Home | Blog | About | Contact

The Star Larvae Hypothesis
Nature’s Plan for Humankind
Part 2. Star Larvae

The Proton Crisis and the Heat Death of the Universe

Biological life extends the life of the universe by recycling black holes into new protons (through a technology sufficiently advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic).

Those nuclear organisms that populate the sky have an interest in human affairs. This is as the ancients believed, but it is a self interest. The stars count on their larvae, biological organisms, to help solve a crisis. The stellar crisis is a food shortage, specifically a shortage of baby food. Stars need technologically advanced organisms to manufacture fresh protons, so that new generations of stars will have something to eat in their infancy.

Normal science holds that stars will go extinct and that the universe itself will expire from a "Heat Death," after stellar metabolisms have fused into atomic nuclei all of the available protons. When that day comes, the last generation of stars will begin to flicker out, so goes the scenario, and the rush toward entropy will proceed unbalanced by a countervailing rush toward complexity. The universe will die. This problem does not evoke any sense of urgency from a fresh brood of larvae, such as humankind. But the many billions of years that will pass before the problem becomes acute must seem proportionately less remote, and hence of greater urgency, to the stars themselves.

Nonetheless, researchers conclude that star production in the universe peaked billions of years ago and that the galaxies already are running out of gas. After completing a survey of distant galaxies in 2011, Dr. Robert Braun, chief scientist for astronomy and space science at Australia's CSIRO institute, says bluntly, "Our result helps us understand why the lights are going out. Star formation has used up most of the available molecular hydrogen gas." The death of the universe is inevitable, according to normal science, because only a limited number of protons precipitated out of the Big Bang. And only individual protons can be made to fuse—and deliver new stars—at the relatively low temperatures and pressures that characterize stellar nebulae—the particle clouds that serve as stellar nurseries. Atomic nuclei, consisting of proton clumps fused by previous generations of stars, do become incorporated into new stars and participate in nucleosynthesis, but they are too massive to initiate nuclear fusion. For that, kindling is needed, in the form of unfused protons.

The Quantum Gravity Solution to Recycling Protons

The manufacturing of new protons, then, would seem to be the missing link in the stellar life cycle. A fresh influx of protons potentially could extend the life of the universe by extending the generations of stars. Science already has identified the raw material from which new protons could be manufactured. It resides at the interface of two phenomena that physicists have been trying to integrate into a Grand Unified Theory. These are (1) gravity, in particular the intense gravity of black holes and (2) the indeterminate behavior of matter-energy at the quantum level. Together, these phenomena might be able to recycle old mass into new mass, the new stuff potentially taking the form of fresh protons.

When a large star exhausts its nulcear fuel, it collapses in on itself, creating a concentrated point of mass. If the mass is sufficiently concentrated, goes the theory, the result will be a black hole. Black holes are "black" because not even light can escape their intense gravity.

In the 1970s the British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking refined the theory of black holes in a way that suggests practical applications. In his best selling A Brief History of Time Hawking included a chapter called, "Black holes ain’t so black." In the chapter he describes a phenomenon that has come to be called Hawking radiation. This radiation consists of particles emanating from black holes. The particles that constitute Hawking radiation do not escape from the interior of the black holes, but rather appear spontaneously just beyond their edges, straddling the so-called event horizon. In Hawking's conjecture, these particles begin life as virtual particles—particle-antiparticle pairs, actually—called virtual because they exist only for a fraction of a second. Typically the members of a virtual particle pair collide soon after they come into being, annihilating one another—end of story. But atypically, when this process occurs at the edge of a black hole, the outcome can take a different turn.

When a particle-antiparticle pair appears in the space that intersects the event horizon of a black hole, then the members of the virtual pair can become separated before they annihilate one another. One member will be pulled in, leaving its partner in our universe—virtual no longer. In the Scientific American book, "A Journey into Gravity and Spacetime," physicist John Archibald Wheeler summarizes the process,

"During these quantum fluctuations, pairs of particles appear for an instant from the emptiness of space—perhaps an electron and an antielectron pair or a proton and an antiproton pair. . . . Under the conditions at the horizon [of a black hole], a virtual pair becomes a real pair. . . . In the Hawking process, two newly created particles exchange energy, one acquiring negative energy and the other positive energy. The negative-energy particle flies inward from the horizon to the point of crunch; the positive-energy particle flies off to a distance."

In Hawking's conjecture, a black hole eventually will evaporate, because each particle released into the universe by the Hawking process represents a net loss of mass from the black hole.

Protons: A Renewable Resource

Through the wizardry of Hawking radiation, our universe converts the mass of black holes into fresh particles of matter. If the appearance of these particle-antiparticle pairs could be influenced, then the Hawking process potentially could be used to manufacture certain kinds of particles preferentially to other kinds. If the process could be skewed to produce protons preferentially, then the generations of stars might be extended and the Heat Death of the universe postponed. By implementing such a process, the universe would be exhibiting another characteristic of living organisms. It would in a sense be healing itself, by manufacturing essential microcomponents of its body, just as biological organisms manufacture essential microcomponents of their bodies, such as enzymes, hormones, and vitamins.

By engineering protons from the quantum fluctuations of spacetime, humankind’s extraterrestrial descendants will not be doing anything particularly innovative, according to the star larvae hypothesis. They will be playing their assigned role in the regularly scheduled program. Which is already in progress.

The program will not, however, proceed along the lines of some assembly-line factory project. It will involve a metamorphosis of biological life. And that metamorphosis will involve a symbiosis with technology that will yield post-biological, or trans-biological, organisms.

Hyperdomesticated urbanites en masse already are locked in a symbiotic relationship with their manufactured environment. They are as much effects of the power plant and the automobile as they are causes. The contemporary urban scene of what Aldous Huxley called "motorized sitting addicts" is just one example of McLuhan’s general observation that as human beings fashion technologies that satisfy their needs, they simultaneously re-fashion themselves to accommodate the needs of their technologies. This is an underappreciated dimension of humankind’s intensifying symbiotic relationship with its own inventions.

The star larvae hypothesis takes the extrapolation from current trends another step. It proposes that after symbiosis with technology comes a new identity. In light of the hypothesis, the manufacturing of stars is analogous to the caterpillar manufacturing in its chrysalis factory the same butterfly that it becomes. Is the butterfly the transformed body of the caterpillar or a Frankensteinian artifact of caterpillar technology, one that consumes its creator? A human baby, by metabolizing raw materials into its own growing body, manufactures, according to a plan, the adult that it becomes. The making of it and the becoming of it are indistinguishable. The Medium is the Message.

Similarly, the star larvae hypothesis proposes, humankind’s extraterrestrial descendants will manufacture and become stars. The process could be characterized as one either of manufacturing or of metamorphosis. In either way of conceiving it, the conjuring of protons from spacetime, to extend the generations of stars, will involve a technology indistinguishable from magic.

NEXT > Quantum Gravity and the Physics of Consciousness

Enter your search terms Submit search form   web starlarvae.org starlarvae.blogspot.com		Social Media = Social Mediocrity: rue or alse?

Text Copyright ©2004-2012 Advanced Theological Systems. All Rights Reserved.