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.
"My
own picture of humanity today finds us just about to step out from
amongst the pieces of our just one-second-ago broken eggshell. Our innocent,
trial-and-error-sustaining nutriment is exhausted. We are faced with an
entirely new relationship to the universe. We are going to have to spread
our wings of intellect and fly or perish; that is, we must dare immediately
to fly by the generalized principles governing universe and not by the
found rules of yesterday's superstitious and erroneously conditioned reflexes.
And as we attempt competent thinking we immediately begin to re-employ
our innate drive for comprehensive understanding."
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.
"The
perfection on earth is relative to the universal soul of the world.
There are three atmospheres in which souls can dwell. The third
leaves off where the planetary attraction of other worlds begins.
Souls which have reached perfection on earth depart for another
station. Having visited the planets, they go to the sun. From there
they rise to other universes and begin again their evolution from
world to world and from sun to sun. Within the suns they remember
all; upon the planets they forget."
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
"1. When a distinguished
but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost
certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he
is probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering
the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into
the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology
is indistinguishable from magic."
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.
Stars constitute
a genus of organism.
The stellar life cycle includes a larval phase.
Biological life constitutes the larval phase of the stellar life cycle.
Elaboration: The
hypothesis presents a teleological model of nature, in which
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