Star Larvae: The Proton Crisis

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

The Proton Crisis

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

Think you're Bright? Rise and Shine at http://starlarvae.blogspot.com/

Those nuclear organisms twinkling in the sky have an interest in human affairs, as the ancients believed. But the interest is more self serving than the ancients could have imagined. The stars count on their larvae, biological organisms, to help solve a crisis. The stellar crisis is a food shortage. Stars need people—or, more precisely, their extraterrestrial descendants—to manufacture new protons, so that new generations of baby stars will have something to eat.

Normal science tells us that the universe will expire from a "Heat Death" once stellar metabolisms have fused all of the available protons into larger atomic nuclei. When that day arrives, the last generation of stars will begin to flicker out, so goes the scenario, and the rush toward entropy will proceed without a countervailing tendency toward building up complexity. In effect, 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 hoariest of the stars.

Heat Death is the inevitable scenario in the eyes of science, because only a finite 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 in which stars are born. Large atomic nuclei, consisting of proton clumps fused by previous generations of stars, become incorporated into new stars and participate in nucleosynthesis, but they are too massive to initiate fusion. For that, single protons must serve as kindling.

The manufacturing of new protons, then, would seem to be the missing link in the stellar life cycle. By extending the generations of stars, an influx of fresh protons potentially could extend the life of the universe. Science already has identified the raw material from which new protons can be manufactured. It resides at the interface of two phenomena that have come to light only since the modern era of physics. These are (1) the intense gravity of black holes and (2) the indeterminate behavior of space and time at the quantum level. These phenomena, working in tandem, set the stage for the recycling of old mass into new, the new mass potentially taking the form of new protons.

"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."

—R. Buckminster Fuller
Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth

Black holes provide the energy supply for the recycling process. When a large star exhausts its fuel supply, it collapses in on itself, creating a concentrated point of mass. If the mass is sufficiently concentrated, goes the theory, the result is a black hole. These strange phenomena are characterized as being "black" because not even light can escape their intense gravitational fields.

However, the British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking in the 1970s refined the theory of black holes in a way that opens them up to practical applications. In his best selling "A Brief History of Time" he 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, then they annihilate one another. Typically the members of a virtual particle pair collide soon after they come into being, canceling out 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.

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 other kinds of proteins.

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 process just described 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 produce a post-biological form of organism.

Hyperdomesticated urbanites en masse already are locked in a symbiotic relationship with the 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 essentially overlooked aspect 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 beyond a mere symbiosis with technology comes a redefinition of identity altogether. In the context of the hypothesis the manufacturing of stars is analogous to the process by which a caterpillar manufactures 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 (food, water, and air) into a refined product (its own ever-changing 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. Or, the conjuring of protons from spacetime, to extend the generations of stars, might be characterized simply as . . . Magic.