Abstract
Conventionally, intelligence is seen as a property of individuals. However, it is also known to be a property of collectives. Here, we broaden the idea of intelligence as a collective property and extend it to the planetary scale. We consider the ways in which the appearance of techno-logical intelligence may represent a kind of planetary scale transition, and thus might be seen not as something which happenson a planet butto aplanet, much as some models propose the origin of life itself was a planetary phenomenon. Our approach follows the recognition among researchers that the correct scale to understand key aspects of life and its evolution is planet-ary, as opposed to the more traditional focus on individual species. We explore ways in which the concept may prove useful for three distinct domains: Earth Systems and Exoplanet studies; Anthropocene and Sustainability studies; and the study of Technosignatures and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).
Statistics: Posted by Harvey — Mon Mar 06, 2023 9:59 pm
New Theory Suggests That the Origin of Life on Earth-Like Planets Is Likely
According to a recent paper by a math professor at the University of Arkansas, the existence of life on Earth provides proof that abiogenesis is relatively easy on planets similar to Earth, refuting the “Carter argument” conclusion.
Does the presence of life on Earth provide any insight into the likelihood that abiogenesis—the process by which life first emerges from inorganic substances—occurs elsewhere? That is a question that has baffled scientists for a while, as well as everyone else inclined to think about it.
Astrophysicist Brandon Carter makes the widely accepted claim that the selection effect of our own existence limits our ability to observe. Nothing can be concluded about the likelihood of life existing elsewhere based on the fact that we had to end up on a planet where abiogenesis took place.
He claimed that understanding life on this earth had, at best, neutral value. Another way to look at it is to say that because Earth wasn’t chosen at random from the group of all Earth-like planets, it can’t be seen as a typical Earth-like planet.
However, a recent paper by retired astrophysicist and University of Arkansas mathematics instructor Daniel Whitmire argues that Carter’s logic was flawed. Whitmire contends that Carter’s theory suffers from “The Old Evidence Problem” in Bayesian Confirmation Theory, which is used to update a theory or hypothesis in light of new evidence, despite the fact that it has gained widespread acceptance.
After giving a few examples of how this formula is employed to calculate probabilities and what role old evidence plays, Whitmire turns to what he calls the conception analogy.
As he explains, “One could argue, like Carter, that I exist regardless of whether my conception was hard or easy, and so nothing can be inferred about whether my conception was hard or easy from my existence alone.”
In this analogy, “hard” means contraception was used. “Easy” means no contraception was used. In each case, Whitmire assigns values to these propositions.
Whitmire continues, “However, my existence is old evidence and must be treated as such. When this is done the conclusion is that it is much more probable that my conception was easy. In the abiogenesis case of interest, it’s the same thing. The existence of life on Earth is old evidence and just like in the conception analogy the probability that abiogenesis is easy is much more probable.”
In other words, the evidence of life on Earth is not of neutral value in making the case for life on similar planets. As such, our life suggests that life is more likely to emerge on other Earth-like planets — maybe even on the recent “super-Earth” type planet, LP 890-9b, discovered 100 light years away.
Reference: “Abiogenesis: the Carter argument reconsidered” by Daniel P. Whitmire, 23 September 2022, International Journal of Astrobiology.
DOI: 10.1017/S1473550422000350
Statistics: Posted by DrEvil — Mon Dec 19, 2022 7:43 am
DrEvil » 03 Dec 2022 05:26 wrote:Yeah, just to be clear, I don't actually believe this, I'm just spitballing because it's fun, and you can probably pick so many holes in it it falls apart completely. Just the assumption that the universe has any kind of agency is a huge one. That it's hostile to us, or that we could possibly be any kind of threat to it is also, to put it mildly, dodgy. Then again, to paraphrase an old Rigint comment: the universe is billions of light years across, and every inch of it will kill you dead in an instant.
Could probably cobble together a half-decent short story from it though. Scientist investigating the nature of the universe and how everything is connected with quantum woo (throw in some personal stuff to ground it and give it emotional stakes as a counterpoint to the underlying nihilism), with each short chapter divided by small snippets from the news about the first human probe to reach another solar system, which would be the trigger point for the Great Filter. Ends with the scientist realizing the horrible truth and rushing home to deal with $personal_stuff just as the data from the probe gets scary (the probe communicates via quantum entanglement to get around the timing issue) and the talking heads and experts start getting uneasy, and asteroids in the outer system start heading towards Earth, or the sun starts charging up the mother of all solar flares.
I just watched The Lazarus Project, so I'm in an end of the world kind of mood.
Statistics: Posted by DrEvil — Wed Dec 07, 2022 11:56 pm
Statistics: Posted by Harvey — Sat Dec 03, 2022 7:47 am
Statistics: Posted by Joe Hillshoist — Fri Dec 02, 2022 9:07 pm
Statistics: Posted by DrEvil — Fri Dec 02, 2022 3:26 pm
DrEvil » Tue Nov 29, 2022 12:53 am wrote:this is probably only a fraction of it.
You can say that again. The Eurekalert piece left out the title of the paper - "In vitro neurons learn and exhibit sentience when embodied in a simulated game-world".
I guess "We created a sentient Pong slave! Look at it go!" was too incendiary.
It does mention the free energy principle, but not that the guy who came up with it, Karl J. Friston, is a co-author on the paper. The math is so far beyond me it's not even funny, but the basic idea (which I am probably mangling beyond recognition) is fascinating. It essentially boils down to: systems try to minimize surprise. We model our surroundings and try to predict what will happen, and if our predictions fail we reassess our model or change our surroundings to fit our predictions (in other words, politics are hardwired into reality. Damn it!).
Can't wait to see what happens when a more advanced experiment (maybe with robot arms. Robot arms are cool) fails to predict an outcome and decides to change its surroundings to fit.
Peter Watts has his usual uplifting take on the whole thing:
https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=10307
A completely different tangent: I'm pretty (a little) sure that entropy plays a part in the above. Minimizing energy spent is usually beneficial, and having to spend time and energy organizing things to fit our predictions or reorganize our internal models spends energy and goes against entropy.
All life really goes against entropy. It's a high-energy state that will naturally decay into a low-energy state if left alone.
Throw in pan-psychism and the implications are a little unnerving. If the universe is sentient/conscious and we're just tiny parts of it, what else follows that basic layout? Our bodies and the cells inside them. In our case, specifically the type of cells that throw their weight around, gobbling up everything around them to spread, also known as cancer. What does our bodies do about that? Immune system GO! Our immune system wipes out cancers all the time and they never amount to anything. How would that apply on the scale of the universe? What if the universe has an immune system, we just haven't become enough of a nuisance to trigger it yet (spreading to another solar system might do the trick)? What if the reason we haven't found anyone else is because the Great Filter is the universe's immune system kicking in whenever someone gets too European?
Anyway, sorry about the detour. The idea "what if life itself is evil" just popped into my head a couple of weeks ago and has been sloshing around in there since, so I just wanted to lay it out and hopefully have someone explain why it has to be wrong.
DrEvil » Tue Nov 29, 2022 8:19 pm wrote:
Yeah, I should have clarified. Not intrinsically evil, that was just my starting point before I came up with all the other nonsense, but bad/evil in the same sense we view cancer or a virus: not good for the host, in this case the universe.
Actually, come to think of it, my starting point wasn't even "what if life is evil", but "what if the pan-psychic universe is evil?" (again, not Satan-evil, just not friendly to us). We tend to assume that if there is some greater being/mind/sentience/consciousness it has to be good and wise and all that stuff. I can't think of a good reason why that should be the default. Why isn't it selfish and indifferent to others and mostly concerned with itself, same as most other life we know of? I know for a fact I'm not going to lose any sleep over a virus or bacteria in my body dying, I might even actively work towards getting rid of it. Why should the universe be any different?
Then again, maybe life is the whole point. I've seen some research looking at whether life is a random accident or an intrinsic emergent property of our universe, and the researchers landed on the latter. Pure speculation of course, since we only have a sample size of one, but intriguing nonetheless. If life is inevitable the place should be teeming with it.
Statistics: Posted by Harvey — Fri Dec 02, 2022 8:31 am
Was the Origin of Life a Fluke? Or Was It Physics?
By Ian O'Neill published August 30, 2017
Understanding the origin of life is arguably one of the most compelling quests for humanity. This quest has inevitably moved beyond the puzzle of life on Earth to whether there's life elsewhere in the universe. Is life on Earth a fluke? Or is life as natural as the universal laws of physics?
Jeremy England, a biophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is trying to answer these profound questions. In 2013, he formulated a hypothesis that physics may spontaneously trigger chemicals to organize themselves in ways that seed "life-like" qualities.
Now, new research by England and a colleague suggests that physics may naturally produce self-replicating chemical reactions, one of the first steps toward creating life from inanimate substances.
This might be interpreted as life originating directly from the fundamental laws of nature, thereby removing luck from the equation. But that would be jumping the gun.
Life had to have come from something; there wasn't always biology. Biology is born from the raw and lifeless chemical components that somehow organized themselves into prebiotic compounds, created the building blocks of life, formed basic microbes and then eventually evolved into the spectacular array of creatures that exist on our planet today. [7 Theories on the Origin of Life]
"Abiogenesis" is when something nonbiological turns into something biological and England thinks thermodynamics might provide the framework that drives life-like behavior in otherwise lifeless chemicals. However, this research doesn't bridge life-like qualities of a physical system with the biological processes themselves, England said.
"I would not say I have done anything to investigate the 'origin of life' per se," England told Live Science. "I think what's interesting to me is the proof of principle – what are the physical requirements for the emergence of life-like behaviors?"
Self-organization in physical systems
When energy is applied to a system, the laws of physics dictate how that energy dissipates. If an external heat source is applied to that system, it will dissipate and reach thermal equilibrium with its surroundings, like a cooling cup of coffee left on a desk. Entropy, or the amount of disorder in the system, will increase as heat dissipates. But some physical systems may be sufficiently out of equilibrium that they "self-organize" to make best use of an external energy source, triggering interesting self-sustaining chemical reactions that prevent the system from reaching thermodynamic equilibrium and thus maintaining an out-of-equilibrium state, England speculates. (It's as if that cup of coffee spontaneously produces a chemical reaction that sustains a hotspot in the center of the fluid, preventing the coffee from cooling to an equilibrium state.) He calls this situation "dissipation-driven adaptation" and this mechanism is what drives life-like qualities in England’s otherwise lifeless physical system.
A key life-like behavior is self-replication, or (from a biological viewpoint) reproduction. This is the basis for all life: It starts simple, replicates, becomes more complex and replicates again. It just so happens that self-replication is also a very efficient way of dissipating heat and increasing entropy in that system.
In a study published July 18 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, England and co-author Jordan Horowitz tested their hypothesis. They carried out computer simulations on a closed system (or a system that doesn't exchange heat or matter with its surroundings) containing a "soup" of 25 chemicals. Although their setup is very simple, a similar type of soup may have pooled on the surface of a primordial and lifeless Earth. If, say, these chemicals are concentrated and heated by an external source – a hydrothermal vent, for example – the pool of chemicals would need to dissipate that heat in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics. Heat must dissipate and the entropy of the system will inevitably increase.
Under certain initial conditions, he found that these chemicals may optimize the energy applied to the system by self-organizing and undergoing intense reactions to self-replicate. The chemicals fine-tuned themselves naturally. These reactions generate heat that obeys the second law of thermodynamics; entropy will always increase in the system and the chemicals would self-organize and exhibit the life-like behavior of self-replication.
"Essentially, the system tries a bunch of things on a small scale, and once one of them starts experiencing positive feedback, it does not take that long for it to take over the character of organization in the system," England told Live Science.
This is a very simple model of what goes on in biology: chemical energy is burned in cells that are – by their nature – out of equilibrium, driving the metabolic processes that maintain life. But, as England admits, there's a big difference between finding life-like qualities in a virtual chemical soup and life itself.
Sara Imari Walker, a theoretical physicist and astrobiologist at Arizona State University who was not involved in the current research, agrees.
"There’s a two-way bridge that needs to be crossed to try to bridge biology and physics; one is to understand how you get life-like qualities from simple physical systems and the other is to understand how physics can give rise to life," Imari Walker told Live Science. "You need to do both to really understand what properties are unique to life and what properties are characteristic of things that you consider to be almost alive […] like a prebiotic system."
Emergence of life beyond Earth?
Before we can even begin to answer the big question of whether these simple physical systems may influence the emergence of life elsewhere in the universe, it would be better to understand where these systems exist on Earth first.
"If, when you say 'life,' you mean stuff that is as stunningly impressive as a bacterium or anything else with polymerases and DNA, my work doesn't yet tell us anything about how easy or difficult it is to make something that complex, so I shouldn't speculate about what we'd be likely to find elsewhere than Earth," England said. (Polymerases are proteins that assemble DNA and RNA.)
This research doesn't specifically identify how biology emerges from nonbiological systems, only that in some complex chemical situations, surprising self-organization occurs. These simulations do not consider other life-like qualities – such as adaptation to environment or reaction to stimuli. Also, this thermodynamics test on a closed system does not consider the role of information reproduction in life's origins, said Michael Lässig, a statistical physicist and quantitative biologist at the University of Cologne in Germany.
"[This] work is indeed a fascinating result on non-equilibrium chemical networks but it is still a long way from a physics explanation of the origins of life, which requires the reproduction of information," Lässig, who was not involved in the research, told Live Science.
There’s a critical role for information in living systems, added Imari Walker. Just because there appears to be natural self-organization exhibited by a soup of chemicals, it doesn't necessarily mean living organization.
"I think there's a lot of intermediate stages that we have to get through to go from simple ordering to having a full-on information processing architecture like a living cell, which requires something like memory and hereditary," said Imari Walker. "We can clearly get order in physics and non-equilibrium systems, but that doesn't necessarily make it life."
To say England's work could be the "smoking gun" for the origin of life is premature, and there are many other hypotheses as to how life may have emerged from nothing, experts said. But it is a fascinating insight into how physical systems may self-organize in nature. Now that researchers have a general idea about how this thermodynamic system behaves, it would be a nice next step to identify sufficiently out-of-equilibrium physical systems that naturally occur on Earth, England said.
Statistics: Posted by DrEvil — Thu Dec 01, 2022 6:29 pm
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/05/11/world/dinosaur-apocalypse-tanis-fossil-site-scn/index.html
A tiny fragment of the asteroid that hit Earth 66 million years ago may have been found encased in amber
-- a discovery NASA has described as "mind-blowing."
By Katie Hunt, CNN [K T Hunt?]
Updated 1225 GMT (2025 HKT) May 11, 2022
It's one of several astounding finds at a unique fossil site in the Hell Creek Formation in North Dakota that has preserved remnants of the cataclysmic moment that ended the dinosaur era -- a turning point in the history of the planet.
The fossils unearthed there include fish that sucked in debris blasted out during the strike, a turtle impaled with a stick and a leg that might have belonged to a dinosaur that witnessed the asteroid strike.
The story of the discoveries is revealed in a new documentary called "Dinosaur Apocalypse," which features naturalist Sir David Attenborough and paleontologist Robert DePalma and airs Wednesday on the PBS show "Nova."
The ultimate bad day
DePalma, a postgraduate researcher at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom and adjunct professor for the Florida Atlantic University's geosciences department, first started working at Tanis, as the fossil site is known, in 2012.
The dusty, exposed plains starkly contrast with what the site would have looked like at the end of the Cretaceous Period. Back then, the American Midwest was a swampy rainforest, and an inland sea that has since disappeared -- known as the Western Interior Seaway -- ran all the way from what's now the Gulf of Mexico to Canada.
Tanis is more than 2,000 miles away from the Chicxulub impact crater left by the asteroid that struck off the coast of Mexico, but initial discoveries made at the site convinced DePalma that it provides rare evidence of what led to the end of the dinosaur era.
The site is home to thousands of well-preserved fish fossils that DePalma believed were buried alive by sediment displaced as a massive body of water unleashed by the asteroid strike moved up the interior seaway. Unlike tsunamis, which can take hours to reach land after an earthquake at sea, these moving water bodies, known as a seiche, surged out instantaneously after the massive asteroid crashed into the sea.
He's certain that the fish died within an hour of the asteroid strike, and not as a result of the massive wildfires or the nuclear winter that came in the days and months that followed. That's because "impact spherules" -- small bits of molten rock thrown up from the crater into space where they crystallized into a glass-like material -- were found lodged in the gills of the fish. Analysis of the fish fossils has also revealed the asteroid hit in spring.
"One piece of evidence after another started stacking up and changing the story. It was a progression of clues like a Sherlock Holmes investigation," DePalma said.
"It gives a moment by moment story of what happens right after impact and you end up getting such a rich resource for scientific investigation."
Many of the latest discoveries revealed in the documentary haven't been been published in scientific journals.
Michael Benton, a professor of vertebrate paleontology at the University of Bristol, who acted as a scientific adviser on the documentary, said while it was a "matter of convention" that new scientific claims should go through peer review before being revealed on television, he and many other paleontologists accepted that the fossil site really does represent the dinosaurs' "last day."
"Some experts have said 'well, it might be the day after or a month before ... but I prefer the simplest explanation, which is that it really does document the day the asteroid hit in Mexico," he said via email.
Cosmic origin
Most of the glassy impact spherules that first revealed the fingerprints of the asteroid impact to DePalma are preserved as clay as a result of geological processes over millions of years. However, DePalma and his collaborators have also found some spherules that landed in tree resin on the surface of a log that fateful day and were preserved in amber.
"In that amber we've located a number of spherules that were basically frozen in time, because, just like an insect in amber which is perfectly preserved, when these spherules entered the amber, water couldn't get to them. They never turned to clay, and they're perfectly preserved," he said.
It's "like getting a sample vial, running back in time and getting a sample from the impact site and then saving it for science," DePalma said.
They were able to locate a number of little unmelted fragments of rock inside the glass spherules. Most of these tiny rock fragments were calcium-rich -- likely from the limestone under the Yucatan Peninsula, DePalma said.
"But two of those were wildly different in composition. You had spikes in chromium and nickel and some other elements that are only common in meteoritic material and those fragments based on our preliminary analysis...are almost certainly of cosmic origin."
DePalma said they hope to be able to confirm what the asteroid was made from and where it might be from -- efforts that have caught the attention of NASA; DePalma presented his findings last month at the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
"This example of what might be a little tiny fragment, maybe micrograms, of the colliding asteroid -- the fact that a record of that is preserved, would be mind-blowing," said Goddard Chief Scientist Jim Garvin, who has studied impact cratering on Earth and Mars.
Research on the amber-entombed spherules hasn't been published in a peer-reviewed journal. During peer review, scientists give rigorous feedback on one another's work to ensure it stands up to scrutiny. DePalma said a peer-reviewed paper on the preliminary findings would be published "in the coming months."
Dinosaur leg
An exceptionally preserved dinosaur leg with skin in tact is another discovery from the Tanis site that features in the documentary, which first aired in the UK in April, and has turned heads in the paleontological world.
Very few fossils from the Cretaceous Period have been found in the uppermost rocks of the geological record, and it's possible the limb -- which belongs to a Thescelosaurus, a small plant-eating dinosaur DePalma and his colleagues discovered -- could have died on the very day the asteroid hit. The preservation of soft tissue such as skin suggests that its body did not have any time to decay before it was buried in sediment.
"The only two supported scenarios here are that it died in the surge or that it died immediately before (the asteroid strike) but so close in time that it really did not have time to decay. This is not something that had died years before and then been reworked. That does not happen with soft tissue like that."
Detailed analysis of the dinosaur's leg bones could shed light on what conditions were like in the lead-up to the impact.
Other cool finds from the site include a fossilized pterosaur egg, the first found in North America. It shows that the eggs of the giant flying reptiles were soft like those of many reptiles today. A fossilized turtle with a wooden stick through its body is evidence that the creature was impaled during the water surge unleashed by the asteroid strike.
The work being done at Tanis not only nails down in jaw-dropping detail what happened the day the asteroid struck, it also provides insight into an event that caused a mass extinction and how that extinction subsequently unfolded. DePalma hopes this will provide a framework to think about the climate crisis today.
"The fossil record gives us a window into the details of a global-scale hazard and the reaction of Earth's biota to that hazard," DePalma said. "It gives us... a crystal ball looking back in time and enables us to apply that to today's ecological and environmental crisis."
"That is both startling, but also a benefit to us. Because by studying this impact event in greater detail, we can be better prepared to care for our world right now."
Statistics: Posted by Harvey — Thu May 12, 2022 6:13 pm
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.211926
Language of fungi derived from their electrical spiking activity
Andrew Adamatzky
Published:06 April 2022https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.211926
Review history
Abstract
Fungi exhibit oscillations of extracellular electrical potential recorded via differential electrodes inserted into a substrate colonized by mycelium or directly into sporocarps. We analysed electrical activity of ghost fungi (Omphalotus nidiformis), Enoki fungi (Flammulina velutipes), split gill fungi (Schizophyllum commune) and caterpillar fungi (Cordyceps militaris). The spiking characteristics are species specific: a spike duration varies from 1 to 21 h and an amplitude from 0.03 to 2.1 mV. We found that spikes are often clustered into trains. Assuming that spikes of electrical activity are used by fungi to communicate and process information in mycelium networks, we group spikes into words and provide a linguistic and information complexity analysis of the fungal spiking activity. We demonstrate that distributions of fungal word lengths match that of human languages. We also construct algorithmic and Liz-Zempel complexity hierarchies of fungal sentences and show that species S. commune generate the most complex sentences.
1. Introduction
Spikes of electrical potential are typically considered to be key attributes of neurons, and neuronal spiking activity is interpreted as a language of a nervous system [1–3]. However, almost all creatures without nervous system produce spikes of electrical potential—Protozoa [4–6], Hydrozoa [7], slime moulds [8,9] and plants [10–12]. Fungi also exhibit trains of action-potential-like spikes, detectable by intracellular and extracellular recordings [13–15]. In experiments with recording of electrical potential of oyster fungi Pleurotus djamor, we discovered two types of spiking activity: high-frequency (period 2.6 min) and low-frequency (period 14 min) [13]. While studying another species of fungus, Ganoderma resinaceum, we found that the most common width of an electrical potential spike is 5–8 min [16]. In both species of fungi, we observed bursts of spiking in the trains of the spike similar to that observed in the central nervous system [17,18]. While the similarity could be just phenomenological, this indicates a possibility that mycelium networks transform information via interaction of spikes and trains of spikes in manner homologous to neurons. First evidence has been obtained that indeed fungi respond to mechanical, chemical and optical stimulation by changing pattern of its electrically activity and, in many cases, modifying characteristics of their spike trains [19,20]. There is also evidence of electrical current participation in the interactions between mycelium and plant roots during formation of mycorrhiza [21]. In [22], we compared complexity measures of the fungal spiking train and sample text in European languages and found that the ‘fungal language’ exceeds the European languages in morphological complexity.
In our venture to decode the language of fungi, we first uncover if all species of fungi exhibit similar characteristics of electrical spiking activity. Then we characterize the proposed language of fungi by distributions of word length and complexity of sentences.
There is an emerging body of studies on language of creatures without a nervous system and invertebrates. Biocommunication in ciliates [23] include intracellular signalling, chemotaxis as expression of communication, signals for vesicle trafficking, hormonal communication and pheromones. Plants communication processes are seen as primarily sign-mediated interactions and not simply an exchange of information [24,25]. Evidences of different kinds of chemical ‘words’ in plants are discussed in [26,27]. Moreover, a modified conception of language of plants is considered to be a pathway towards ‘the de-objectification of plants and the recognition of their subjectivity and inherent worth and dignity’ [28]. A field of the language of insects has been developed by Karl von Frisch and resulted in his Nobel Prize for detection and investigation of bee languages and dialects [29,30]. An issue of the language of ants, and how species hosted by ants can communicate the ants language, was firstly promoted in 1971 [31]. In the early 1980s, analysis of the ants’ language using information theory approaches was proposed [32]. The approach largely succeeded in analysis of ants’ cognitive capacities [33–36].
We recorded and analysed, as detailed in §2, electrical activity of ghost fungi (Omphalotus nidiformis), Enoki fungi (Flammulina velutipes), split gill fungi (Schizophyllum commune) and caterpillar fungi (Cordyceps militaris). The phenomenological characteristic of the spiking behaviour discovered are presented in §3. Linguistic analysis and information and algorithmic complexity estimates of the spiking patterns are given in §4.
Statistics: Posted by Harvey — Fri May 06, 2022 2:39 am