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

The Stellar Organism

The birth, catalytic metabolism, periodic physiological cycles, and death of a star finger the luminary as an organism.

In his book, "In the Beginning" physicist and science writer John Gribbin argues on behalf of "the living universe." This phrase captures the idea that physical nature's cosmic parts function like living beings. Gribbin focuses on galaxies to make his case, pointing out the various ways in which their internal dynamics meet the physiological requirements that qualify them as organisms. If the Earth’s biosphere can be considered a discrete living unity—The Gaia concept—then so too can the Milky Way galaxy, or any other spiral galaxy be considered a discrete organism, Gribbin argues. Like Gaia, a spiral galaxy actively maintains itself in a state of stable disequlibrium, by, for example, using feedback to control the rate of star production in its spiral arms and thereby regulate its internal physics in the way needed to maintain its characteristic form.

By regulating its internal conditions to maintain itself in a state far from equilibrium, a galaxy exhibits the essential behavior of a living organism.

However, as eager as Gribbin is to assign the status of creature to the Milky Way, he is less magnanimous when it comes to stars as individuals. As dynamic and lively as they are in terms of their internal processes, stars themselves do not qualify as living things, he contends. "The life processes that create and maintain the spiral structure in disk galaxies start with stars," Gribbin acknowledges. He goes on to note that stars possess a trait distinctive of living things: "A star like our sun is itself, of course, in a state far from equilibrium." But we should not be misled by that fact: "Not even the keenest enthusiast for the Gaia hypothesis would argue that the sun is alive in the way that the Earth and the Milky Way are alive, because the sun is doing the best it can to reach equilibrium."

Gribbin’s dismissive characterization reveals a bias common to the scientific view. The sun and all the other stars may be succumbing to entropy—rolling down the slope of potential energy toward equilibrium—despite their best efforts, just as are all of us who find ourselves past midlife and continuing to age. But stars exhibit such a striking number of characteristics associated with living organisms, including self regulation through feedback control, that a reconsideration seems justified. The star larvae hypothesis extends the notion of being alive specifically and explicitly to stars.

The case for the lives of stars relies on the similarity between the processes that drive biology and those that drive stellar physics. Animals maintain themselves in a far-from-equilibrium state by releasing chemical energy from the nutrients that they consume. Stars maintain themselves by releasing nuclear energy from the atomic nuclei that they consume. Like organisms, stars use the released energy to maintain their bodily structures in a state of stable disequilibrium

Stellar metabolism is a system of nuclear fusion (anabolic) and fission (catabolic) reactions that maintain the gross structures and processes of stellar anatomy and physiology. Newborn stars consume hydrogen nuclei, protons, exclusively. The processes that fuse these protons into the nuclei of all the other atoms occur by various but specific routes. Inside stars, nuclear reactions, such as the proton-proton chain, the triple alpha process, and the CNO cycle, build up the larger atomic nuclei from individual protons. The general term for this process is nucleosynthesis.

"The most useful tool astronomers have for studying the way stars change as they age is called the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, after the two astronomers who pioneered its use. Stars live for so long and change so slowly, by and large, that there is no hope of studying stellar evolution by watching an individual star or two age. But the H-R diagram enables astronomers to do the equivalent of a botanist who studies a forest of trees that includes seedlings, saplings, and mature specimens and uses those studies to work out the life cycle of a tree." — John Gribbin Blinded By the Light

The preponderance of the various nuclear reactions relative to one another varies with the age of a star, a situation that parallels metabolic changes that occur in biological organisms as they age. A newborn star fuses individual protons into proton pairs, which are the nuclei of helium atoms. This process is called hydrogen burning and dominates nucleosynthesis in young stars. Eventually insufficient numbers of free protons remain to keep this process going, but sufficient numbers of helium atoms have been created for the star to shift into a hotter, helium-burning phase. This nucleosynthetic process fuses helium nuclei into carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and other larger atoms. Eventually a star will burn carbon and larger atoms and produce yet larger ones, with iron defining the upper size limit of atoms that are formed through the metabolic processes that dominate the life of a typical star. Shorter-lived but more energetic processes are responsible for producing atoms heavier than iron. These processes take place during the explosive, high-energy events that constitute the death throes of a star.

In a star bigger than the sun, a peculiar thing happens during the hydrogen burning phase. If the particle cloud from which the star condensed includes sufficient amounts of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen, the star will initiate a mode of hydrogen burning called the CNO cycle, in which it fuses hydrogen nuclei into helium nuclei through a catalytic process. Catalysis is a transformative process that organic metabolisms use to manage their chemical reactions. Catalysis relies on intermediaries that participate in reactions but remain unchanged. An example from biology is the use of enzymes. Certain kinds of enzymes will bond to particular molecules, introduce those molecules to others, then detach themselves from the molecules that they have joined, emerging from the reaction unchanged.

During the catalytic CNO cycle, isotopes of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen exchange protons and emit subatomic particles through radioactive decay in a specific sequence of transformations that yields helium from an initial union of hydrogen and carbon. Each time a helium nucleus is emitted from the process it leaves behind the original carbon isotope, which is then free to bond with another hydrogen nucleus—proton—to begin the cycle again. The process is a true catalysis. When the manufactured helium is released, the initiator of the process remains.

Notice the elements involved in the CNO cycle: carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen, interacting with hydrogen. This group of elements, sometimes designated by the abbreviation CHON, constitutes up to 90 percent of the mass of biological protoplasm. It is surely a strange coincidence that this small set of elements plays starring roles in the catalytic metabolisms of both biological organisms and stars. A priori, there is no reason to think that their nuclear and chemical properties would link them in such a way. The star larvae hypothesis interprets the coincidence as suggestive of a family tie.

But a complex metabolism is just one attribute that stars share with organic life. Stars also possess an internal arrangement of dynamically interacting subsystems by means of which, or in the service of which, the metabolism proceeds. These subsystems constitute the anatomy of the star. The material and energetic exchanges among the subsystems constitute a star’s physiology.

A star is not a homogeneous blob of hot gas. It is an organized structure of discernable components arranged and interacting with one another in definite ways. The sun, as a typical example, comprises, anatomically, an inner core within which nucleosynthesis occurs, a radiative layer that carries energy out from the core by radiation, and a convective layer that carries the energy further by convection. This onionlike structure continues outward from the core to the periphery with the photosphere, the chromosphere, and, at the outer fringes, the diffuse corona.

This layered body plan is maintained dynamically by a system of physiological processes. The photosphere, for example, includes structures that solar physicists call granules, which are the tops of convection cells that cover the sun. The convection cells underlying the granules constitute a circulatory system that shuttles material between the interior and the surface of the solar body. At the surface the fluid material circulates according to multiple flow components (rotation, cellular convection, oscillations, and meridional flows).The granules themselves compose supergranules, whose fluid motions concentrate magnetic fields to produce a weblike pattern of field lines—the chromospheric network—that continually evolves over the sun’s surface. The photospheric circulatory system includes magnetic field markers—the familiar sunspots—and the smaller, brighter spots called faculae. A system of interlocking processes is at work here to maintain a discernable, complex structure in a state of stable disequilibrium and that exhibits a level of complexity suggestive of a living—organic—system.

And, as with biological systems, a star's internal processes are cyclic. Physiological cycles of organisms include the familiar respiratory, estrus, and circadian rhythms of animals. Gaia, too, pulses according to interwoven rhythms: tidal, seasonal, glacial, and other. The sun exhibits the same tendency. Its rhythms include the well-studied eleven-year sunspot cycle, along with a 76-year oscillation in its volume. NASA’s orbiting SoHo observatory during the 1990s revealed a rapid five-minute cycle of helioseismographic activity—of sound waves resonating through the body of the sun (for more details, see "Solar and Stellar Activity Cycles" by Peter R. Wilson).

Stars and biological organisms both also depend on feedback to achieve homeostasis, or internal stability. The sun uses feedback controls specifically to maintain its internal temperature, which must remain within a limited range to keep it viable. If the sun were to cool excessively, it would implode under its own gravity. If it were to heat up excessively, it would fly apart. The sun keeps blazing because its tendency to expand—an effect of its heat—is countered precisely by its tendency to contract—an effect of its gravity. The temperature range that balances these two countervailing forces happily corresponds to the range that keeps nucleosynthesis proceeding in an orderly fashion.

Despite the foregoing, at least one essential biological process has no obvious counterpart in the lives of stars. That process is reproduction. The star larvae hypothesis fills the gap by accounting for the stellar reproductive cycle.

The theory of cosmological natural selection, in which black holes spawn new universes, potentially accounts for the reproductive cycle of universes. As for stars themselves, the issue of reproduction is addressed, ostensibly, by the standard scientific model of the stellar "life cycle."

When stars die, they do so explosively, expelling their bodily material into the space around them. The death leaves behind a dense core, which persists as a brown dwarf, neutron star, or black hole, depending on the size of the original star. The material that is ejected enriches the nearby interstellar clouds, from which new stars form. This recycling of material from one generation of stars to the next resembles reproduction. But it resembles the fertilization of roots more than it does the production of seeds. It is an incomplete reproductive cycle. The seeds of stars are unattached protons. The recycling of material from old stars into new ones does not produce new protons.

"The Rosicrucians and the Illuminati, describing the angels, archangels, and other celestial creatures, declared that they resembled small suns, being centers of radiant energy surrounded by streamers of Vrilic force. From these ourpouring streamers of force is derived the popular belief that angels have wings. These wings are corona-like fans of light, by means of which the celestial creatures propel themselves through the subtle essences of the superphysical worlds." -— Manley Palmer Hall The Secret Teachings of All Ages

The star larvae hypothesis proposes that stars reproduce in a way that more nearly resembles biological reproduction, insofar as the stellar reproductive cycle is divisible into discernable stages, all of which participate in the succession of stellar generations.

The hypothesis proposes that the stellar body is the adult phase of a developmental program that includes a larval phase, which, like some biological larvae, bears little resemblance to the adult. The larval phase of the stellar life cycle unfolds on planetary surfaces. The developing larvae exploit the material resources of planets, and the larval population eventually differentiates to produce a type, which on Earth calls itself Homo sapiens, that is uniquely adapted (programmed) to carry the stellar life cycle into its next phase. This avant-garde type rapidly converts the material resources of the planet into complex environments—cities. It develops symbiotically with its evolving technologies as it does so and becomes highly domesticated—neotenous. Eventually, the complex symbiotic environments are manufactured in the orbital space around the incubator planet, enabling the larvae to occupy a new—extraterrestrial, weightless—ecological niche and commence the next stage of the life cycle.

Researchers, called anthropologists, who study the habits of Homo sapiens testify to a peculiar behavior that betrays an intuition of the metamorphosis to come. As if by precognition, the larvae fashion images of themselves as glowing and airborne. Larval lore points to the sky as the abode of "enlightened" fellows, a place and condition to which larval institutions called religions admonish adherents to aspire. While the drive to join the celestial illuminati of myth expresses itself through religious art and lore, the drive to join the celestial illuminati of the physical sky—the stars—expresses itself through aerospace engineering.

Spicules: Jets on the Sun
Credit: SST, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, LMSAL

Explanation: Imagine a pipe as wide as a state and as long as half the Earth. Now imagine that this pipe is filled with hot gas moving 50,000 kilometers per hour. Further imagine that this pipe is not made of metal but a transparent magnetic field. You are envisioning just one of thousands of young spicules on the active Sun. Pictured above is perhaps the highest resolution image yet of these enigmatic solar flux tubes. Spicules dot the above frame of solar active region 10380 that crossed the Sun in June, but are particularly evident as a carpet of dark tubes on the right. Time-sequenced images have recently shown that spicules last about five minutes, starting out as tall tubes of rapidly rising gas but eventually fading as the gas peaks and falls back down to the Sun. These images also indicate, for the first time, that the ultimate cause of spicules is sound-like waves that flow over the Sun's surface but leak into the Sun's atmosphere.

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