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The source of all hatred
Recently I’ve read an interesting article in a well-known magazine about the evolution of cooperation. The bottom line of it was that cooperation evolves together with competition. It makes a lot of sense and can be seen in many species, including humans.
Competition is good, because it promotes individual good features. This way the good features spread among a species. This way the whole species can adapt to a changing environment.
On the other hand cooperation is also good. Those who help each other make it easier for their group to survive, while those who are selfish have it harder, so obviously the ones with more altruism have more chance to survive, thus the altruistic features spread better. Obviously individuals in any given group share more physical traits with each other than with individuals from other groups, so helping individuals from the same group or family helps the same or similar genes to survive. In some species it does not matter too much, e.g. tigers live solitary lives. Other species are on the other side of the spectrum and seemingly rely on almost total devotion, such as ants.
All species evolve together with a balance between competition and cooperation. It’s hard to say arbitrarily what the balance is for each species exactly, but it is certainly different between various species and depends on their traits and environments – apparently competition is more important for tigers and cooperation is more important for ants. One could determine clues on why this is, but it’s not important here.
So what struck me in humans is that cooperation leads to promoting and supporting their own groups. For example people of the same race, religion or hobbies, etc. tend to stick together in order to cooperate. But at the same time they may be competing with other groups. This is rooted deep in human nature and goes back way before tribal groups, back to apes. Chimpanzees share similar behavior, while they cooperate within their groups, they sometimes fight between groups. So while cooperation makes us like people similar to us, competition makes us hate others who are different from us.
When you look at it from this angle, it explains the existence of many of the bad human features, such as racism, hatred, etc. They are rooted in humans and were one of the primary tools of human evolution. On one hand the good features such as altruism helped humans survive as a species in their environment, on the other hand the bad features which were helping promote individual genes, were the result of competition.
Humans are getting less aggressive these days and due to globalization and cheap travel they and their cultures mix. Eventually there will only be one group.
Next time you see hatred, don’t ask where it’s coming from, think of this post.
Evolution
Most people consider evolution just a proven biological theory which explains biodiversity and how humans came to be.
But I think of it in a different way.
I don’t know if you’ve heard of meme theory. In my definition a meme is any cohesive set of information which together makes a whole. Examples of types of memes include stories, books, gossips, religions, computer programs, food recipes, designs (mechanical, architectural), movies, songs, etc. A notable example is of course information encoded in chromosomes about an individual organism.
Memes are copied very easily. For example stories are told and repeated, books get revised, movies get remakes, designs get fixed and improved, creatures reproduce, etc.
When memes are copied, they are also often modified for whatever reason. Sometimes on purpose, sometimes because of errors. When you look at a history of a meme, it will look like a graph. Multiple copies may be modified in different ways. In time the meme changes.
This is evolution.
So in my definition, evolution is change which happens to any kind of memes or information over time. This change is inevitable. Even if there is no practical need to change memes, they often change due to errors resulting from the imperfectness of the medium (such as human memory, errors when copying genes, etc.)
To many programmers this is no news, since “genetic algorithms” are very useful in searching enormous parameter spaces for local maxima.
Evolution is everywhere and governs the change of everything.
The Thing (2011)
A post in a new category – movie reviews. Hopefully everyone’s favorite. 🙂 This new category will in fact be not only about reviews, but also about my commentary.
The Thing is a movie about an alien lifeform which crash-landed on Earth in Antarctica long ago. It’s actually a prequel to John Carpenter’s original movie from 1982 with the same title.
If you like movies about evil aliens like I do, you would certainly like this one. The prequel blends very well with the original movie, in fact it at the end it is surprisingly well connected to the original. They did not overdo the monsters but made them more believable using current technology. There is a lot of action in it, boring scenes were kept to a minimum to sustain the story. Definitely worth watching if you like thrillers, action and aliens.
Spoilers
The lifeform in the movie is bloodthirsty, but it does not only want to just consume Earth’s lifeforms. When the organism catches and swallows a dog or a human, or even if it only sprinkles one with its fluids, the alien cells attack prey’s cells and convert them into alien cells.
It wasn’t said in the movie, but one can suspect the alien lifeform attacked some other intelligent aliens who had a spaceship and this way came into the possession of that spaceship, which it used to come to Earth. This could potentially explain why a graceful landing would be too hard for that creature.
What does not make much sense is how such lifeform with the ability to understand and pretend other lifeforms from other planets could evolve in the first place. All lifeforms are bound to their environment. They are used to pressure and chemical composition of that environment. Advanced organisms don’t have the flexibility to live in environments beyond their home, because they are too complex for that. I find it hardly believable that a species from another planet could come to Earth and breathe our air, eat our meat, let alone have the ability to change itself into one of us in a matter of minutes.
However there is one scenario in which such a life form could be possible – if it was deliberately created as a weapon or even just as a crazy experiment.
But even if such a lifeform existed, I still find it quite improbable that it could find another alien with spaceship technology who it could mimic. I would argue, that civilisations able to travel in space to other planets must have evolved beyond physical limitations of biological life and consist of cybernetic beings, which we today consider as “robots” or “androids” etc. For this reason I think that even if such a creature existed, it wouldn’t be able to spread effectively to other planets.
Nanotechnology
Nanotechnology is one of the technologies of the future which we will develop and embrace. The idea of nanotechnology was pioneered by Eric Drexler who in his book “Engines of Creation” described the potential and many uses of this technology.
The whole idea is centered around the ability to manipulate individual atoms for various purposes, such as creating new materials, creating entire devices from scratch with unparalleled precision or modifying molecules in living organisms, including fixing human bodies.
In the recent years we’re seeing incremental progress in the ability to manipulate individual atoms, with or without the help of carbon-based nanotubes. However we are still very far from mastering the technology, we still need one or more breakthroughs.
There is a lot of debate concerning nanotechnology, also related to its feasibility or dangers. But nanotechnology is already everywhere around us – we and all lifeforms are its creation. Nanotechnological devices lie at the basis of all living cells and are nanomechanical parts of all organelles.
When nanotechnology finally arrives, it will change our world more than cars or computers did. We will be able to manufacture goods at home, we will just have a pot or a chamber filled with a medium, we will download designs from the internet, throw in raw materials such as dirt, wait and take out a TV or parts of a car to assemble. Just like we have paid and free software, we will eventually have paid and free designs of devices to assemble at home.
Carbon and Silicon will become the most common materials used, but surely people will still want to use wood and other common materials, but they will be more expensive and less durable.
A lot of people will lose low paid jobs, esp. in manufacturing and distribution, but more intellectual jobs will open instead. After all we’re good at thinking, we should let robots and computers do the mechanical jobs. There will still be demand for food, but the production of food has already been automated to some extent.
Are we alone?
Once in a while a theory pops up that questions whether Earth is special for whatever reason. After all we know that our planet is just a speck in the vast depths of the Universe, but as of today we have no proof that life ever existed anywhere beyond Earth.
Is there life anywhere else in the Universe?
Elements which are basic building blocks for the life as we know it are abundant in the Universe. Water is everywhere, we have evidence that it’s on the Moon, on Mars and various other planets and satellites in our system, not mentioning comets. It’s essentially trivial to create membranes of which living cells are composed by taking a bunch of chemical compounds and shocking them with electric current. Give these processes billions of years and mono-cellular organisms will likely evolve.
Mars may have harbored life in the past. Certainly it had liquid water an may still occasionally have it. In a matter of decades we may find out whether it did have life indeed.
Europa (Jovian moon) is thought to have liquid ocean underneath the icy surface. One day we may find out whether there is anything living in it or not.
So out of 12-15 bodies in our Solar system (planets and satellites) there are three or four which have or might have harbored life.
During the recent few years we learned that at least half of stars harbor massive planets. And this is just through observation under certain conditions – the axis of the planetary system of the observed star must meet conditions for us to notice the movement of the star. We can’t notice smaller planets yet. So it’s safe to assume that most stars have complex planetary systems like ours.
Our Galaxy contains 200-400 billion stars. That means that there are probably a trillion planets or satellites. 10% of those may have conditions for mono-cellular life.
So definitely life exists beyond Earth and it’s abundant in our own Galaxy. In addition to that, we estimate that the observable Universe contains 100 billion galaxies (10^11) and the total size of the Universe is not known (may be one or two orders of magnitude bigger). The odds for extraterrestial life existence are quite high!
Do extraterrestial civilizations exist?
We estimate that a star like ours lives for 10 billion years. It took 5 billion years for our Civilization to appear on our planet. Multi cellular organisms had 1-1.5 billion years only, before our planet may not have had conditions necessary for them – we are not really sure, because most of the surface of our planet was recycled due to plate tectonics.
Should a terminal event not occur 65 million years ago, maybe dinosaurs would eventually evolve a civilization? Well, life on our planet had at least two chances to evolve a civilization.
If life is so abundant in our Galaxy, that there may be 10 billion of planets or satellites on which life may have abound, and many of these bodies may have had billions of years to evolve a civilization, then it becomes quite clear that there may be plenty of planets that will produce a civilization in their life time. How many bodies exactly? Millions? Billions? We can’t estimate right now due to lack of statistical data… but they must be abundant.
After a civilization leaves their planet, life will remain on it and continue evolving. So potentially a single planet may produce more than one civilization.
If extraterrestial civilizations are so abundant, why haven’t they contacted us yet?
This question is also known as the Fermi paradox.
It took 5 billion years for us to appear on Earth. We started putting together something that could have been called an early civilization only a mere few thousands years ago. The real transformation started about 200 years ago and it speeds up ever since, exponentially. The means of communication 200 years ago are today considered primitive. The means of communication used today will also be considered primitive in a few tens of hundreds of years. So the aliens may not even know how to contact us, that’s how fast our technology is changing.
Besides, we may not be interesting to be contacted at all! We are as interesting to contact for them as fish are for us. I’m not saying we are edible to them. We have nothing to offer for them, just like we have nothing to offer for humans 100 years from now. We are not that much different from any other creature that lives on this planet after all, we haven’t really managed to produce intelligent beings able to sustain cosmic conditions and explore the Galaxy. Plus we cause a lot of suffering to ourselves like other mindless animals. Our systems, corporations, governments, politicians, are resource driven (money).
Given how rapidly our technology changes today, in a few tens or hundreds of years we may change significantly. Maybe then we will be worth to be contacted, or maybe we will find out their existence and be willing and able to contact them ourselves.
The Big Bounce and the shape of the Universe
So we evolved on this rock somewhere in the suburbs of a large galaxy. But looking around (read: into the stars) we are able to figure some things out, like where it all came from and where it is going. There is still a lot to learn, we barely scratched the surface, let’s try to sum up some things we already know.
Until recently the widely or wildly popular theory was that it all started with a Big Bang! But where did this singularity which gave birth to our Universe come from? What triggered the explosion of space, time, energy, matter and information?
Cosmic microwave background should be uniform. However astronomers who observe and analyze it find some irregularities. These irregularities could be the remnants of the previous incarnation of our Universe, the proof for a new interesting theory, which says it wasn’t a Big Bang, but rather a Big Bounce. The Universe existed before, but for some reason, like gravity, it compressed into one spot. For some reason the compression reached a critical point and it all exploded again.
The Universe has been expanding for the last ~14 billion years. It’s likely going to slow down at some point. Whatever caused to compress it before, will stop the expansion and induce a collapse again. Gravity is a force which we know, but we can’t tell for sure yet if that’s the real cause behind the collapse. In fact we can’t even reliably estimate the mass of our galaxy, let alone the whole Universe and that would be necessary to tell whether it’s gravity that pulling it all together or not.
Looking far away with our best telescopes we can see the faint light that gets to us after billions of years. The farther we look, the older the light. The “oldest” light we see is from before about 14 billion years. This is how we estimate the age of the Universe. The shift of the spectrum of the light we see towards red indicates that the Universe is expanding.
Some theories propose that the expansion is not only caused by the matter speeding after the Big Bounce, but also by expansion of the space itself. This would explain why two points of space sufficiently far away from each other escape from each other with a speed which virtually seems greater than speed of light. Therefore if places far away from us escape virtually faster than light, we will never be able to se what’s beyond a certain point.
Because of this “faster-than-light” expansion, the Universe is bigger than what we can see, according to some estimates by an order of magnitude, or even more. The truth is, at this point we don’t even know how big the Universe really is, the estimates vary, we suspect it’s ~14 billion years old but much bigger than that the distance that light would travel in ~14 billion years.
What does the Universe look like, what is its shape? The simplest answer is that it’s filling the inside of an expanding sphere. The shockwave of the initial explosion is really fast, so we can’t get out and see it from outside. Some even propose that there is no space outside, that the space exists only inside of the Universe, which physically makes sense, because what we think of as empty space, completely sterile vacuum, is in fact not empty, but full of energy. Since there is no energy or anything beyond the expanding sphere of the Universe, we can’t treat it as ordinary space as we know it.
I do not really believe that the Universe is an expanding sphere sitting in an unexplainable, unmeasurable, infinite, sterile and pristine void without bounds of end. That does not make any sense to me. But I have my own theory.
In my opinion our Universe is a three dimensional surface of a four dimensional sphere. This is mind boggling and impossible to imagine “from the outside”, but it’s quite easy to grasp from the inside if we compare it to our two dimensional life on Earth. If we were able to freeze the time and then send a spaceship in any randomly chosen direction, the starship would eventually return from the opposite side. This means that to us, confined to the three dimensional space of our Universe, there is no boundary, there is no escape, there is no getting out. No matter where we go, we will eventually get back to where we started.
What I think really expands is the four dimensional sphere on which surface our three dimensional Universe is located. It’s like the Earth was a balloon and somebody was blowing it. When we’re blowing a balloon, its volume expands, so does its surface. The number of atoms on the surface remains the same, only the expansion of the balloon causes them to move away from each other. Similar thing happens to our Universe.
The fourth dimension of the expanding sphere is not time. At some point the Universe will stop expanding and will start collapsing again, but the time will not start going back. (Or will it?)
So what if it’s true, if the Universe has multiple lives, if it is expanding and collapsing back and forth? What is causing it? It could be gravity. My theory is that the behavior of the Universe is like a perfect pendulum. It swings back and forth. When it expands, the expansion is slowing down up to certain point when it stops, then collapses back again, the collapse accelerates until finally the Universe collapses into a singularity and all matter and energy ends up in one spot having maximum “kinetic” energy it bounces and starts expanding again, the expansion decelerates until it stops again at the same point as before. If the contents of the Universe don’t have a place to escape, the process is perfectly conserved and the Universe is bouncing back and forth, forever. And every iteration of the Universe can be different, doesn’t need to be identical, the elements of matter and energy don’t have to follow the same paths as before the bounce.
Maybe it’s like that, maybe not. Even if it is, it does not explain how this all started, where it came from, what’s inside the four dimensional sphere and what’s outside. Will anyone be ever able to find out?
Chris Dragan's Corner 