Messages in the Film Gravity??

by Gary Berg-Cross

This weekend I saw the 3D action-thriller movie Gravity. It's filled with visual wonder but I think offers more than that. On the surface it proves an

out there feeling of the vastness of space topic punctuated with the claustrophobic feeling of  living in a space suit.  It is quite grounded in the science of space and the engineering of our efforts there, but I liked as well the implications and the perhaps some implied view of the fragility of the human condition. 

When my head stopped spinning from the  closely observed and etchingly realistic experiences of spinning in space I groked the meaning of the title for the first time. It's Gravity and not Zero Gravity.

Part of the message seemed to me that complex things (see posting on Collapse of Complex Societies) are too heavy and fall down in chain reaction type events – it’s the human condition in the strangeness of what modern tech can place us in. "I hate space" is the simple line as our heroine tries to cope with a spiraling series of oxygen deficits and hasty repairs and systems that break down in chain reaction.

In the movie our space constructs are destroyed by our own debris and it’s a bumpy ride being tethered together and the direction of things is down.  There is some parallel to the film 2001 in some scenes such as getting into a space station while in a space suit, but the neatest relations is a connection to evolution. Indeed we are treated to both evolution and something like a reverse evolution in that we start in the air and fall to ground.  Well actually we fall to the sea and have to emerge onto land again as did our ancestors.  

If the message of 2001 is about transcendence and emergence, this movie has something in the opposite direction. Maybe we need something simpler we can understand (Look the dials are in Chinese so we need our wits and “eenie meenie mo"  chances to survive.) 

But our time is ticking by till the next Meltdown, I mean space-debris shower happens.

 'You have to sip, not gulp,' says the George Clooney character, as you realize you're holding your own breath.'  

Yep, we are all holding are breath watching this movie, but maybe as a passenger of our complex times too.

It's a mix of  complexity, unintended consequences and natural forces like gravity that bring things crashing to earth.  Time perhaps for us to sip and not gulp on the topic of the challenge of modern complexity and multiple levels - in orbit and down on earth.

Talking Space and Time with Yahweh

By Gary Berg-Cross

I noted in an earlier blog on cosmic views that one of the ironies of modern life is to live simultaneously in a rich culture alive with scientific advance while also stewing in a conservative, religious culture denying much of that science and limiting its sights to old visions. 

For example, there was a recent story called “The Oldest Star in the Universe? --A Primeval Dwarf Galaxy Sucked into the Emerging Milky Way") which has an age close to the universe's calculated age of about 13.8 billion years.  

That got me thinking about the contrast of views of the universe that science gives compared to religious view such the Genesis story (well there are really 2 conflicting stories) of the Hebrew Bible. Those storied adopted from Sumerian tales in effect are the cosmic image Yahweh supposedly dictated to humans about the Universe. This is what you need to know. There we have no deep spacer or time which is so awe-inspiring to many of us.  So I thought “What if we might supply some very simple math to see how the Yahweh-religion view compares to the contemporary scientific view?  How much revelation do we get?

Time is a simple way to start. We have all heard of the creation story days of creation. One religious source by Dr. Jason Lisle debunks the most widely accepted teachings about an old universe and summarizes the Biblical view this way:

 

 The Bible teaches that the entire universe was created in six earth-rotation days (Exodus 20:11 ). Furthermore, the Bible provides the age differences between parents and descendants¹ when listing certain genealogies. From these kinds of biblical references, we know that the elapsed time between Adam and the birth of Christ was roughly 4,000 years. From other historical records, we know that Christ was born roughly 2,000 years ago. Since Adam was created on the sixth day of the creation week, we can conclude that the earth, the entire universe, and everything in it were created approximately 6,000 years

OK, so the universe is about 6000 years old, let’s call it 10⁴ ,this is closer to the upper range found in The Bible and Science give very different Ages for the Universe. This contrast with the 1.38 x 10¹⁰  modern science concludes from data, principles  and models. So the portion of the now known universe and the Old Testament version of about one millionth of the time (10^-6).

Space provides an even larger discrepancy.  The old world the Hebrews 

wrote about covered perhaps 10% of the earth’s surface. Let’s be generous and say it applied to 10% of the spatial volume of the earth. A NASA earth fact sheet lists its volume as (1010 km3). So the biblical account, 

throwing the Garden of Eden and such in, would be (109 km3).  

Compare that to the volume of the solar system.

The radius of the Solar System is perhaps a million times that of the earth. This is the point where the Solar Wind (from the Sun) meets the Interstellar Wind. And thanks to Voyager 1 we have that distance to the heliopause. (http://www.solarviews.com/eng/solarsys.h... and see http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/where/ for a measure of where Voyager 1 is right now. 

This gives a volume 4/3 times the cube of 1 million or about 10¹⁸ bigger than earth.  Volumes grow large quite fast with the cube power. We could stop there and say that Yahweh was holding back a bit of info from the ancient Hebrews.  Multiplying space and time we have Yahweh’s biblical coverage as 10^-6 x  10-¹⁸ or about 10^-24th of the solar system.  That is a million, million, million, million times too small. Of course this is still only a small part of the spatial story.  There are star systems to consider. Yahweh held out on much of the beauty of the galaxy.

The volume of the Milky Way is 

estimated at about ~3.3×1061 m3. That’s 1051 bigger than the Earth (and over 1024 of the solar system. 

And we might note in passing that the approximate volume of the 

observable universe (see Orders of Magnitude) is 3.4 ×1080 m3 or

 bigger by a factor of 1030 or so. 

Putting it all together we would have to imagine that our cosmic engineer 

Yahweh who would have designed electrons,quarks and black holes saw

fit to pass on a non-quantum and very local bronze age message covering only 10-100 or so of the potential story.  And here I am leaving out all of 

the great objects and such we might discuss in this volume over time. 

Yahweh left out dinosaurs too along with the simple idea of atomic theory or the quantum realm of the natural order! Just a hint about the speed of 

light or a Plank length would have been so enlightening.

One may go a bit farther considering that we seem to live in an expanding universe (Bang) so the size of the universe or is observable part expands over time, something it would have been nice to know back in 1400 BCE.  Then there is the even more interesting ideas that may be true such as this universe being part of a much larger system, as Brian Greene elucidates in his Hidden Reality. There are many possible universes that modern Physics suggests are possible.  Yahweh might have outlined these, but instead we've had to do it ourselves:

• Quilted Multiverse - Space is infinite, therefore somewhere there are regions of space that will exactly mimic our own region of space. There is another world "out there" somewhere in which everything is unfolding exactly as it unfolds on Earth.
• 
  
• Inflationary Multiverse - Inflationary theory in cosmology predicts an expansive universe filled with "bubble universes," of which our universe is just one.
• 
  
• Brane Multiverse - String theory leaves open the possibility that our universe is on just one 3-dimensional brane, while other branes of other number of dimensions could have whole other universes on them.
• 
  
• Cyclic Multiverse - One possible result from string theory is that branes could collide with each other, resulting in universe-spawningbig bangs that not only created our universe, but possibly other ones.
• 
  
• Landscape Multiverse - String theory leaves open a lot of different fundamental properties of the universe which, combined with the inflationary multiverse, means there could be many bubble universes out there which have fundamentally different physical laws than the universe we inhabit.
• 
  
• Quantum Multiverse - This is essentially the Many Worlds Intepretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics: anything that can happen does ... in some universe.
• 
  
• Holographic Multiverse - According to the holographic principle, there is a physically-equivalent parallel universe that would exist on a distant bounding surface (the edge of the universe), in which everything about our universe is precisely mirrored.
• 
  
• Simulated Multiverse - Technology will possibly advance to the point where computers could simulate each and every detail of the universe, thus creating a simulated multiverse whose reality is nearly as complex as our own.
• 
  
• Ultimate Multiverse - In the most extreme version of looking at parallel universes, every single theory which could possibly exist would have to exist in some form somewhere. (from  a review of The Hidden Reality by  Andrew Zimmerman Jones)

  
  

  
  

  
  
  We think of the Big Bang as creating our universe, but as we have studied the Big Bang in more and more detail, the math is suggesting that the Big Bang may not have been a unique event. There may be many Big Bangs that happened at various and far-flung locations, each creating its own swelling, spatial expanse, each creating a universe -our universe being the result of only one of those Big Bangs....
  
  For instance, in the multiple Big Bang version that gives rise to different universes, it's possible that the different universes, as they expand, could collide with one another, sort of like - think of a bubble bath. Each of the Big Bangs gives rise to one expanding bubble in the cosmic bubble bath. Those bubbles can smash into each other.
  
  
  And if they did, if our universe got hit by another, had a fender-bender with another universe, that would send ripples going through the cosmic microwave background radiation - heat left over from the Big Bang. And astronomers are now looking for patterns in the microwave background radiation that might suggest that we did have that encounter in the past with another universe. That'd be a very direct way of establishing that other universes are out there. From a NPR interview

You can interpret this discrepancy between the Hebrew stories and modern science views many ways, but to it me it provides astonishing odds that the Yahweh story is just that, a local, home grown Middle Eastern creation story. People may admire the Genesis prose, but I’ll take the poetry of the scientific view of the Univserse by a factor or 10100 or so.

Towards Grand Challenges – why not an SH Prize for Secular Humanist Challenges?

There are lots of big challenges out there for society to wrestle with. Some such as in the energy, development and health care are well recognized and indeed fall under the rubric of Grand Challenges with prizes. So far as I know we have none in the secular humanist domain, but perhaps we should.

Calling out "grand challenges" to stimulate progress isn't new. Some old paradoxes like squaring the circle might qualify, but recent challenges have largely been less philosophical and more technical. The British government offered the equivalent of about $12 million in 1714 to solve their Navy’s problem: How could British ships calculate their longitude location which allowed avoid shipwrecks & calculating how far east or west they were from home. Many scientists of the day attacked the problem, but it was solved by a humble, self-taught watchmaker named John Harrison.

The first modern grand challenge was pretty intellectual and introduced over a century ago by mathematician David Hilbert. At a conference in 1900, Hilbert asked a colleague what would be a compelling presentation topic who suggested that he “look into the future and compile a list of problems on which mathematicians should test themselves during the coming century.” Hilbert issued 23 challenges which were grand in mathematical concepts and represented problem which long resisted solution, and whose solution is expected to have some real consequence. The challenge inspired a generation of mathematicians with generally successful results - nearly all of his challenges have now been solved.

The success of Hilbert’s challenge has spawned several grand challenges over the last few years and they cross many disciplines. A modern grand challenges looks at specific critical barrier that, if removed, would help solve an important problem in the world. In October 2004 Space Ship One was the first privately funded spacecraft ever to reach sub-orbit nearly 70 miles above Earth. The Ansari X spaceflight Prize paid out $10 million to the first privately-financed team to fly a spaceship capable of carrying 3 people to 100km twice in 2 weeks. In 2005, "Stanley," a Volkswagen modified by Stanford University students, survived 130 miles of desert driving without a human driver. It was a robot navigating the rough terrain guided by computer programs and sensors. The DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) prize for robotic vehicles paid $2 million in public money.

The success of the X prize for “space exploration” has launched other Prize Groups including a general Exploration, Energy & Environment, Education &
Global Development. These represent movement from single challenge prizes to whole lists of grand challenges. One of them was developed by the National Academy of Engineering in 2008. They framed the problem in a way that I think many secularists would agree with:

“As the population grows and its needs and desires expand, the problem of sustaining civilization’s continuing advancement, while still improving the quality of life, looms more immediate. Old and new threats to personal and public health demand more effective and more readily available treatments. Vulnerabilities to pandemic diseases, terrorist violence, and natural disasters require serious searches for new methods of protection and prevention. And products and processes that enhance the joy of living remain a top priority of engineering innovation, as they have been since the taming of fire and the invention of the wheel.

In each of these broad realms of human concern — sustainability, health, vulnerability, and joy of living — specific grand challenges await engineering solutions.”

http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/cms/8996/9221.aspx

Among the many challenges they list are to manage the nitrogen cycle, provide affordable clean water and reverse engineer the brain. Many efforts have picked up on Grand Challenges that bring focus and energy to defining and addressing environmental and global health issues. Such global problems have supports from large scale donors such as the Gates Foundation which as a special Grand Challenges Initiatives (http://www.grandchallenges.org/Pages/Default.aspx). Among other things this has increased funding for research on diseases that affect the world's poor. One goal is to develop superior diagnostic tools, prevention strategies, and interventions to counter the debilitating impact of these diseases.

Factors that go into making for successful grand challenges has also been studied. McKinsey & Co.’s analysis of the promise of philanthropic prizes improve current prizes and stimulate effective future use by developing a number of simple frameworks and compiling useful lessons for sponsors is detailed in their article “And the winner is..”

http://www.mckinsey.com/app_media/reports/sso/and_the_winner_is.pdf

A summary graphic from their report is shown below:

And now there are even University programs to support such broad work. Princeton University, for example, has a program to train people on global scale problems with scientific, technological and public policy dimensions. One example is energy problems which have a financial dimension but also confronts climate change science, the management of fossil-fuel carbon, the expansion of non-fossil energy sources, and other environmental impacts of the various energy systems. Confronting infectious disease around the globe is another complex challenge that has genetic, interdisciplinary epidemiology and modern medicine dimensions, but also demands community support and environmental action. To master these problems one needs integrating knowledge from a variety of disciplines including biology, engineering, the social sciences, ethics and public policy. See http://www.princeton.edu/grandchallenges/health/

There are many things that I like about the grand challenge prizes. They are highly leveraged and efficient so that $X often sparks contestants into an aggregate $10X or more effort. In some cases it helps spawn a new industry. And it is often not about one technology. It’s more about transforming the way humanity as whole addresses some of our greatest challenges.

I am particularly inspired by some bold efforts in Europe to bring together hundreds of the best scientists for 10 year projects to explore social life on earth and everything it relates to such as financial activity (see FuturICT flagship proposal - http://www.futurict.ethz.ch/FuturICT. Projects like FuturICT flagship hope to “produce historic breakthroughs and provide powerful new ways to manage challenges that make the modern world so difficult to predict.”

Which makes me wonder if we will ever have a Secular Humanist Grand Challenge. Certainly the current efforts on education and environment are things that humanists can support. But might there be a place for a very specific challenge that we could agree would help address our challenges. One thought is to have something like the Humanipedia - The Free Encyclopedia for New Humanists! (http://www.humanipedia.org/) That site seems to be an idea that hasn’t been carried through. It just created a place for organizations that work on “new humanism” to list their websites. I can imagine a more ambitious effort to create a real, online secular encyclopedia like Wikipedia. It might be a great educational tool for community. It does raise the question of who would fund it. Perhaps the right prize might launch it.