Are We the Proverbial “It”? Part One

Every one and their great grandmother has apparently had a go at, and calculated a value for the Drake Equation (named after radio astronomer and SETI scientist Frank D. Drake). The Drake Equation estimates (guesstimates is actually more accurate) the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy that could in theory say “Hi” to us and receive our “Hello” in return by examining all the factors that are part and parcel of that scenario. Seeing as how the Universe is some 13.7 billion years old, and seeing as how the current human species has been around for only some 200,000 years (give or take), then I have to ask, is it logical to assume that we’re the proverbial “It”? Here’s my two cents worth.

Are we alone in the Universe? That’s a question that’s been asked by millions over the eons, without, to date resolution. Of course the word ‘alone’ implies alone in the sense of whether or not there exists elsewhere our rough equals, more likely as not betters. We want to get to know our neighbours across the street, not their pets, or their plants. The standard gut-feeling answer to the question usually revolves around how vast the Universe is, and surely, given the billions of stars in our galaxy and the existence of billions of galaxies each with billions of stars, etc. and the vastness of time, surely we can’t be the proverbial “It”. There’s unfortunately one slight flaw in that statistical approach. There’s a rather long chain of events that have to happen, hurdles to be jumped, in order to get from the elements of star-stuff to biological cosmic neighbours. Depending on whom you talk to, that chain can be extremely long indeed. The point is, if any one factor in that chain of causality has a very low probability of coming to pass, it matters not one jot whether or not all the other factors are extremely probable, the overall result is going to be low. If any one factor is as close to zero as makes no odds, then the overall answer will also be a close to zero as makes no odds. Certainty multiplied by certainty multiplied by certainty multiplied by certainty multiplied by zero multiplied by certainty multiplied by certainty multiplied by certainty ultimately equals zero!

Rather than give an exhaustive list of all those factors required to give us cosmic neighbours, I’ll focus on six essentials.

Firstly, one has to have the right kinds of matter and energy that can produce beings like us, and a solid surface to stand on. That’s no problem. The Universe has lots of kinds of energy on tap; stars can manufacture and disperse the required kinds of matter, like carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, silicon, etc. There’s lots of solid bodies (planets) out there. That’s one vote for certainty. 

Secondly, one has to have a solid planetary body turn into a habitable world; a suitable environment for physics, chemistry, biochemistry and biology to do their evolutionary thing. Fortunately, that shouldn’t be a problem. There’s a lot of real estate out there and it comes in all sizes and flavours. While there’s only ever going to be one Planet Earth (I’ll avoid discussions of the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics, the notion of parallel worlds, and the Multiverse here which could argue the contrary), there has been, is, and will be, lots and lots of earth-like abodes, just letter perfect for life-as-we-know-it to survive, even thrive. If one wants to throw in life-not-as-we-know-it, there will be lots of worlds suitable for those possibilities as well. So, that’s another vote for certainty.

Thirdly, physics has to become chemistry, and chemistry has to become biology. We need biology to have had origins, or an origin, an origin(s) of life that’s an inevitable outcome of the everyday ordinary interactions between physics and chemistry. Well, many will argue that the origin of life is as nearly predictable as death and taxes, given a suitable habitat. Many will also argue that the origin of life is a fluke! In my point of view, the origin of life need only happen once, and that clearly has been a certainty – we exist and we are life. Once there’s one origin of life, the rest is just distribution. Panspermia provides the ways and means of distributing (microbial) life throughout the cosmos. So, I’ll have to cast another vote for certainty again!

Fourthly – well, now we hit the proverbial brick wall.  You and your neighbours aren’t microbes – you’re a colony of microbes. In short, you’re a multicellular life form. We seek, in the cosmos, other multicellular life forms, on the grounds that the odds that a microbe or unicellular life form isn’t going to prove to be much of a companion or drinking buddy is a near given. So, we need to get from unicellular to multicellular, and therein lays the rub. And it’s here that we have to rely for guidance on a sample of one – Earth. Note: It’s dangerous to extrapolate from a sample of one, but what choice do we have? 

There’s no ecological niche on Earth occupied by multicellular critters that’s not also occupied by unicellular critters (microbes). The reverse isn’t true. You may think the world is totally dominated by multicellular critters – you, your partner, your family, your pets, your garden, your food, all the life you see around you is multicellular. There’s millions of species of insects – all multicellular. What’s more common than bugs? Yet, if you did a biological census, even in your home and your garden, you’d find that apparently common multicellular life forms are out-common-ed, vastly outnumbered, by unicellular life forms by a ratio of trillions to one. What you don’t see does matter!

So, are multicellular critters an evolutionary certainty? Is there anything a ‘colony’ of 2 or 20 or 200 or 2000 cells can accomplish or fill a previously unfilled ecological niche that one cell can’t? And by the way, that 2 or 20 or 200 or 2000 stage has got to be selected for before one can get to the two million and two billion colony stage. Well, clearly the transition happened here, albeit it took some three billion years to seriously kick-start the process, so it’s hardly some inevitable ‘law of nature’. I mean taking some three billion years to get to a colony of cells from a single cell doesn’t inspire confidence that the process is easy, necessary or inevitable. Anyway, it did happen here, so it’s obviously possible. I just don’t see it as a super-evolutionary development that confers immediate survival-of-the-fittest advantage. Of course a colony of two cells might be harder to eat than one cell, but at that level, ‘food’ tends to be absorbed at the molecular level. In any event, microbes can easily attack and ‘eat’ multicellular critters, causing sickness, death and decay. We’re ultimately food for the microbes and the proof of that pudding is how we spend small fortunes keeping them at bay. But, eventually, though you might win the battles against the microbes, you’ll lose the last one, and thus the war.

Another factor that argues against multicellular organisms being a universally common feature of the Universe is that it is also a lot harder to transport around the Universe by natural means – that concept of panspermia – multicellular critters. I mean getting a microbe from Earth to Mars is one thing. Getting a cockroach there is a whole different scenario.   

Multicellular development; its probability, can’t be zero since we’re multicellular, but, on balance, I can’t assign a high probability to the transition between unicellular and multicellular life on every habitable planet, every time. This one is nearing zero!

Fifthly, as noted earlier, you don’t want to interact with your neighbour’s multicellular pets or multicellular garden plants, but your neighbours. What do you have in common with your neighbours that you don’t have in common with your neighbour’s pet or garden plants? Intelligence (even if you probably think your neighbours are a few cents short of a dollar!).

The issue now is whether, having evolved to a multicellular stage, will one develop some higher brain function? Is there any further evolutionary advantage towards increasing one’s intelligence? By going back to our sample of one, if Earth is any guide, the answer is roughly ‘not likely’. There are millions of multicellular species that have existed, and do exist, on Planet Earth. There are apparently only a very few species that have evolved something beyond the minimum level of brain power required for their day-to-day survival. That doesn’t inspire confidence that intelligence has inevitable value as a means of survival.

By far and away, most multicellular critters just operate on pure instinct and don’t (can’t) stop to figure things out (far less stop to smell and appreciate the roses) - but, there are an admittedly few exceptions.  Many wild birds would put our everyday companion animals to shame in the IQ department. I mean I love my cats, but little Einstein’s they’re not. Whales and dolphins have also been credited with being in the higher IQ bracket; ditto our close primate cousins. In the invertebrate kingdom, the octopus is pretty smart – by invertebrate standards (and then some if one is honest). However, on balance, most multicellular critters put their evolutionary strategies into something other than higher brain function. Take my cats. Is it to their survival advantage to ‘figure things out’ or to be just a bit faster afoot, hear just a bit better, see ever more clearly? Nearly all organisms put their survival abilities into something other than pure brain-power. Clearly brain-power has survival-of-the-fittest attributes. But, it’s not the only game in town, and therefore doesn’t have what I’d call evolutionary ‘certainty’.  However, it would be illogical to say that developing intelligence, the ability to figure things out, isn’t valuable and doesn’t have survival value, it’s just that if you were to list all the multicellular animal species on Planet Earth, very few would have an IQ of even one (the human average is 100). So, let’s say intelligence is somewhere between certainty and highly improbable.

Next, let’s assume your intelligent neighbours are fairly far away and the usual means of keeping in touch is by phone (or email). That introduces one additional complication; it’s not enough to just be intelligent. You need to have technology. Then, and only then, will the ‘are we alone?’ question be answered to our absolute satisfaction. We need technology if we are to find extraterrestrial intelligence(s); and/or extraterrestrial intelligence(s) will need technology to find us. One or both of us has to have invented engineering to a somewhat sophisticated level - maybe rocket ships, maybe radio telescopes, but something technological is required. There’s also a hidden assumption here – you actually want to seek out new civilizations. It matters not if you have all the required technology but care not to use it for the purpose of answering that question – ‘are you alone in the Universe?’ I’ll assume here that if you have intelligence, and it’s been able to construct technology, then part of your intelligence is devoted to be a curious critter who wants to know and find out things – so that’s a certainty of one. But what’s the level of certainty of developing technology in the first place? Rather poor judging from those terrestrial species that have some reasonable smarts to their credit. There’s the human species of course, and though while we’re not quite a sample of one, it’s pretty close. There are documentary observations of some animals (primates mainly) not so much making, but making use of existing ‘tools’ to assist in their survival. Alas, most intelligent species lack the anatomy and/or the right environment to manipulate objects. In the case of dolphins and whales, their ocean environment stymies any way and means of constructing things and making use of fire, for example. So, developing technology has to be rated, judging from our terrestrial sampling, as rather low. 

Technology is also a double-edged sword. The use of technology has had obvious survival value for the human species. You wouldn’t be hard-pressed to come up with dozens of technological inventions that have enabled us to survive longer and thrive better. But, out technological genie is out of the bottle, and unless you’re a hermit, you will have noted by now that technology can also reduce our quality of life, and no doubt you wouldn’t be equally hard-pressed to cite dozens of examples. Which leads nicely into the last consideration. 

To be continued…

The Ongoing Enigma of the Crop Circles: Part One

When it comes to the British crop circle phenomena, no explanation put forth makes any logical sense. The best of all the implausible explanations is the extraterrestrial intelligence one, but only on a scale of two out of ten because the rest don’t even rate that highly. 

I’ll start this off with a controversial statement. I thing the crop circle (or corn circle as it is sometimes referred to) phenomena is currently the greatest terrestrial scientific puzzle going – full stop.

I admit from square one that I haven’t the foggiest idea what they actually are, or represent, but I at least think I know what they’re not.

I’m sure the phrase ‘crop circles’ need little introduction. I can’t imagine too many people being ignorant of the general phenomena – there’s lots of books, media coverage, internet sites, TV specials, feature films, even calendars which have, and continue to cover the subject.

In general, by way of a probably unnecessary introduction, crop circles are geometric patterns, pictograms that are often generally circular but not always, that appear mysteriously in crop fields, usually overnight, perpetrated by person or persons, or by a non-person or non-persons, unknown. While these ‘circles’ have appeared in many countries they tend to be associated by the public mainly with England. They have been especially common over the past three or four decades, though some earlier reports are on record.

There’s no denying the picturesqueness of them, and often, in fact in more recent times, their geometric complexity.

There’s no doubt that crop circles exist – that’s undisputed. Crop circles are an ever on-going phenomenon, the pictograms growing in complexity year by year. So there’s an evolutionary pattern that needs explaining. And at least crop circles have the decency to sit still and not vanish without trace like UFOs, the Yeti and the lone mysterious interstellar ‘wow’ signal so suggestive, yet so illusive of proving the existence of, extraterrestrial intelligence!

So what the hell are crop circles? Are they a new form of human graffiti? Are they messages from extraterrestrials? Are they a cry for help from our own Mother Earth or Mother Nature? Are they a now and again mysterious, but ultimately natural, even if chaotic feature of Mother Nature – say weather or biological phenomena? Are they in fact none of the above?

A few data points to start with if you please.

Firstly, it’s now clearly an ongoing phenomenon, not a one or two year fad that college kids revel in doing (like goldfish swallowing or VW cramming) before something new grabs their attention for fun and games and mischief. Now I’ve likened crop circle ‘art’ to graffiti ‘art’, and of course graffiti is an ongoing fad, but there’s a vast world of difference between some spray paint on an alleyway brick wall that harms no one and crop circles which robs farmers of income – at least IMHO.

Secondly, let’s look at geographic distribution. Crop circles have appeared in many countries – that alone rules out just your lone rogue hoaxer or two. However, they do tend to be identified more with countries that have English as a native language, and in particular, by a relatively massive lot, the United Kingdom; Great Britain; England. This may be an artificial artefact as most of the relevant literature is in English. I mean there may be lots of crop circle activity in Asia, but Asian languages aren’t represented in the media in proportion to population. Still, I’d wager that there is a real concentration in select geographical areas (i.e. – England), and that too needs explaining.

Thirdly, crop circles tend to be concentrated in areas of reasonable population density, though that could also be an artificial artefact.  If they happened in Antarctica or the Sahara Desert there would be relatively few witnesses and reports and evidence. As well, any evidence would tend to be erased or eroded fairly quickly. Still, I’ll take it as a given that crop circles do tend to be concentrated in more humanly populated areas.  

And now for the non-explanations!

The Natural Phenomena Connection: Crop circles don’t look natural. They most certainly do look like artificial creations, the creations of intelligence. However, before pursuing that chain of thought, one, in all fairness, needs to consider a non-intelligent (natural) explanation.

Mother Nature is not widely known for producing complex structured geometric patterns in non-living materials – snowflakes and crystals aside. Nature tends to be more chaotic. Patterns – symmetry is another valid term - are usually one way, and a fairly foolproof way at that, of distinguishing something natural from something artificial – which is why the ‘canals of Mars’ or the ‘face on Mars’ attracted so much speculation. Now clouds, for example, can take on all sorts of weird shapes or a pattern if you like. Every now and a rare again you’ll see a pattern or a shape in a cloud which reminds you of something else – that’s just random probability. 99.9% of the time, when you look at a cloud, all you can identify or think of is ‘cloud’. But that other 0.1% of the time – well, it’s just a freak of nature.

Freaks of nature, very rare natural phenomena, certainly can and have happened, no more so than with all things meteorological, like clouds – weather phenomena. There’s documented cases of paper straws being driven into hardwood trees via the force of tornado winds. Ball lightning is another case in point. So, a freak of nature, weather-related in all probability, may account for some of the relatively simpler flattened crop circles.

In the beginning of the modern crop circle phenomena, the pictograms were fairly simple circular patterns in various crops. It was thought that perhaps swirling storm winds, whirlwinds, mild tornados, or other sorts of wind vortices might be responsible, though few newly created circles were created under those sorts of weather conditions – and why only at night? Say a whirlwind as cause for the effect. But, I defy anyone to examine the more complex geometrical (and often fractal) patterns and tell me how Mother Nature, meteorologically or otherwise, did it! Since crop circles exhibit patterns or symmetry, then that argues against them being natural or nature-made phenomena. Life forms certainly exhibit patterns or symmetry, but whatever crop circles are, they themselves aren’t alive, so again, we rule out a natural explanation.

Today, no thinking person in their right mind could look at these highly complex geometric patterns (not all are circles anymore) and think that Mother Nature could have produced them. If crop circles are natural, it nearly has to be weather related and no kind of weather can produce complex geometric patterns in crops. So, crop circles really have to be the product of intelligence; there’s no way Mother Nature can be held accountable for these complex geometric pictogram formations – that’s now undisputable. Scratch Mother Nature.

To be continued…