Spelunking the Universe
Posts tagged Thought Experiment
Over thinking It
May 15th
To say that I over think things would be an understatement of such proportions that it would be far beyond a lie. It is something that keeps me up many nights and causes me to think about situations that all others involved have long since forgotten.
I’ve noticed it all the more recently as I work on “the story”. (Now forgive me as I’m about to compare myself to a truly talented writer, this isn’t to say I am talented, it just happens to be who I’m reading at this moment) I’ve been reading harry potter, yes I know only a decade or so after the rest of the world started. I try my best to be so far back on the bandwagon that I occasionally must rush after it as it scampers off without me. Keeps life refreshing for me that way…in the sense that I can enjoy something and not feel the urge to rant on about it for ages. Although today that will not be the case!
At any rate Rowling manages to present an entire castle worth of characters, likely thousands of students, hundreds of teachers, and a plethora of monsters all working in tandem. The details of what all of them do is scarce, save for about 20 or so major players but it still feels like a very deep and active place to learn. I wonder as I read it, how many hours did Rowling spend plotting out the journeys students with no real importance made each day? Did she spend nights pondering about just what the professors were doing at the moment Harry and Ron walked into that very wet and very empty girl’s bathroom?
How many days of her life were lost to constant thought over just what Dumbledore was eating each day? Did these sort of questions even pop up to her? I find myself plotting distances, times, steps taken, weather patterns, social and economic issues. I’m pondering what characters who won’t even appear for multiple books are doing at the exact moment a situation is going down.
It is swallowing my mind to the point where I’m thinking about it during much of the rest of the day, even when I AM reading Harry Potter. As I plod away through the, admittedly very interesting, tale of this young boy and his friends I am wondering just how the next scene of my own fantasy universe will pan out. I’m hoping by the end of this first novel I’ll have some sort of system down, a series of kill switches to help dull the endless pondering about this place. Because if I don’t I might just wake up one day within the pages.
How many people are you?
Jan 7th
I’ve been on a journey of sorts through my life, to prove to folks that likely nothing is black and white. Now honestly, could something like “How many people are you?” be that complicated of a question? I mean obviously, you are one person, I am one person, it seems so simple.
Well lets go on a very short journey, through an entirely plausible series of events, merely limited by current medical technology. I’ll then ask a few simple questions and we’ll see how straight forward they are.
For reasons unknown, Markus, has entered a hospital to have a peculiar surgery done. The hospital is going to cut Markus completely in half from tip of his head to his groin. The brain itself can survive as damaged as 50%, which means that a perfect cut with optimum tools and technology would leave two halves that only are limited by the organs that remain. We would need to either build or donate an extra heart and any other organs that are not perfectly split. Essentially the ‘open’ side would then be closed with a bionic enclosure. Nothing fancy, an apparatus that helps enclose both sides so that now we have two living halves that both function.
My first question is a simple one. What would each side know? Would one side be able to speak and the other not? Does the brain store certain information in a raid between both halves? What would the halves say to one another?
Perhaps some deeper more philosophical questions. Would the halves themselves feel one another? In theory if we have a soul we would be dealing with one entity that now experiences two separate sets of sensation. What metaphysical ramifications come from each not communicating with the other?
Now I ask you. Given this situation that could quite easily happen with some small gains in the medical field. Is this just one person or two people? If you argue that it is one person, would you arrest one half if the other (unbeknownst to it) robbed a bank? If you didn’t arrest both of them then you are acknowledging that they are both separate people.
But now we have a new question. At what point did we take one person and make them two? What was it that defines a person? Is it simply the bridge between the two hemispheres? Or is it merely how many functioning bodies are present. In the face of the split man you have taken one functioning body and made it into two with a few modifications.
So that’s my conundrum. A problem that could be so easily fixed by just having a brain that does not operate when the hemispheres are disconnected from one another. This of course isn’t my finest work but the simple scenario and questions should keep folks busy which is what is important.
A Waste of Time
Dec 10th
It is a term that gets thrown around so much that it got me thinking. Following off the theme of the last post my question is this: Is anything you do not a waste of time?
Perhaps it is just a matter of the glass being half empty, half full, or perhaps just twice as big as it should be. But isn’t everything a waste of time?
Every book you read, every thing you do, every mark you make, each of these things will be null in respect to you once you die. Every person you influence in any manner will also die and with them the events become null. Given humanities overall inability to separate from ancient fantasy I have doubts that humanity will ever make it off the Earth. We are likely to see cycles of intellectual growth, great destruction caused by fantastical ignorance, and then a recovery period. This will extend the time and resources needed to reach a colony in space and just might push us up until the big end.
That big end for the Earth of course being when the sun expands and swallows it. Every single activity ever committed by a person will be scorched to cinders and yanked into the center of the sun. In that moment every single action of humanity becomes moot. For the exception of maybe some satellites that are well out of harms way but it is only a matter of time before something destroys them.
So really isn’t everything a waste of time? Then again how do you properly use time? Who is the judge of what is a constructive use of time? These are questions that so frequently seem to be treated as self evident when the answers are hardly so.
Why shouldn’t we be here?
Nov 18th
People often ask the question of “Why are we here?” Which I believe I’ve touched on before but most recently it popped a similar thought into my head. To be succinct “Why Not?” Of the massive number of possible formula’s for universes that could possibly exist each has the same chance of existing as every other universe.
Mathematics, Physics, Biology, and every other science that I don’t fully understand are based specifically within our own universe. It is one of those tautological “It is because it is.” kind of situations. So we are no more special than any other possible universe, sure we have life as we know it, but that is a self fulfilling setup. Anytime we find life it’ll be life as we know it because we have found it and thus we know it.
Life as we know it has changed over the entire span of human existence and was different before we existed. Life as we know it will continue to change and if we discovered another universe (or even another planet) with different life following rules that we do not fully understand we will now have a new understanding of life as we know it.
All that separates life in this universe from another universe that may or may not exist from being under our oh so wonderful “life as we know it” tag is us finding it.
Because of this I see nothing special about this universe which makes me wonder. So it isn’t a question of why we are here, there is no reason why we shouldn’t be here. Not all why questions are necessarily ones that have an actual answer. Just like “Why do people generate more energy than the sun.” I can’t take credit for that revelation, Richard Dawkins had a similar one “Why are Unicorns Hollow.” Just because you can ask it doesn’t necessarily mean it is a valid or important question.
My question isn’t necessarily better. I realize the irony or hypocrisy in me asking it, but I am finding it odd to assume that life shouldn’t be here. There is no better chance of any other universe than this one, and everything that makes it special is only special because it involves us in some manner or another.
As a point of clarification before closing this little thought, I don’t hate our reality, in fact I find it very awesome, but I don’t need some unanswerable question to justify that feeling. Since we exist I see reason enough.
Thought Experiment: Life and Intelligence
Jul 18th
The following is not necessarily fact, indeed this is just a thought experiment on why I’m not too amazed that there is life or that life can manifest itself from a universe that is seemingly non-living.
I am unsure of the exact mechanics of DNA and RNA. Nor do I know if these are the most basic of building blocks for life. However I am going to assume, for the sake of argument, that they are. If they are not you can quite easily, without breaking the point, replace their names with the actual names of the basic building blocks of life.
If you were to take the chemicals that naturally occur upon Earth that are responsible for these basic building blocks and you placed them in a large vat. Lets say a vat the size of a stadium, something far smaller than the size of the Earth (almost ridiculously so) and you left them to constantly react to one another every moment of every day, for years and years, I am certain that you would in return find yourself with extremely simple life.
This life would have an intelligence, however it would be absolutely basic. The operations of generating energy and replicating would be all that it does. Why? Well even non-living elements on the periodic table are (misnomer alert) instinctively searching to complete their outer electron shell. There is an inherent motivation to have a full ring and it is an ever present reality in our Universe. This basic need moves right on into life, the ever present desire to consume energy in order to complete operations that sustain a stable life pattern that gives the longest period of time to replicate and repeat this action.
This function is so fantastically simple that it requires little in the way of blind faith to accept. It essentially is the spawning of a billion light switches that have binary modes. They have two extremely basic functions and they repeat these functions over and over.
It is through this process of repetition and the ever present reality that nothing can (to our or at least my knowledge) perfectly replicate itself that we received change. These simple creatures began to have errors in their coding that resulted in extra operations becoming present. These extra operations, just like newer mechanical gadgets, presented even more gears to break. The more complicated anything gets the more there is to worry about after all.
These compounding functions, of replication, error, and growth result over a period of time to what we see today. It is not difficult to believe either, when watching bacteria replicating at nearly breakneck speed I find myself wondering just how many sneezes are going on in the process. How unrelated the bacteria a few days later are from their great ancestors of the days prior (assuming the bacteria has a short lifespan of course).
The shorter the lifespan of an organism the more present are these mechanisms I believe, because the shorter the lifespan of an organism, the more quickly it consumes and reproduces thus providing far more chances for replication and error. I’m sure this is not breaking science news for anyone but it is something I was thinking about recently. The point however is that at the most basic level of life. You really just have the same operations that are committed (at least in concept) at the electron level of elements. They are attempting to complete a simple circuit to establish a level of stability. It is this simple action that is present even in the non-living that drives all of life. Not necessarily the only thing, but I’m quite sure that the primary need of any organism is to maintain a stable energy level since every other operation after that requires it. You can’t exactly mate if you are dead…usually…ok there was that one time…wait…nevermind I’ve said too much.
I hope you enjoyed this thought experiment. Tonight I will also be publishing my final version of the Alabaster Bonobo: Tides of Chaos. If you ever needed a reason to dislike Microsoft here it is: They have Wal-Mart in their dictionary but not Bonobo.
God Vs. The Devil: A Thought Experiment.
Jul 13th
It is often said that God sent the Devil to Hell as punishment for defying him and attempting to overthrow the kingdom of Heaven. Sure this makes absolutely no sense at all but lets just run with it and assume that it does. So with this in mind the Devil has established a very powerful trait, the Devil defies God. This fact enrages the Lord and thusly he reacts win the same manner as any Tyrant and banishes the Infidel.
The story goes that the Devil is behind all the pain we go through. Sure Eve tricked Adam into eating the Apple but it was the Snake (Devil) that tricked her. So the idea stretches on to say that the Devil is hurting all people to get back at God for being an asshole who can’t take a little insurrection.
I would think that there is a much easier way to get back at God. In fact an action that would be so infuriating that there would likely have to be a new even worse punishment (perhaps being made non existent). This would be not harming people, or even worse still helping them. In doing so the Devil would be defying God once again and would create a system where Heaven would be depleted of its members and the Devil would then essentially own his own Heaven. It would infuriate the one asshole he never could get a long with and it would absolve him of doing exactly what his old leader demanded.
What I find almost incomprehensible is the idea that the Devil has not already thought this up. Considering the fact that I am merely a mortal and the Devil was originally an Angel of Heaven (the top angel wasn’t it). This leads me to ask the question of whether or not the Devil (if existent) is actually already doing this. If this is the case then it follows to ask who is causing all the pain in the world?
What better way to get people into your following than to hurt those around you and put the blame on someone else. It is entirely possible that God, being defied by Satan again, has no other option but to hurt people in order to maintain the belief that Satan is harming folks and to perpetuate the system God originally put in place to get people into the club.
Now this might sound preposterous however it really does fall on some pretty simple facts. These tactics have been used in Governments in Human History and it has been proven that the best way to Infuriate someone you can’t kill is to disobey them and to showcase just how powerless they actually are.
Also doesn’t help that all of the mass murders in the Bible were perpetuated by God. Unless someone found a verse that says that the Devil was killing innocent babies, creating mass floods, and murdering hundreds of thousands of people to prove a point.
Thought Experiment: Bilateral Cloning
Jun 23rd
When discussing cloning there is a general question of whether or not the new clone would retain the memories of its parent organism. Generally speaking I can think of absolutely no reason why this would be the case however it got me thinking.
I believe I’ve discussed before the fact that the right side of the brain and the left side of the brain can function while entirely separated from their sister lobe assuming they still have all the connections to the body that keep them alive. While these are both in the same body it appears that the person still is a single person.
What would happen though if we split a person bilaterally from top to bottom and connected each side to the required machinery to keep them alive. Perhaps in a future with advanced cybernetics we could give them half mechanical and half organic. At any rate, my point is this, would each function as the original did? We have created two people out of one person and not only that but each has the ability to function just as the originally did, however half as fast (well not literally but a separated brain does not function as well as a full brain…which isn’t a shock).
Would each side make the same choices when presented with the same stimuli? How evenly split would the memories of the person be? How well would they function as a team? Do we consider this as two individual people or one person? That final question is the one that is blowing my mind a bit.
Is a person split in half and still alive a single person or two people? It seems to break the black and white view of a person or an organism in general. It is another case of something seemingly obvious that is in no way obvious. It also is an important question when looking at a mother and the child within her. At what point do we consider them as two individual people, is it because they have each a set of organs? If so would that mean that a person split bilaterally would now no longer be a person at all?
The things that keep my brain moving are so odd sometimes…
The Möbius Code (Part 5)
Apr 18th
[ Index ]
Part 1 – The Introduction
Part 2 – From Universe to Solar System
Part 3 – From Solar System to Earth
Part 4 – From Solar System to Earth
So time has passed and we have reached what we would now call Humans, Homo Sapiens, or any other clever naming agent you can grow to love. There is little to talk about here, not because much hasn’t happened, but because it is all easily accessible in the plethora of required history courses you will take in school.
One can hope we’ll survive ourselves. Assuming we do we have many millions of years to go before the current theorized end comes (the scientific one not all the religious ones that pop up annually). We are 
years away from what is the predicted end. That’s a much less clean way of saying 1 Googol years from now, or (arguably) even cleaner would be 1 with 1 hundred zeroes following it. It’s a fantastically long time that even I didn’t quite grasp till I saw it written out in this post.
Over this time we’ll have stars born and stars die. Black holes will grow and shrink (via a process championed by Stephen Hawking). Galaxies will soar away from one another with each passing day, planets will be consumed in the expansion of stars, the Earth will be scorched by the sun (all things left as they are). Eventually all matter will be stretched to an extreme and ever widening point where heat is no longer generated. This will leave an entire universe with absolutely no action which technically would also mean that time has ‘ended’.
I’m skeptical as I’ve stated before. We have not accounted for the excess gravity all over (the idea behind the possible existence of dark matter) and frankly there tends to be new information found with each passing year and certainly with each passing decade. It’s not to say we don’t have ages, 1 Google years is an amazing amount of time. So many wonderful (and unfortunately terrible) things can transpire between now and the purposed end.
My theory? While I’m hardly a better source than any astrophysicist I think that there is some currently unknown rubber band response to the expansion. At a certain point the stretch will get so extreme that everything will then rocket inwards. It seems quite reasonable to assume that this is what has happened the X amount of times in the past and will happen the X amount of times in the future. Of course there is also the possibility that the recoiling inwards is exponentially proportional to the expulsion outwards with each ‘bang’ and perhaps we are experiencing what will end up being the final shot. Who knows, it would be quite unfortunate but we still have far more time than needed for just about anything.
It is currently the state of all things mortal or otherwise to reach a state of inaction, it would be nice if we put more energy into prolonging and enhancing the time of action we each have. With each dollar we spend on death instead of life we are creating a large imbalance that could indeed snowball one day. I just hope it hasn’t already begun.
I’ve left out unimaginably large amounts of time, but that’s because who knows what will happen down to the number. The chaos effect makes estimating things highly difficult if not impossible. Neat stuff.
The Möbius Code (Part 4)
Apr 16th
[ Index ]
Part 1 – The Introduction
Part 2 – From Universe to Solar System
Part 3 – From Solar System to Earth
So when last we met (if memory serves) we were discussing the first life on Earth. Tiny tiny little organisms that one cannot see with their naked eye (unless you squint really really hard…ok you still can’t). Slowly the organisms become more complex, initially it was a matter of symbiosis for at least some. Small organisms began fusing to one another (see mitochondria) to create more complex and indeed more efficient systems. With the noticeably copious amounts of space in the sea and the development of an Atmosphere there was not much to worry about but taking in energy, via eating or sunlight, and reproducing like you had nothing left to do.
Some organisms split like a particularly tasty banana in your ice cream, others mated. As time passed and the bigger is better mentality started to pick up we begin to see visible formations in the sea. Eventually plants will dominate the sea and spread out onto land. With the introduction of a nice firm atmosphere (firm my way of saying effective) to protect their cells from the ultraviolet sunlight there was little reason to stay bound to the sea. The first’ ‘animals’ would be completely secluded to the sea and would spread quite well. Considering the absolutely massive nature of the ocean and its ability to reduce gravity’s effect on organisms it makes surviving and growing much easier than on land (at least initially, these days you get eaten by many crazy animals in the sea).
Once the surface land is absolutely covered in plants (maybe sooner) there is a revelation, as always, a copious amount of food leads to the introduction of something that’ll eat it. Indeed someday there will be a bacteria that absolutely engorges itself on our plastic waste, it is just a matter of waiting. As the first animals move to land they bring a second source of food to the land, that being them. Carnivores would soon fill that gap as well. I often wonder if the copious levels of land carnivores are what lead some animals to return to the sea. Indeed all sea mammals are incidents of animals that were initially land mammals and moved to the sea. The motion of a dolphin is hauntingly similar to the motion of a gazelle, and in some cases you can find the remains of what once were legs in whale corpses and other sea mammals as they move ever closer to lose all evidence of their previous adventures on land.
Somewhere in here you have dinosaurs rise. They have a pretty long and successful run (I believe there was a mass extinction or two) until the drop of a meteor that I’ve read was large enough to fill the rose bowl (or some football stadium). It impacted somewhere in the gulf of Mexico and utterly dominated the planet. Basically all life on Earth died. Before this point there were tiny little mice like animals, which might not be accurate, so just imagine a cute little mammal of your choice. Essentially before Dinosaurs were extinguished this was the pinnacle of our particular class in the animal kingdom. After dinosaurs mammals popped out and started to show their talents. It would be some many millions of years but eventually a particularly successful class of apes came to be the most dominant of all animal species (relative to land mass covered…and I suppose not counting insects).
People often wonder why Humans made that jump mentally. As I’ve stated before I think it was a case of substantial amounts of food. Evolutionarily there is no real advantage to being exceedingly smarter than your prey, it doesn’t take much to catch a Gazelle, strength and big teeth will do it more often than not. However with a single mutation of the brain taking it just far enough above the average level of ape intelligence it would become, much like the original organisms spreading across the planet, a snowball effect. With every evolutionary generation the human brain would grow larger, at one time even there was more than one type of human. However, for reasons I don’t know personally, one particular answer I’ve heard was the mistake by the now extinct humanoids to let their opponents spread into Europe and across to Asia, this essentially locked them into a small area and they died off. But again take that with a grain of salt.
So slowly but surely, this ever increasing effect, like the pull of a black hole growing with each uncontrollable growth we move on to modern day. Which is where we will stop for now. Tomorrow may indeed be the final episode of this little collection. It’ll be about what is to come (in the most general of senses) and the ‘end’…as well as a bit of philosophy that I hope someday to get clarified.
The Möbius Code (Part 3)
Apr 15th
[ Index ]
Part 1 – The Introduction
Part 2 – From Universe to Solar System
So where were we? Well science is not my strong point, I’m more about the philosophy of things using science as backup. That being said if you catch any scientific inaccuracies in here don’t be all too surprised. The general idea should be close enough for Jazz however.
Generally speaking the further away from a star you are the larger you are. I’m not entirely sure why but I’ve read a few times that it has to do with the lower temperatures. As planets are forming there was probably an issue with certain matter being burned away from inner planets (like say Ice) which didn’t burn off on the outer planets. This would give them much more mass to pull in even more matter until they hit whatever limit (that is before they’d start hitting those uncomfortably large star sizes).
While there are other planets in our Solar System and I’m sure with a good drink and a weekend you could get to know any of them and find them to be quite friendly folks. However there is one that is substantially more important at the moment. That would be Earth, which in the beginning like all other matter was in a fairly hot state. This molten sphere was spinning quite merrily, getting belted by frozen comets and meteor rocks and probably a unicorn or two (okay likely not the latter).
According to a report I read (and subsequently watched on FORA.tv, again you all should check it out), the Moon was formed from a rather large impact during the early days of the Earth. A massive object smashed into the Earth launching a fairly large, dare I say moon sized, chunk of rock into the atmosphere. Interestingly as the video notes the composition of the moon fits quite nicely with this theory and frankly I see little reason not to believe it, I imagine otherwise it would be quite hard for something the size of the moon to be flying by and get stuck in our orbit.
About 4 billion years ago, which frankly isn’t all that long when thinking about non-living things, the first life sprouted up. The presence of water on Earth is not exactly all that surprising. I’d be willing to bet that any planet in the relative range that we are from our star (that is further if their star is larger or closer if their star is smaller) would find quite a lot of water on them. Comets which were, amongst other things, pretty icy were pummeling anything they could get attracted to. Those planets too close to stars would have it subsequently evaporate and those further would have it freeze (special exceptions aside). However for your average planet in this area like that of ours found themselves covered in water. This is helpful because, generally speaking, you are going to be hard pressed to find water and not find life in it. Even extremely toxic, extremely hot, or extremely cold (see ice) water can have life either living merrily or at least being in stasis within them.
I personally wonder if Virus’s were not the first ‘life’ on the Earth. An in-between stage moving from the many non-living (see incapable or acting on own) things to the living. They have very simple processes and a very simple goal. Simply to sustain their existence through whatever means possible. There is and likely never will be any evidence of this and it is merely a thought. However what I can say is that once the acidity of the Oceans (volcanic activity is hell on a PH balance) were friendly enough the bacteria that sprung forth was quite happy to do so.
It seems almost silly to imagine hundreds of millions of years, in which every fraction of a second there is a reaction of chemicals and elements across an almost unfathomably large space would not return some sort of unusual side effect. It’s a very good side effect because without it we wouldn’t have chicken…oh or us. I keep forgetting you need to exist before you eat chicken.
The fact that life is so happy in water makes much sense. Ultraviolet light and other radiations that do well to destroy the genetic makeup that comprises life have relative difficulty permeating water as easily as other substances (exceptions like Lead aside). Unlike Lead and rock, Water is also easy to move through which is a very helpful addition. Though even without water I’m sure that some sort of extreme bacteria would live quite happily in a mercury rich cave dining on the walls.
At some point it became apparent that there was a massive orb blasting endless levels of ultraviolet light onto the planet. Organisms began converting this matter for energy creating a seemingly endless supply of food. They began to convert the CO2 flowing through the air (and wherever else it could squeeze its deadly butt into) into Oxygen. This process would help bolster the atmosphere and probably for a bit was actually quite extreme. Anything that wasn’t prepared to process Oxygen would have found the result quite fatal.
But whenever a massive supply of new food arises something arises to consume it. At some point in here there was surely something that noticed everything around it could produce energy if consumed. Carnivores likely arose at this point. Indeed on thinking back carnivores probably popped up before even the photosynthesis, I just get ahead of myself.
We now had carnivores, herbivores, water, and copious levels of oxygen. However all things included in this conversation are still so small that unless there is an absolutely grotesquely large collection of them we couldn’t see them with the naked eye. Stuff that would make plankton squint…well maybe not but it would sure as hell be hard for us to see.
Tomorrow we’ll move onto the first plants and hope that I don’t butcher too much while trying to make my various points. Who knows in a few decades I might have a nice solid little lecture out of this thing (I redo it yearly).