Destination Phobos?

Phobos is one of two small moons circling the planet Mars. The other is Deimos.

Phobos as photographed from the Mars Express

It is only 3,700 miles above the  surface and circles around Mars in only 11 hours 9 minutes, which is slightly less than half a Martian day (24 hours 37 minutes). As far as we know this is lower than the moon of any other planet in our solar system. As this photo shows its appearance alone is intriguing and there is reason to suppose that it could reveal secrets about the history of its parent planet, including any biological life that may have been present over its 4 billion year history. The low density of Phobos suggests that it may be partially hollow, with underground caves and rock consisting of lightly packed microfragments. Large amounts of interior ice are also probable. tThe furrows on the surface may be due to boulders ploughing across the surface during asteroid bombardment at the time of formation.


The most likely theory for its formation is that it comprises debris from the surface of Mars. This would have been thrown into orbit by meteorite collisions over the probably 4 billion years since the planet was formed and during this time the debris has coalesced to form the Phobos we see today. So within the material that makes up this satellite could be a record of life on the surface of its parent planet.



Why not go there? It would be much cheaper than visiting the surface of Mars or even that of our own Moon, which is never less than 140x closer than Phobos. This is because it is so small (mean radius 6.9 miles) that it has virtually no gravity for a spacecraft’s engines to have to battle against, so only a small amount of fuel would need to be carried and the larger distance would be covered largely by coasting from the Earth’s orbit around the Sun to that of Mars after an initial boost; similarly, but in reverse, for the return mission.

In my view this should seriously be considered as a priority destination for the MPCV (multi-person crew vehicle), also known as Orion, now being developed by NASA for missions beyond earth orbit. The Moon and nearby asteroids are other targets being evaluated for manned missions before the much bigger and more expensive step of landing men on Mars is taken. Russia and the USA both have experience of prolonged micro-gravity effects on humans, which is necessary since the trip out would take about 9 months.

I think Phobos should be the next step for a manned expedition for the following reasons:

• It would take less energy and money to get men to Phobos than to the surface of the Moon and back (as explained above).

• Phobos’s rocks could provide evidence of past life or absence of life on the Martian surface over billions of years.

• Underground caves would provide an ideal shelter from cosmic bombardment, a major problem for manned missions, and a logistic base for future descents to the Martian surface. 

• Humans on Phobos could observe Mars in great detail without risking contamination of the surface with terrestrial bacteria.

This last point is important because the occurrence or non-occurrence of any form of biological life independent of Earth would be of enormous significance in assessing the nature of its origin and putting terrestrial life into a cosmic context. Since the inception of terrestrial life there have been innumerable ejections of organic debris into space due to meteorite, asteroid and comet impacts, so that some of this is likely to have found its way to other planets. However, I believe it is possible to identifiy this life as terrestrial in origin or otherwise.

Interest in Phobos is growing. Russia attempted to send an unmanned probe there recently (November 2011) but this failed. China had experiments on board the Russian probe, called Fobos-Grunt and the USA is also interested.

To get there or anywhere else beyond  earth orbit efficiently we need to be able to launch materials, equipment and prefabricated structures into orbit more cheaply and frequently than was possible with the Space Shuttle, so that earth orbit can serve as a base. Once a vehicle is assembled there it can be launched off into deep space without having to fight hard against gravity.

 I am still mystified as to why the Skylon spaceplane, a UK design, with its revolutionary air breathing rocket engine (SABRE), is not being developed as a matter of priority. Skylon could get mass into orbit at a fraction of the cost of any other technology of which I am aware. Presumably politics is a factor since space exploration is moving towards international cooperative ventures to share costs and expertise. There is also a major trend towards private ventures and away from government-led programmes.

My view is that the universe is there to be explored, not ignored. International space exploration projects are a way of raising our horizons and cooperating instead of stewing up the biosphere and destroying ourselves spiritually and in internecine conflict.

John

see also Interplanetary mining

2077 novel: buy & preview options + reviews

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The deep mystery of existence. 5. Life is from outside space-time

Every form of biological life, known or imaginable, depends partly on the arrangement of chemical elements in countless ways into hierarchically ordered goal-oriented systems, interacting in an astronomically large number of ways to create the Earth's biosphere of which humans are a part and in which they play a central role (e.g. by being aware that the biosphere exists and that they are meant to be stewards of it). Moreover, the latest biomolecular research indicates that the protein molecules (amino acids etc.) out of which life is formed are finely tuned to fold themselves into the 'building blocks' of life; so this propensity must have been embodied in the original creation design along with the finely tuned physical constants (i.e. laws of physics) also needed for life to be possible.

image from http://adoreabhijit.wordpress.com/tag/prayer/

In 1954 Fred Hoyle calculated that for this miraculous phenomenon of life to be possible a certain kind of nuclear reaction would have had to have occurred inside stars billions of years ago. He even forecast
the energy of the reaction – 7.6 million electron volts. He calculated that it would have only a small chance of occurring but without it carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and most other elements could never been produced in stars or anywhere else for that matter. Astronomers then searched for the gamma rays which would show the existence of this reaction, subsequently named the ‘Hoyle state’, and they found it within 5 years. 

This had a profound effect on Hoyle, who became convinced that the universe and the life in it was not just a chance throwing together of matter and energy. He did not believe in God and so was opposed to the idea of a created universe (subsequent observations have proved with growing accuracy that the universe was indeed created, as stated in Genesis 1.1 and John 1:1) : the only alternative for him was an eternal infinite universe which had a kind of mind. 

Hoyle was right in stating that the universe has a teleological nature. However, it is now accepted by most cosmologists that the universe is not infinite and eternal. It emerged from outside of space-time and indeed space-time only came into being as it emerged, i.e. during the Big Bang. So in a sense it emerged from the mind of God and its teleological properties can be seen as a means by which the Creator guides, permeates and holds in being the whole creation, including evolution of some kind. The creation and ongoing involvement of the God in the created order is now easier to imagine than it was before modern physics and cosmology. Life was dependent on these early stellar reactions and on the way the atomic output of these cosmic factories formed the protein molecules which assembled,  folded and arranged themselves into ultra-sophisticated systems that thrived under the right conditions – conditions which are very probably unique to Earth, judging by observations of the 4000 or so exoplanets detected to date and the specifically life-friendly nature of these conditions which modern science is revealing.

So where and when was life created? Where does all this information and intelligence come from? There can, it seems to me, be only one answer. Order cannot emerge from chaos. The ultra-sophisticated purposeful complexities of viruses, bacteria, plants and animals must have been designed before the universe exploded into existence. In essence, living systems, ranging from bacteria to mammals,  were created from outside the universe, not within it. 

Whether life formed early in the history of the earth, say 4 billion years ago, or only  few thousand years ago (I don’t believe that, incidentally) its real origin resides outside our reality, in the mind or being of the Creator, who is also able to exert ongoing influence on it. Life is not just extraterrestrial: it is supernatural. 

Life comes from a timeless and spaceless 'place', and it seems not surprising that life at some level should return ‘there’ in some form when it has finished ‘here’, having undergone a learning process. ‘There’ is the place of eternal life and from which eternal life is held within a living believer, to continue when he or she casts off the 37 trillion body cells.

 

John Sears

The story of a canned drink

It is customary to drink beer, Coke, lemonade etc. from an aluminium can. Given the convenience of storing and transporting the drink around this is not surprising (although personally I have a tendency to snap off the ring pull, leaving the can sealed). However, there is a price to pay for this convenience when one considers the enormous amount of energy and environmental destruction that goes into the production of a pop-top alumimium can.

Womak and Jones in their book Lean Thinking tracked down the manufacture of a can of English cola (presumably fairly typical of most canned drinks. The data is from the 1993 book but the overall picture is still essentially the same.)

1. Bauxite ore is mined in Australia and trucked to a chemical reduction mill.
2. At the mill each ton of bauxite is purified to half a ton of aluminium oxide in half an hour.
3. The Al oxide is loaded onto an ore carrier bound for roller mills in Scandinavia.
4. In Sweden or Norway the Al oxide is taken to a smelting plant. Each half ton is smelted down to one quarter ton of aluminium, which is converted into 10 metre ingots.
5. Each ingot is heated to 480 deg C and rolled down to a sheet 30 mm thick. The sheets are wrapped in 10 ton coils and transported to a warehouse.
6. The coils are transported to another country for rolling down to 3 mm sheets.
7. The Al sheets are sent to England for punching and forming into cans.
8. The cans are washed, dried, and base painted. Product information is then painted on.
9. The cans are lacquered, flanged, sprayed inside with protective coating, loaded onto pallets, forklifted and warehoused.
10. They are then shipped to a bottler where they are washed and cleaned again.
11. After filling with cola pop-top lids are added at the rate of 1500 cans per minute.
12. The cans are inserted into cardboard cartons made of forest pulp originating in some other part of the world (e.g. Siberia or British Columbia).
13. The cartons are shipped to a distribution warehouse and finally to the supermarket.

This leaves out the production and transport of the drink itself. In the case of the English cola drink this involves mining phosphates from deep open pit mines in Idaho, USA; refining this to food grade; and shipping caffeine from chemical plants abroad to a syrup manufacturer in England.

All these production and transportation steps use up energy, sometimes huge amounts – e.g. the conversion of the mined phosphate to food grade uses electricity at the same rate as a town of 100,000 people. The metal used also defies belief. Even after allowing for recycling the USA ‘throws away enough aluminium to replace its entire commercial aircraft fleet every three months.’ Natural capitalism by Hawken et al, 1999.

Other examples from Hawken et al :

• Semiconductor chips generate 100,000 x their weight in waste.
• A laptop computer produces nearly 4000 x its weight in waste.
• 1 quart of Florida orange juice requires 2 quarts of gasoline and 1000 quarts of water to produce it.

Should we feel guilty when our lifestyle is so dependent on these things?  Partly, but we are trapped in a greed-driven multinational system which is kept afloat by crazy accounting which ignores the real world. To change that system, one which ultimately must lead to war, is our only option. Either from top down or bottom up, or both at the same time, it has to change; and that means people themselves have to change both individually and collectively, and at all levels of society.

As one who believes in our Creator I think this can only only happen by getting closer to the one who created us.  Reason is of paramount importance; but reason alone is not enough, as was learned at the cost of millions of lives and decades of misery by the disciples of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao Zedong.

See also Waste of the western world

Feedback welcome.

John

Author, 2077

cosmik.jo@gmail.com

The Shroud of Turin

Until about 3 years after I submitted to Christ in 2009 I had always treated the Shroud of Turin as some kind of medieval forgery and not the burial shroud of Jesus Christ. Circa 1988 it had been announced that the radioactive carbon 14 dating put the origin of the Shroud to around the 14^th century and this more less settled it for me.

 Before becoming a Christian I had been skeptical about the reality of the Resurrection. Even after looking at the evidence for the Resurrection, which I found wiped out the objections of the skeptics , and coming to believe in the historical reality of a supernatural Resurrection    (as supernatural as the Big Bang, in which space-time-energy emerged from a fraction of  a pinpoint to give us life, the universe and everything)  I still dismissed the Shroud as a hoax or a confidence trick, as many Christians do today. In fact I was concerned that if it was a fraud it would only help to discredit the overall case for a Resurrection in the public mind, given the natural skepticism of some scientists who tend to be treated as guardians of truth, which they should indeed be as regards the logically accessible aspects of reality.

Recent YouTube presentations by respected scholarly teams (sindonologists) are making it difficult to ignore that this cloth defies natural laws by virtue of the unprecedented and unequalled nature of the image. It is most definitely not a forgery and I even saw a  BBC article by Philip Ball, the ex-editor of Nature, confessing to its extraordinary properties.

http://www.newgeology.us/presentation24.html

http://www.historian.net/shroud.htm

I have heard since that all the arguments which try to dismiss the authenticity of the Shroud's image have failed the scholarly peer review process (they nevertheless get picked up by journalists). No scientist has been able to explain the  unique nature of the image despite thousands of research hours and many research papers.

This could be world shattering for many and force those denying the resurrection on the grounds of conspiracy theories - which start from the erroneous assumption that the resurrection could not have happened- to reconsider their position.

see also

The Shroud of Turin, Authenticated Again

RADIOMETRIC DATING CORRECTED

The initial carbon dating exercise in the 1980s gave dates around 1400 years after the Crucifixion (33 AD), which led most people to dismiss the Shroud as a medieval fake. The dating had been carried out by a reputable international team; but since then the date has been thrown into doubt because the dating process used a sample containing threads used by medieval nuns to repair the cloth.

In recent years it has been proposed that an earthquake which is fairly reliably known to have taken place in 33 AD, could have generated a neutron flux which would have affected the dating results by increasing the amount of C14 due to neutron bombardment of the C12 nucleus (the more C14 in the sample the younger it would appear to be). The latest date estimate puts the time of the cloth centrally within an error bar of several hundred years spanning the 33 AD date. Pollen analysis also backs this up. By itself this would not prove that the Shroud was the one that en-wrapped Jesus but the date is certainly much earlier than medieval and the Crucifixion date lies well within the error spread.

BLOOD

The trauma caused by the Crucifixion as described in the Gospels would have affected the physical nature of the blood emanating from the wounds caused. This is confirmed by analysis of the blood stains on the cloth. Moreover, the positions of the stains clearly correspond to the Crucifixion accounts. The evidence for this is startling in its detail. E.g. the spear wound indicated on the cloth is in forensic agreement with the John 19:34 account; the bloodstains on the head are clearly from a cap or crown of thorns as described in John 19:2.; 120 scourge marks on the body, front and back indicate about 40 lashes from a three-thronged whip, which was the standard whipping procedure adopted by the Romans at the time.

The colour of the blood stains is red. Normally one would expect it to be black after such a long period but in fact a body having undergone the trauma to which Jesus was subject would have chemically altered blood that would stay red , and containing bilirubin, and this is precisely what  the Shroud stains exhibit. The elevated levels of the bilirubin actually indicate the traumatic process of the Crucifixion as described in the Bible.

WRISTS NOT PALMS NAILED

Biomechanical science indicates that a body pinned to a cross by nails through the palms could not bear the weight of the body – it must have been through the wrists, which is just what the image shows. The traditional belief was that the nails had been hammered through the palms, so any attempt at forgery would have tried to simulate this. All the iconography of the time indicated nails through the palms.

CHEEK BRUISES

The image shows marks indicating a blow to the cheek as described in John 18:22: "And when he had thus spoken, one of the officers which stood by struck Jesus with the palm of his hand." As with most of the image features discussed these were invisible before the technology of the 20th century and there is no way anyone would have any motive for forging them, even if someone in medieval Europe had technology more advanced than any known or even envisaged today.

IMAGE FORMATION

The image was formed by a process which no team of scientists has been able to reproduce over the last several decades, possibly one involving high energy radiation. It was not produced by any kind of pigmentation. One singular characteristic of the image is that it was in the form of  a negative which comes out as a positive on a photographic negative, much to the astonishment of Secundo Pia when he developed his two glass plates in 1898 when the Shroud was first photographed. In fact as photography advanced the image became increasingly clear. Without the invention of photography no one would ever have seen the image at all.

[ In addition to the evidence above there is a close correspondence to the results emerging from an investigation of what is probably the tomb of Christ and the head cloth used after the Crucifixion. New evidence on this subject is available and I hope to insert a link to it later.]

Very advanced technology has been applied to the Shroud, including the VP-8 Image Analyzer which NASA used to construct three dimensional images from ordinary photographs of, for instance, the moon’s surface taken from two different angles. When applied to the Turin Shroud image this has somehow yielded a 3D image of Jesus Christ that does not distort as it rotates. At this time I do not know the physics and mathematics behind this and believe there are aspects to this process which nobody understands.

The information extraction power of the VP-8 enabled experts to interpolate the presence of a lepton, a coin used at the time of Pontius Pilate, placed in each eye socket. It had been customary to do this. Even part of the inscription round the edge of the coin was determined and found to correspond to that used on the lepton at the time of Pilate. 

QUANTUM COSMIC POSSIBILITIES

There is one aspect of the Shroud image which is so enormous in its implication for the human race and the entire universe that I am almost hesitant to mention it for fear that it will immediately label me as a crank in many people's eyes.

Perhaps the most extraordinary feature of the image is that the markings penetrate barely a fibre's thickness down into the cloth, on both sides. Nobody has been able to produce such an image using any technology known to man. For reasons that at this time I do not understand it has been seriously proposed that the only possible explanation of this and other aspects of the image lies in the same theoretical domain as black holes and event horizons. 

The proposal is that information from Christ at the moment of death passed into the entire universe instantaneously and that a new universe and a new humanity is in the process of being created. (NB: modern physics posits that any particle in the universe can instantaneously interact by quantum entanglement with any other particle in the universe, since at the start of the Big Bang every particle was confined to the same quantum space .)

A whole team of scientists is involved at both a theoretical and an experimental level. See this video by a particle physicist Dr Isabel Piczec 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbl4EmoH_jg

PRE-MEDIEVAL HISTORY

How did the Shroud get from Jerusalem to Turin, in Italy? Christian relics were frequently transported for safety because of Islamic and other attacks prior to the Crusades. The Moslem conquerors had reached Spain, having violently subjugated 2/3 of the Christian world (hence the Crusades), by the time of the Shroud’s final resting place in Turin, Italy. Before the Moslems there were still many enemies of Christianity, such as the Romans before Constantine, the non-Messianic Jews and the Vandals. So it is not surprising that the cloth did not begin to be openly talked or written about until it was safe.

I am in no way an expert on all this so let me refer you to some of the sites I came across in putting together the above:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/10631973/Turin-Shroud-may-date-from-time-of-Jesus.html

http://www.volto-santo.com/Home_English/The_burial_clothes/Shroud_of_Turin/shroud_of_turin.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/11/shroud-of-turin-earthquake-jesus_n_4770202.html

http://www.redstate.com/diary/6755mm/2014/04/20/five-reasons-shroud-turin-authentic/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wF4v7BLAvzM&noredirect=1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MMOAV-xYFs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVXXZcN8RVI

There is also an iPhone app called Shroud 2.0 which pulls together a lot of evidence, as well as innumerable books.

Apart from online sources such as the above I used this book

The Mystery of the Shroud of Turin:the Case for its Authenticity by John.C.Iannone

So what if the shroud is indeed genuine, as looks increasingly likely?

It will add to the already substantial evidence for the reality of the Resurrection event which changed history and the meaning of which is still being hotly discussed and argued about 2000 years later after huge moral, social, artistic, scientific and technological upheavals made in its wake.

There is no doubt in the mind of any genuine believer that the Resurrection is as real as the other supernatural event which came to light only a few decades ago: the creation of space and time from existential nothingness 13.8 billion years ago, from behind an event horizon, i.e. the Big Bang, an occurrence for which the evidence has been steadily mounting since the 1920s.

The argument must at some point shift from whether there was a Resurrection to its deep significance for humanity. Forget religion. The implications could totally shatter our view of reality if the quantum aspects become widely accepted since it casts light on every aspect of life of every person on the planet as well as all of life and every particle in the universe.

So watch this space.

J.LSears

cosmik.jo@gmail.com

Robotics and AI: more jobs and a more human world?

Much of the western world has operated in a way to saddle itself with large numbers of unemployed people with no prospect of job security or of doing anything that seems really worthwhile. Making money and making sure you enjoy yourself, if possible not at other people's expense, seems to be the ethos of a spiritually arid age.

Whatever our spiritual beliefs or indifference to the spiritual aspect of reality it cannot be denied that meaningful work is essential to the well being and balance of most people. It is an important role of a government to steer the country it governs towards an economic structure which generates meaningful jobs and careers. This means encouraging industries and enterprises, state or private, which create value-added products and services i.e. products and services which bring in the money needed to finance social services and investment for the future, and above all, to provide people with lifelong, meaningful employment, either with one organization or a variety of employers, ensuring that adequate training is available.

Here are some schemes which could employ a huge number of people, paying them good wages to do useful work. All are compatible with or driven by the growth in robotics or artificial intelligence.

   

• Robot ships to clear up the oceans (briefly described in my novel 2077:Knights of Peace).This could provide a great opportunity to generate both IT and heavy engineering work, bringing back to life many a derelict shipyard (e.g. like those on the UK’s northern coast – Tyneside etc.) and creating entirely new ones. It could not only provide worthwhile employment and stimulate local economies but solve the burgeoning problem of microscopic, non-digestible plastic particles entering the marine food chain, including sea birds.

  

• Roads and pavements, millions of miles of them world-wide, need ripping up and replacing with smooth, high quality surfaces. Consider the market for a robotic machine that stops over a crumbling section of motorway or clearway, say, pulverises the existing material and replaces it with a smooth, tough, durable surface within an hour. The market would be mind boggling and  a boost to the engineering industry, employing humans to design, develop, test, manufacture and market the machines as well as operate and transport them.

• Laying of new roads and railways. Again, a robotic machine that could lay down strips of finished road by the mile would have a vast market worldwide. Imagine the sales potential of China and India alone as well as  the investment and employment opportunities for western economies.

• Footpaths and small roads over mountains, rough terrain and marshland are especially useful in rural and tourist areas. Teams of skilled individuals equipped with robot-based systems could lay these down more efficiently than at present. The market would be enormous in the developing world, allowing small remote communities to share in the growing prosperity of the wider world as well as allowing medical aid to reach them more quickly. Hopefully, food aid would be less in demand as the communities prospered.

• High tension overhead power cables need repairing rapidly so any robotic help could reduce the down-time. As completely new national grids are installed there will also be a big market for technological assistance in doing this rapidly. Again there would be a boost to employment as new infrastructure is manufactured, installed and maintained. As with all infrastructure the more functional and efficient it is the more smoothly the economy runs and the higher will be the quality of life of the people.

• Robotic repair systems for use on sewage pipes, drains, water supply lines, gas pipes and buried cable conduits, especially in metropolitan areas, are already being used but there is no doubt plenty of scope for innovation. The demand for such technology in the developed and developing worlds should be enormous, with more employment opportunities in both.  Local people would be needed to operate, supervise and complement the robot repair technology and there would be many jobs in design, manufacture, commissioning and installation.

• Caring for our fellow humans when their physical or mental faculties require this is primarily a personal task, requiring great kindness, skill and dedication by gifted individuals. If robotic devices could be developed to help the carers at a practical level (e.g. fastening buttons or handling soiled clothing) this would allow them to spend more time on personal interaction and transform the nature of care work.                                                                                                                                                                                
  
  
• Drivers displaced by driverless vehicle technology could be trained to help, both practically and at an interpersonal level, infirm or disabled passengers at the start, during and after their journey. Taxi drivers, for instance, often have good interpersonal skills which could be put to good use providing they are not burdened with excessive demands for political correctness or following of petty rules and regulations.                                                                                                                                    
• Automated telephone menu systems are widely resented when they are inhuman (made more so by pretending to be otherwise), complicated and inflexible. There is a place for these but they need to be kept behind the scenes as well as improved. There will be a need to employ a new version of the switchboard operator able to interpret the customer's needs and match it to the right department and support them if they get disconnected. The operator would in turn need plenty of training and an up-to-date knowledge of the organisation's structure, which in practice changes continually faster than the IT (including telephone menu systems) designed to service it. In large companies or departments the operator would need support staff. Artificial intelligence could possibly be used behind the human front, to assist the operator                                                                                                                             
• Surgeons could be greatly assisted by automated image recognition of X-rays, tomographs, f-NMR scans etc. to identify or eliminate disorders and diseases. If this approach proved very effective it would increase the turnover and complexity of work by medical secretaries and other ancilliary staff while at the same time dealing more effectively with many more patients. 

• Medical research and frontier surgery could be greatly assisted by block chain technology. This could, e.g., give simultaneous access to research and pioneering treatments world-wide, before they had been published in academic journals. When a patient's life is at stake he or she may wish to sanction the use of experimental treatment where the risks are higher. Medical technology could advance more rapidly as geographically scattered workers are connected to the same block chain system.

                                                                                     

• Lawyers could be released to make better use of their talents by employing artificial intelligence to scan routine legal documents. This could lead to more secretaries and other posts requiring interpersonal skills.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
• Business services could be aided by artificial intelligence, leading to a simpler, faster, less burdensome process of setting up a small company. This could result in a growth in self employment and make possible enterprises driven by creative individuals less hampered by paperwork.                                                                                                                                               
• High street banks are closing local branches and customer counter positions at an alarming rate as automated menu driven customer stations are brought in. It could be that if small businesses (see above) multiply there will be a greater demand for bank staff able to advise them and connect them to the appropriate sources of finance and expertise.
  

 Blockchain technology, briefly mentioned above in a medical context, enables people or devices in different departments or areas of work, interrelated in some way (so that each is affected by what is happening elsewhere in the organisation or project or operation, even when spread over different parts of the world) to instantly monitor real-time data anywhere in the system. This  will no doubt lead to new areas of human work not even envisaged today.

If I, a layman, can think up a list like this imagine what a dedicated think tank could come up with. So my hope is that readers may pressurise their MPs, senators, congressmen, local government officials, aid agencies and church leaders to move in this direction. Or plant ideas in the minds of existing and potential entrepreneurs, or, even better, start up their own companies to develop and launch such technology or use existing technology more imaginatively.

Robotics, machine learning and neural networks could be a way to help the developing nations while saving the developed ones from their past sins and improving the quality of life  of their own citizens.

John Sears

author

 2077: Knights of Peace

reach me at
cosmik.jo@gmail.com

Is the earth alive?

Until only the last decade or so there appeared to be a widespread belief among most biologists that life on earth was not really that mysterious. (Many physicists and most engineers did not share this view.)

Admittedly there was much to learn but ultimately it was just a matter of finding the mechanisms by which atoms and molecules had accidently arranged themselves into reproducing entities which by random genetic mutations and natural selection would evolve into a bewildering plethora of competing viable species of  bacteria, insects, reptiles, fish, birds and mammals.  It all started with 20 different kinds of amino acid molecules (19 of which had to be 'left handed' as opposed to their 'right handed' counterparts)  being thrown together by chance to produce the first organisms able to reproduce and with the potential to differentiate into future species in a way which would ultimately lead to the biosphere we know today. There was admittedly a growing recognition that cooperation between species, as in symbiosis, played a role but it was all driven by chance and selection pressure.

The widespread appearance of design was considered illusory - but not even neo-Darwinists ever suggested that design did not seem to be present.

Now this picture is beginning to be recognised by most scientists, even many neo-Darwinists, to be at best inadequate and probably fundamentally wrong.

1.SPECIATION. This is observed mainly in  bacteria and some insects but as far as I am aware (I only have the knowledge of the interested layman) no new bird or mammal species has occurred since humans appeared a few tens of thousands of years ago. One occasionally hears about a 'new' species but this always means 'newly discovered', unless it is a bacterium.'

2.MUTATIONS. The so called random mutations which give rise to new species of bacteria while intrinsically stochastic do not occur anywhere in the organism at random - they only happen where they lead to a viable variation of some kind that fits into and integrates with the overall architecture and functional scheme of the new organism, which at some level is 'known' in advance.

3.EPIGENETICS. Learned behaviour and acquired characteristics are passed on down the generations. The gene is not the master. What determines the behaviour and characteristics of an organism is what genes are turned on or off and the instructions for this somehow get passed on (by a by a fairly recently discovered process called methylation) to the offspring. What you learn now about how to cope with your environment can be passed on to future generations. How many generations is not known.  I saw one paper recently talking about 18 generations but I can't remember at this moment what kind of life it was.


4.COOPERATION betweeen species seems to be common throughout the ecosphere.This, as far as I am aware, occurs for all types of life, from bacteria to mammals, both within one type of life and between different kinds of life.

5.BIOLOGY AND GEOLOGY INTERACT. For instance, vegetation in prehistoric times lubricated the movements of rocks in a way which led to certain patterns of tectonic activity which indirectly affected earthquakes, volcanoes, vegetation, animal life and human settlements today.

6.INTELLIGENCE is ubiquitous in nature. New examples appear in the scientific press almost daily whether it is insects solving the 'travelling salesman problem' or crows using twigs as tools . A clue as to how this intelligence is achieved may lie in recent quantum biological investigations into photosynthesis and bird migration. Intelligence is being studied at the neurological level, leading to neural nets, deep learning and artificial intelligence.

7.PURPOSE.  Everything from an embryonic stem cell to the leader of a lion pack in some sense knows its purpose and behaves accordingly. In his book Improbable Planet the astrophysicist Hugh Ross cites a wealth of meticulously referenced evidence to support the thesis that the entire cosmic history is directed towards the realisation of human civilisation. New discoveries compatible with this hypothesis are appearing frequently in the literature without comment by the popular science media as far as I am aware.

8.QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT. Physicists since the mid 20th century have been aware that molecules, atoms and other particles are able to interact independently of separation. This interaction is instantaneous, and so independent of time. In principle it is possible for particles on opposite sides of the universe to interact regardless of future, present or past. The controversial reports by Sheldrake et al of  learning within a species being passed without human intervention to another in a different part of the world should be seen in the light of this and of the intergenerational information transfer proven in epigenetics (item 3 above).

While not inferring here  anything about the philosophical or theological implications of this emerging picture it worries me that many scientists, in particular biologists and cosmologists, are made uncomfortable by it. They also show great reluctance to accept, if not a fear of, the hyperfine tuning of the initial state of the universe for life  (e.g. gravitational constant, cosmic constant, dark energy, electromagnetic constant, initial mass and initial entropy, to name only a few, are finely balanced to permit living systems to function). Yet the scientist's role is to discover truths about the world, not pretend they don't exist when they are discovered.

Some cosmologists have been so nonplussed by the Big Bang model (first conceived by a Roman Catholic priest), the fine tuning and the teleological evolution of the universe that they resort to invoking chance under the auspices of parallel or multiple universes which by definition cannot be experimentally verified, rather than focus on understanding the real universe we live in, over 90% of which is a total mystery. Instead of looking for more powerful theories on how our universe operates they arbitrarily invoke new ones. It reminds me of medieval alchemy.

Many young people regard scientists as priests and expect them to be guardians of the search for truth. If humanity is to continue to progress the holding of truth as a sacred target is its most precious resource. Popular science, e.g. BBC's Horizon, or the Discovery Channel or science articles in the press, need to acknowledge and discuss these aspects of the world. Otherwise instead of a new generation of scientists respecting God and truth we risk a descent into alchemy and magi, hopefully not conducted at great public expense.

John Sears
author, 2077:Knights of Peace