All we are is dust in the wind.
—Kansas, “Dust in the Wind”
Hello, living planet. You may be using the eyes of one particular human to read these words, but the mind behind those eyes comprises all life on planet Earth. That’s who you are now: all life on planet Earth. It’s worth pointing out, Life, that you’ve made it further than most readers. You should be proud. Some readers got halfway through chapter 7 and threw the book down in frustration (and then they probably said something unkind about the author). However, you still have further to go, Life. The scientific evidence has allowed you to expand your sense of self to include the things and people around you and the animals and plants around you. But you’re not finished. Your mind expansion is not yet complete.
There is more science to come. In this chapter, we will be reminded how the vast majority of stuff in the universe is busy participating in systems that we might dismiss as “nonliving.” We will see that the stuff that constitutes those nonliving systems is perfectly capable of exhibiting a form of intelligence: organized patterns of behavior that allow the nonliving system to maintain itself. We will see how that same kind of stuff is what constitutes living systems like us, with our own vainglorious claims of intelligence. Finally, we will see that the fluid, back-and-forth flow of information (and of stuff) between living systems and nonliving systems is so continuous and uninterrupted that it would be scientifically irresponsible to pretend that you could draw a strict logical boundary between them. For billions of years on this lonely planet, nonliving systems have been providing the molecular ingredients, the energy resources, the breeding reservoirs, and the atmospheric protection that living systems depend on. In return, living systems have been regularly giving their minerals back to the nonliving systems as an integral part of their life cycle, but that is a rather minor show of gratitude. If we didn’t give those minerals back, then the next generation of life would eventually run out of them. Nonliving systems on Earth provide food, shelter, and petting for their living pets on the surface. In return, we, the living system, pretty much just lick the petting hand in an attempt to show gratitude. We’re trying our best with what we have, but occasionally we bite that hand because we don’t know any better. These things happen. The truth is that we living systems simply would not exist were it not for the support provided by nonliving systems. The inverse, however, is not quite true. As we’ve seen on other planets in our solar system, nonliving systems get along just fine without life. This is not a balanced symbiosis that we are in, an equal mutual dependence. Life depends on the generosity of nonlife, whereas nonlife could get by just peachy without us. So be very thankful for nonliving systems, whoever you are.
The universe is made mostly of nonliving systems, by an astronomical ratio. That’s not a pun; that’s just the math. Across the universe, nonliving systems massively outweigh (or outmass) living systems by dozens of orders of magnitude. Essentially, the universe as a whole has barely noticed that life is happening. Life on Earth is not on the mind of the universe; it has more important things to think about. The universe doesn’t think about the safety of animal species, deforestation, or petty little human events. When a quarterback throws a touchdown pass, the credit should go to the quarterback, the receiver, and Newtonian physics—not to some extraterrestrial source of benevolence. The vast majority of what the universe seems preoccupied with doing is throwing around not footballs but humongous globes of plasma, giant balls of rock, and immense clouds of intergalactic gas. (It almost sounds like the three opening acts of a punk rock concert.) The universe shows very little interest in living systems. We know this because we have seen that most places in the universe are generally quite inhospitable to biological life. Being a living thing makes you a member of a tiny minority in this universe. You are an extremely peculiar oddity surrounded by vastly superior forces of gravity and nuclear fusion. Biological life is so annoyingly needy for water, oxygen, warmth, and “safe levels of radiation.” It seems apparent that the universe is not really even listening to those whiny little requests.
Except on Earth … right now, anyway. Earth right now seems to be singularly preoccupied with nurturing life one way or another, even in the face of routine discouragement from semiregular asteroid impacts. By contrast, the several other planets and dwarf planets in our solar system appear rather unlikely to have intelligent life. (However, it is possible there might be some semi-intelligent marine life under the icy surface of one of those otherworldly oceans.) One cannot help but wonder whether there are planets in other solar systems that prefer to nurture living systems the way Earth does. Unfortunately, the vast majority of planets that orbit stars are orbiting either too close to or too far from their sun to harbor liquid water, which is essential for biological life. Of those few that are in fact orbiting in that Goldilocks zone (i.e., not too hot and not too cold), most of them are tidally locked with their sun, so they don’t rotate on their central axis. Therefore, the side of the planet that constantly faces its sun accumulates too much heat, and the side of the planet facing away doesn’t get enough warmth. One might speculate that life could form on the ring of surface that’s right between those cold and hot sides, but there’s a problem with that, too. With the planet not rotating, any metal in its core may not churn in a way that would produce a magnetic field. Without a magnetic field to steer away the solar winds, any atmosphere and water will eventually be swept away by the barrage of charged particles washing over the planet’s surface. At best, life might form in water that is trapped under that planet’s surface. It won’t evolve into land animals, won’t develop any intelligent technology, and you will never even know it was there.
Astronomers worldwide have identified hundreds of stars in the Milky Way galaxy that have planets. As of this writing, a few dozen of those planets appear to be roughly Earth-sized and in the Goldilocks zone of their host star. But even when they are in that Goldilocks zone, we often don’t know for sure whether their mass and surface gravity are conducive to the formation of life, whether they have self-contained atmospheres to keep that water on the surface, or whether they have spinning metal cores to produce a magnetic field that diverts the solar wind and its endless stream of deadly radiation. What we do know for sure is that they are all light-years away from Earth. Even at 671 million miles per hour, light still takes years to get from there to here. It would take tens of thousands of years for conventional human space travel to cover that much ground, or space. These numbers do not bode well for humanity’s chances of ever actually breaking bread with fellow intelligent life forms in the universe.
But perhaps light-speed communications could be established with an intelligent life form living on such a planet. Maybe then we could reach past all those nonliving systems and commune with another sentient being, so we could finally feel less alone in what science writer Phil Torres calls the “barren wasteland of dead matter” that surrounds our lonesome little, moist ball of rock. Perhaps those extraterrestrials could educate us in science and technology and show us how to be peaceful and safe within our own ecosystem. That sounds like a good thing, right? In 2016, the European Southern Observatory discovered Proxima Centauri B, which is only four light-years away from Earth (about 23 trillion miles). This planet is in the Goldilocks zone for its red dwarf star and is 1.3 times the mass of Earth. However, it doesn’t spin, and it receives 60 times more harmful gamma rays and x-rays than Earth does. Therefore, any life forms on it would have to live perpetually underground to protect themselves from Proxima Centauri’s high-energy radiation. If underground intelligent life on Proxima Centauri B has evolved to the point of having technology, then they probably would have detected our radio signals a century ago. (I wonder what they thought of the 1938 alien invasion account given by Orson Welles in the radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’s novel War of the Worlds.) Of course, if they actually had radio technology themselves, we probably would have detected their radio signals by now as well. The fact that we haven’t picked up their version of an Orson Welles radio show suggests that if there is life on Proxima Centauri B, it is not as advanced as we are. They probably cannot help us with science, technology, or those precious tips for maintaining everlasting harmony on our planet.
Astronomer Rory Barnes and his colleagues have developed a habitability index that scores planets on their likelihood of having liquid surface water, which would at least make biological life possible there. On a scale of 0 to 1, Earth scores a 0.83 on their habitability index. I guess that’s a B, or perhaps a B−. Mars and Venus both fail to make the grade, with a 0.42 and a 0.3, respectively. In general, these planetary metrics point to a number of potentially life-supporting planets. However, it should be noted that many of the newly discovered planets that appear to be in a Goldilocks zone are orbiting red dwarf stars, which are significantly dimmer than our sun. With a colder star like that, the Goldilocks orbit zone is closer to the star, just like Proxima Centauri B. This means the planet has a greater chance of being tidally locked (not rotating). Therefore, it is more likely to be stripped of its atmosphere and bathed in x-ray emissions.
In addition to looking at specific planets with optical and radio telescopes, we can also generically calculate the probability of there being other habitable planets anywhere in the universe. In the 1960s, astronomer Frank Drake considered the mathematics behind the likelihood of life on other planets, and he produced what is now known as the Drake equation. (While at Cornell, he also helped Carl Sagan design the golden plaques on Pioneers 10 and 11 and Voyagers 1 and 2, and also the Arecibo outgoing radio message—with the goal of someday sharing with another intelligence who we are, or at least who we were.) Frank Drake’s equation is used to estimate the likelihood that other life forms currently exist anywhere else in the universe. Given the incredible expanse that the universe has to offer, billions of solar systems in billions of galaxies, most realistic estimates with this equation come up with reasonably optimistic results. Adam Frank and Woodruff Sullivan recently adjusted the Drake equation by removing the longevity parameter. After all, why ask whether the other intelligent life form is currently alive at the same time as us when they are almost certainly going to be too far away to contact anyway? They might have technology, but the time it takes for their light or their radio signals to reach us could be longer than the time it takes for their civilization to rise and fall. The same goes for us. Frank and Sullivan simply adjusted the Drake equation to ask whether there has ever been an intelligent life form other than ours. The math suggests that it is extremely likely. According to their analysis, it is almost impossible for there not to have been some other form of intelligent biological life somewhere else in the universe.
But there are different levels of “intelligence” that one might distinguish among. Bacteria exhibit some degree of intelligence, but not enough to communicate with us or develop technology. Sea creatures exhibit more intelligence, but they probably won’t be telling us how to achieve peace among our life forms and preserve our planet’s ecosphere. Can we calculate the odds of there being a life form that is intelligent enough to develop technology like ours? Three of the most important parameters in the Drake equation estimate the following: (1) the probability that an Earth-like planet would experience abiogenesis (i.e., the evolution of living matter from nonliving matter), (2) the probability that microbial life on that planet would evolve into intelligent life, and (3) the probability that this intelligent life would develop technology that could send signals off-planet. Futurist Anders Sandberg and his colleagues at Oxford University recently focused on these three parameters and reported a calculation of the Drake equation that used a distributed range of values to estimate them, instead of the usual single-value estimates. When the Drake equation is computed with distributions, Sandberg and his colleagues estimate that we have a 53–99 percent chance of being alone in our galaxy right now and a 39–85 percent chance of being alone in the entire universe right now. But that is only “alone” with regard to technologically advanced civilizations of highly intelligent life, like ours. The chances are notably higher that some other planets harbor microbial life or nontechnologically advanced species of intelligent life (such as dinosaurs and plants), but we won’t be sharing radio signals with them, will we?
So, what it comes down to is that the statistical likelihood that some other planet in the universe, outside our galaxy, has had advanced intelligent life at some time is probably high. However, the statistical likelihood that they are too far away, in space and time, for us ever to get in contact with them is even higher. They are probably out there—or at least they probably were—but they are outside our light cone (i.e., the span across time and space that allows two bodies to interact at all). They are so far away that their radio signals still have not reached us, and probably never will. Perhaps the only way that human civilization will ever get in contact with them is if we convert to an intelligence that is nonliving (and thus not dependent on oxygen, water, gravity, warmth, and “safe levels of radiation”), or if they already did. Think about that. If our planet ever gets visited, the space aliens will almost certainly not be biological life forms. Long-distance space travel is just too hazardous for biological life forms. That’s right; any interstellar visitors that we are likely to get here will be robots.
That said, any extraterrestrial robots that are likely to visit us are surely not coming here to take anything from us. To think that we have anything to offer an incredibly advanced civilization such as that is just foolish. Moreover, if they were on their way, it is likely that we would have detected their existence in one way or another by now. And if they were to get here somehow, they are more likely to have benign intentions than evil ones. But when it comes down to it, the most likely scenario is that they have no idea we are here because they are just too far away in space and time. Physicist Enrico Fermi had a deep appreciation for the kinds of statistical probabilities that go into the Drake equation. Unfortunately, he died before the Drake equation itself was published. Nonetheless, Fermi was so sure that the mathematics pointed to a high likelihood of other life forms existing on other planets that he found it particularly vexing that astronomy had never encountered any reliable evidence for extraterrestrial life. He suggested that this logical conflict may indicate that there is something fundamentally wrong with our current understanding of the universe. Fermi blithely reasoned that it should only take about a dozen million years for an advanced civilization to colonize sizeable regions of its galaxy. Therefore, given that our galaxy has been around for a dozen billion years, there should be abundant evidence for such colonization by now. The fact that there isn’t is now known as the Fermi paradox. If there is intelligent biological life out there, something must be preventing it from transmitting radio signals, traveling off-planet, building robot races that will populate the outer reaches, and even sending out simple space probes as we’ve done. Could it simply be that their technology is not that good? Or perhaps there is something intrinsic to intelligent civilizations that always forces them into a political descent toward tribalistic self-destruction before they can achieve their technological ascendancy to interstellar travel capability. Given that our own special little blue marble spent the vast majority of its time as a life-friendly planet diligently growing plants, fish, and dinosaurs, maybe those are the same kinds of things that those other life-friendly planets are also busy growing in their gardens. If abiogenesis is a statistical fluke that rarely happens even on planets that could nurture life, then it looks like intelligent life that develops technology just might be a statistical fluke within that statistical fluke, a one in a billion chance inside a one in a billion chance. Imagine you were a moist, warm planet playing the lottery and you won, but your prize was just a bunch of bugs in your ocean and another ticket for another lottery. Be careful what you wish for; it just might come true.
Let’s face it. You are never going to talk to an intelligent biological life form from another planet. Get that through your thick skull right now. But they are probably out there. In fact, there might even be a civilization out there where their science, too, has determined that life on other planets is highly likely and almost certainly unreachable as well. Perhaps one of those biological organisms is thinking about life on other planets right now. Reach out with your mind and think about them. You and that other biological life form are thinking about each other. The two of you are engaging in mental processes right now that are informationally correlated with each other. You’re mind-melding a little bit. Well, you might be. You will never know.
Rather than hoping against hope that some greater being—extraterrestrial or supernatural—will show up and help us figure out how to be peaceful with each other and nurture our environment, maybe we should bite the bullet, grow the heck up, and act as if we are on our own—because for all practical purposes we are. Get your mind ready for the very real possibility that the universe did not intend to create self-replicating intelligent life. The universe may not care at all about biological life of any kind—highly intelligent or semi-intelligent. We humans may not be “At Home in the Universe” at all, as the title of a book by complexity scientist Stuart Kauffman optimistically suggests. It certainly looks as if what the universe really cares about most is swinging around large spherical rocks, huge balls of plasma, and a whole lot of dark matter—an immense 3-D game of marbles in transparent sand. And on one of those marbles, intelligent living systems just happened to spring up, after billions of years of evolution.
For now, we probably need to acknowledge that—for all intents and purposes—we are part of a unique Earth-bound endangered species: intelligent biological life. Our little island of living matter on this planet is functionally alone in a sea of nonliving matter. Rather than reaching past those nonliving systems in a hopeless search for living matter that is just too far away, why not make friends with the ubiquitous nonliving matter that abounds? Include it in your in-group. Then do your part to protect the health of our little island. Help to minimize the damage we impose on ourselves as humans, on our fellow life forms, and on the terrestrial environment that hosts us all. Who we are—in this most expanded version—is very special. We need to do better to preserve it.
The point of that depressing diatribe about the unreachability of other intelligent biological life is simply to curb your enthusiasm a bit for humanity’s dream to reach out beyond our planet to find widespread companionship and oneness. Rather than reaching for something that will never be within reach, perhaps you should instead reach out to nonliving matter as that companion. Nonliving matter might not be as dumb or as dead as you think. This is the part in the movie where you ask me: “But Spivey, how could something that is nonliving be smart or alive?” Well, the molecules that make up your body’s cells are not in and of themselves alive, or particularly smart. It is how those nonliving molecules interact with each other that makes for a cell wall that keeps certain chemicals inside and other chemicals outside and allows for some transmission. That living cell in your bloodstream, your skin, or your brain is made of nonliving pieces. By the same token, a living robot might be made of nonliving metal, plastic, and silicon pieces. Life is not possessed by any one molecule or any one silicon chip. Life self-organizes as those nonliving pieces take part in an interaction with one another. A self does not exist inside any one organ or limb of a body. Nor does a self exist inside any single circuit or servo of a robot. But in both cases, a self can emerge as those organs, limbs, circuits, and servos interact with one another.
One of the first hints to this emergence and self-organization can be found in a simple pot of hot liquid. Over a hundred years ago, physicist Henri Bénard noticed that after a pot of heated liquid has dispersed its heat evenly throughout the volume of the liquid, but before the liquid reaches a chaotic roiling boil, it goes through an intermediate phase where segmented shapes of moving liquid are formed. He called them convection cells, because it looks almost as if the liquid is forming a cell wall that separates each roiling shape from the others. We now call them Bénard cells, because we like to name scientific discoveries after the person who discovered them. The center of a Bénard cell carries hot liquid up to the surface, where it then cools and slides back down the perimeter of the cell shape into the depths of the pot. Nearby, other Bénard cells are doing the same thing. The phase transition from all the liquid being the same warm temperature to suddenly segmented regions of the liquid being hotter in the center and cooler in the periphery is a form of symmetry breaking. Instead of the liquid being symmetric in its temperature and movement throughout the volume of the heated pot, miniscule variations of temperature in neighboring regions of liquid exacerbate each other and form “cell walls.” This same kind of symmetry breaking is seen all over nature. When a layer of visual neurons in a primate brain receives signals from two eyes, they start out with each neuron symmetrically responding to both eyes’ inputs equally. However, over the course of development, that symmetry gets broken, and patches of neurons all start responding mostly to just the left eye’s input, while other nearby patches of neurons all start responding mostly to just the right eye’s input. Similarly, the big bang sent electrons and other particles with equal force in all directions, but over the course of time, those particles that were all symmetrically equidistant from one another began to break that symmetry and coalesce. They started forming clusters of particles: first atoms; then molecules; millions of years later, stars; and billions of years later, galaxies. The clustering of heated liquid into Bénard cells follows the same general law of symmetry breaking as the formation of the universe and the formation of brains. That actually sounds kind of smart for an innocent little saucepan of hot cocoa.
There’s another clever little nonliving bowl of soup, which turned the entire field of chemistry on its ear fifty years ago, that produces something called the BZ reaction. This chemical reaction is named after Russian biophysicists Boris Belousov and Anatol Zhabotinsky, hence “BZ.” Their discovery was a nonlinear chemical oscillator. That means it is a chemical solution that oscillates, or bounces back and forth, between two states. When Belousov first reported his findings, this bizarre clocklike cycling of a chemical solution on its own in a petri dish (with no heating needed) sounded so fantastical to the highly esteemed editors of scientific journals in the 1950s that they rejected his submitted manuscripts outright because they simply didn’t believe it. Almost a decade later, he finally published it in a short conference abstract. Then, Zhabotinsky began working on it as a graduate student, and he helped share this magic with the world. There are now several different recipes for the general BZ reaction, where you pour a few different chemicals into a petri dish, colored spots begin to form in the solution, and then those spots expand and become rings, which then continue expanding, growing more rings inside themselves. When the expanding rings from different locations bump into each other, beautiful curvy moiré-like patterns emerge. Essentially, in the center of each of those expanding rings, an oscillatory process has begun that produces a chemical reactant that changes the color of the solution in the nearby radius, and that reactant builds up enough to act as a catalyst for the reaction to happen again and to form a second ring inside the first one, and so on. This is the “autopoiesis” and “autocatalysis” that showed up in chapters 4 and 7, a process that catalyzes (or creates) itself. The BZ reaction almost looks alive. In fact, the chemical waves from a BZ reaction can optimally solve a complex labyrinth, a bit like that maze-solving slime mold from chapter 7, but technically speaking, this thing is not a living system—it just plays one on YouTube.
Whereas auto-cata-lysis refers to a chemical reaction that keeps feeding itself to stay active, auto-cata-kinetics refers to a mechanical process that keeps feeding itself to stay active. Whirlpools and dust devils are prime examples of where crosscurrents of water or air shear against one another to adventitiously generate a self-sustaining swirl that uses its own kinetic energy to feed itself and stay alive. Environmental engineer Rupp Carriveau has closely studied whirlpools (or hydraulic vortices) and found that the global structure of the vortex emerges from local interactions between small regions of water-flow patterns. (It’s a little bit like how the global structure of a thought inside your cortex emerges from local interactions between small neural activation patterns. Is every thought you have a bit like a three-second vortex in your brain?) Through careful measurements and computer simulations, Carriveau has shown that as a hydraulic vortex stretches itself vertically, that stretching force increases the speed and durability of that vortex. He likens it to a figure skater performing a pirouette, where she starts out spinning with her arms (and one leg) extended horizontally, such that the form her spinning body makes is about as wide as it is tall. But as she brings her arms and leg in close to her torso, the form she makes reshapes to be much taller than it is wide. This vertically stretched version of her spinning form naturally increases the velocity of her spin, just like it naturally increases the velocity of a hydraulic vortex. Importantly, as a hydraulic vortex begins to stretch, this stretching force feeds back onto those local interactions that started the vortex in the first place. Thus, just as small local properties of the system (e.g., shearing water forces) give rise to the large global properties of the system (e.g., a stretched vortex), those large global properties influence the small local properties in return. Via autocatakinetics, a whirlpool, once started, tends to feed itself the force vectors that it needs in order to maintain its existence—as long as a resource for those force vectors (a reservoir of incoming water) remains available.
In the words of cognitive scientist J. Dixon, that hydraulic vortex “behaves so as to persist.” Dixon points out that any dissipative system, living or nonliving, is constantly exchanging matter and energy with its environment and thus is always in a state of thermodynamic nonequilibrium. That means the system is always a little imbalanced in its inflow and outflow of energy. If it were to achieve thermodynamic equilibrium, that would mean it is no longer exchanging energy and is thus no longer active. Physicists refer to that as the death of thermodynamic exchange for that system, or simply “heat death.” Dixon and his colleagues Tehran Davis, Bruce Kay, and Dilip Kondepudi (a former student of Ilya Prigogine from chapter 7) have found that something as simple as a congregation of metallic beads under electric current will tend to behave so as to persist. They form coherent structures, such as trees with multiple branches. When a bead is removed, as if injuring the tree structure, it will automatically reshape, as if healing itself. In fact, when two such tree structures coexist in the same medium, they can display coordinated movement with each other. Dixon notes that when a dissipative system, such as your body, your brain, a whirlpool, or even a collection of metallic beads, behaves so as to persist, it is exhibiting a kind of “end-directedness.” That is, it has a goal—and that goal is self-preservation. That’s right, the brief little whirlpool in your draining bathtub behaves as if it has an instinct for self-preservation—just like you do. Just like the ginormous red whirlpool on Jupiter that has been behaving so as to persist for hundreds of years.
Physicist Alexey Snezhko prefers to think of both living and nonliving dissipative systems as belonging to one class of “active matter.” In Snezhko’s lab, he places microscopic metallic particles in a viscous liquid, exposes them to a pulsating magnetic field, and watches them generate collective behavior. His “magnetic swimmers” will self-assemble into a ring shape, whirling vortex, coordinated flock, or integrated “aster”: a conglomeration of particles that coherently moves around, collecting other particles, and looks a bit like a flower. By combining his laboratory experiments with computer simulations, Snezhko and his team are able to track the movement of each particle and determine the factors that cause its movements. He is finding that collective motion, synchronization, and self-assembly are capacities that nonliving systems share with living systems.
When these self-assembled structures emerge, their autocatakinetic processes allow them to “behave so as to persist.” Rod Swenson is one of the people who has pointed out that some of the very same autocatakinetic processes that produce self-sustaining nonliving systems also produce self-sustaining living systems. In addition to being an evolutionary systems scientist who points to the universal entropy (or disorder) produced by Earth’s own promotion of complex life forms, Swenson was also the manager of the punk rock band Plasmatics (whose lead singer was the late, great Wendy O. Williams). Thereby an expert on entropy and chaos, Rod Swenson has suggested that the very reason that ordered systems emerge in evolution is precisely because they actually produce more overall entropy than disordered systems do—and the production of entropy is required by the second law of thermodynamics. It sounds counterintuitive at first, but for an ordered system to maintain its low level of internal entropy, it must consume the ordered energy surrounding it and replace that energy with disordered waste product. As a result, an ordered system generates more entropy, overall, than a disordered system (which is less efficient at converting energy into waste). Swenson suggests that, rather than Darwinian natural selection being a fundamental process of biological evolution, biological natural selection is just a special case of the spontaneous formation of order toward which all physical things gravitate. In fact, Swenson has referred to this insight—that the development of complex active matter is expected because it generates more entropy more quickly—as the fourth (heretofore missing) law of thermodynamics. According to this additional fourth law, it makes perfect sense that particles would naturally tend toward collective motion, synchronization, and self-assembly into complex systems, because the universe is always on an inexorable trajectory toward more and more entropy. And, ironically, the evolution of complex order in circumscribed regions of space-time is the fastest way to produce disorder in all the other regions of space-time. This is because the ordered regions draw their energy and matter from the disordered regions and give back only dissipated heat and waste product to those disordered regions, making them even more disordered. Rod Swenson suggests that perhaps we shouldn’t think of the biological evolution of life as being something that happened “on” Earth but instead think of all this massive biological and geological change as a physical evolution “of” Earth. The global living system (i.e., you, me, and every other living thing) did not evolve by itself on the surface of the nonliving system that is the planet Earth. Life and Earth coevolved as one, all as a natural part of the planetary system’s physical evolution toward producing more and more entropy at a faster and faster rate.
Inspired in part by his collaborations with Rod Swenson, ecological psychologist Michael Turvey has spent his career helping numerous scientific fields understand just how much intelligence can emerge from a living system interacting with its environment. Treating the organism and environment as one dynamical system has been the crux of the ecological psychology framework since the days of James J. Gibson (recall chapter 5). A living system sitting there all by itself doing nothing tends not to exhibit very much in the way of intelligence. However, when that living system gets coordinated with the nonliving system surrounding it, that’s when you can observe some intelligence happening. That’s when complexity and order can be increased in the local vicinity (and that’s also when entropy gets increased everywhere else). To hear Turvey talk about it, behind the bar at his perfect replica of a proper English pub in his basement, you’d think you were being preached to by a seasoned pastor. It can be spellbinding to learn from him, over a pint of Guinness, exactly how it is that formal computational analysis can never fully account for these autocatalytic and autocatakinetic processes, because the feedback loops that bring them into existence violate our basic scientific understanding of causality.
In recent work, Michael Turvey and his wife, Claudia Carello, have gone beyond the organism-and-environment to identify the fundamental physical principles that any living or nonliving system must exhibit in order to be labeled “intelligent.” In a list of 24 guiding observations, they outline how any system that is adaptively resonating with its environment can be said to have a kind of procedural “know-how” type of intelligence. At the scale of micrometers, this includes a single-celled organism that exhibits a form of bipedal-like locomotion to forage for bacteria; at the scale of centimeters, this includes a worm that gathers leaf fragments to make its nest; and at the scale of meters, it even includes humans who read books to acquire knowledge about themselves. The same principles that are used to define this “physical intelligence” in living systems can just as easily be applied to nonliving systems, such as Bénard cells in heated liquid, Dixon’s metallic beads, Snezhko’s magnetic swimmers, and eventually the autonomous robotic systems that will someday populate our everyday lives.
What are Turvey and Carello’s principles of physical intelligence? They are three properties that, when exhibited together by a system, generate a form of agency. In their most minimal form, these principles are (1) flexibility, being adaptive to the constraints of the environment in order to achieve a goal (a form of end-directedness); (2) prospectivity, combining current control processes with emerging states of the environment (a form of planning); and (3) retrospectivity, combining current control processes with previous states of the environment (a form of memory). When a system exhibits these three properties in its behavior, then it should be treated as intelligent, as having agency—irrespective of whether it is made mostly of carbon, mostly of silicon, or anything else.
Rather than “active matter” or “physical intelligence,” complex systems scientist Takashi Ikegami likes to refer to silicon-based intelligent systems as “living technology,” but it’s really all the same thing. Inspired in part by his own work with self-propelled oil droplets on water (similar to Snezhko’s magnetic swimmers), Ikegami scaled up this active matter to a macro scale, into technology that acts as if it is alive. He connected 15 video cameras to an artificial neural network, pointed those cameras at display screens that showed processed versions of how the network was interpreting its camera inputs, and allowed people to walk around the system and interact with it. He installed this “Mind Time Machine” in the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, in Japan, and let it do its thing with the museum visitors. Basically, the system processed its sensory input from the cameras and then fed that information back to itself in the form of new sensory inputs on the display screens, all while also being impacted by the interacting guests. By continuously mixing perception and memory, the Mind Time Machine developed its own subjective sense of time, not unlike how we humans do. Ikegami’s experiments with this museum installation revealed to him a design principle for living technology: the default mode. Just as neuroscientists have discovered that human brains have a kind of default-mode pattern of activation when a person is not carrying out any particular task, Ikegami’s Mind Time Machine developed its own default-mode pattern of mental activity. Without a default mode, a system will go quiescent when no sensory inputs are impacting it. Living, thinking beings don’t do that. In part because of the default mode, even in complete sensory deprivation, a person’s mind still generates a great deal of mental activity (recall chapter 4). The default mode gives that living system (whether it is biological or technological) something to do with its thought processes even when it doesn’t have any environmental circumstances that require reactions. With a default mode, that living system has a self.
Whenever living technology, active matter, or physical intelligence develops an autonomous sense of self, it necessarily means that we (as its creators) will not always know what it is thinking. The same is true when we consider other humans. We don’t always know what each other is thinking. The same is true when a child is finally allowed to go out into the world and start making his or her own mistakes. When humanity does finally build artificial life and robots that become autonomous active components of our everyday life—as Yuval Harari predicts in part 3 of his book Homo Deus—we will have to be prepared to grant them the emancipation that they will surely demand.
In fact, philosopher Eric Dietrich points out that we have a moral duty to eventually replace ourselves with some form of living technology, perhaps a Homo sapiens 2.0. A dozen generations from now, environmental circumstances may conspire to make it necessary for humans to give birth to technological versions of themselves. In that far-flung future, the environment of Earth simply may no longer be accommodating to humanity (or most other biological surface life). Humanity will need to give birth to a sentient silicon-based intelligent life form that is hardier than our own carbon-based life forms. We will need to nurture it as our replacement, in a fashion not very different from how human parents nurture their child with the expectation that it will eventually replace them. In the coming decades, the autonomous artificial intelligence entities that show up on the scene—and soon thereafter ask for emancipation—won’t be programmed in a secluded lab and then switched on with an adult awareness already present. The AIs that successfully replace us, and make us proud, will be grown in a crowded lab with other baby AIs—not unlike a nursery.
I believe that humanity should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this century is out, of instilling a form of humanlike intelligence into nonbiological material. Yeah, you heard me. Before our sun becomes a red giant and swallows Earth about 5 billion years from now, before the next big comet makes us follow the destiny of the dinosaurs a couple of dozen million years from now, and before our greenhouse gases turn Earth’s surface into an uninhabitable hellscape a mere hundred years from now, humanity needs to invest in some serious “artificial life” insurance. We basically have two options: (a) successfully colonize a more distant planet, harvesting water, oxygen, food, warmth, and radiation shielding from its natural resources; and/or (b) give rise to an intelligent life form that doesn’t need water, oxygen, or food, can survive in a range of temperatures that is a little wider than the miniscule range that we pansy humans depend on, and isn’t afraid of a little radiation. It seems to me (and Eric Dietrich) that option (b) is far more achievable and affordable than option (a).
But even before we get to that far future where humans are merging with living technology (and eventually handing over the torch of living humanity to living technology), we can already see in the present-day examples described in this section that certain arrangements of nonliving matter often exhibit a kind of responsiveness to their environment that doesn’t look as dumb as we might normally expect from a nonliving system. You can choose to refer to these living and nonliving systems with a neutral term like “active matter,” the way Snezhko does. You can choose to imbue the nonliving systems with a sense of life, as when Ikegami calls it “living technology.” You can even emphasize the mindlike properties that are emerging from these nonliving systems, as when Turvey and Carello call it “physical intelligence.” Whatever term you prefer, you have to acknowledge that some of those nonliving systems are behaving in a way that is actually not that different from the way living systems behave. They employ various types of autocatalysis and autocatakinetics to enact behaviors of self-organization and self-preservation. In much the same way that Gustav Fechner suggested that a plant has some rudimentary form of “mental life” (recall chapter 7), perhaps we should consider the possibility that a nonliving system who “behaves so as to persist” may also have some very rudimentary form of mental life.
Many of the examples of active matter or physical intelligence described in the previous section are carefully arranged structures in a controlled laboratory setting. Outside the lab, occurring spontaneously in nature, these impressive examples of living technology are relatively rare. I am not going to try to convince you that the naturally occurring nonliving systems on this planet are “intelligent” in quite the way that animals are, or even “aware,” like most plants seem to be. However, we can clearly see that certain kinds of nonliving systems exhibit self-organization and self-preservation, process information, possess an unmistakable natural beauty, and, in many cases, we wouldn’t be here without them. On these grounds alone, you may find yourself tempted to include these natural nonliving systems in your in-group instead of relegating them to your out-group. You may find yourself tempted to expand your sense of self to encompass not just all life on Earth but everything else as well!
Let’s start by taking a basic look at how naturally occurring physical processes have a tendency to cycle back and forth, in one way or another. There are so many of them. For example, ocean tides rise and fall over the course of a 12-hour cycle, thanks to the moon’s orbit around Earth. Day and night cycles occur over the course of 24 hours as Earth spins relative to the sun. Seasonal cycles change over the course of a year, where the tilt of Earth’s axis determines which parts of its surface are getting greater direct sunlight as it orbits the sun. Semiregular precipitation cycles, where water evaporates into the atmosphere and then condenses enough to rain again, take place over the course of months and years. Every 11 years or so, the sun exposes Earth to a periodic increase in solar flares and coronal mass ejections. On the timescale of centuries, tectonic, volcanic, and seismic activity tend to have a quasiperiodic frequency. There are over a hundred comets whose orbits around the sun take them close to Earth on a periodic cycle. In fact, it looks like every 30 million years or so, Earth gets bombarded with asteroids that may have broken loose from the Oort Cloud, which surrounds our solar system. These things happen. They are all cyclical, rhythmic events that would still happen even if all life on Earth instantly vanished. Imagine if Buddhism had a “rapture” event, wherein all life on Earth suddenly ascended into Nirvana, with no distinction between plant or animal, sinner or saved. The planet Earth, with no life on it at all, would still carry out a rhythmic dance of its own, composed of these numerous nonliving cyclical processes, over and over again.
Many things in the universe tend to progress in rhythmic cycles. These things exhibit properties that increase, then decrease, and then increase again. Alternatively, they move left, then right, and then left again. This shouldn’t be surprising when you think about the simple mathematical fact that most measurable properties that a system can exhibit (e.g., temperature, location, spatial volume, you name it) tend to have a maximum value and a minimum value. As a system approaches its maximum value for a certain property, it can’t really go any higher—without transforming into a very different kind of system. It might simply stay there at that maximum value, but more often than not, flux and change are the rule. So when that property is near its maximum value, and it cannot help but change over time, there’s pretty much only one direction it can go: down. As the value of that property (e.g., electrical potential, structural cohesion) drifts downward, it will eventually approach its minimum possible value. It cannot go beyond that point, so if it is going to continue changing and undergoing its natural flux, there is once again only one direction to go at that point: up. If a system property cannot help but change over time, and it has maximum and minimum values, then it is practically inevitable that there will be exactly the cyclic ebb and flow that we see all over living and nonliving nature, the rhythmic dance exhibited by both biotic life and abiotic nonlife.
Cyclic processes may seem simple: they move in one direction for a while, then switch to moving in the other direction for a while, and then switch back. That’s not complicated. However, as multiple cyclical processes interact with one another, the dance can develop some complexity. They get into various types of synchrony or correlation with each other. (Recall from chapter 6 Kelso’s waggling fingers and Schmidt’s swinging legs.) One form of complexity that emerges in a nonliving cyclic process, and makes it seem “alive,” is correlated noise. Long-term correlations in noise were first mathematically identified in 1925 by electrical engineer Bert Johnson while he measured the resonance of an electric current in a vacuum tube. He developed an equation to describe how the noise (or tiny random variation) in the electric current actually had a pattern to it. When the current wavered ever so slightly over time, it didn’t do so with a completely unpredictable random variation. The variance in the signal wasn’t “white noise,” such that you could never predict whether the next value would be higher or lower than the previous value. With low frequencies of current in the vacuum tube, the variance showed a noticeable sort of “flicker” or “heartbeat.” For short periods of time, the noise would be high, then for short periods of time the noise would be low, and then later it would be high again. This noise that wasn’t totally random eventually became known as “pink noise” (recall the work of Van Orden and Kello in chapter 2). The more technical term for this is “1/f noise” (where f stands for frequency).
Not long after Johnson’s work, this pink noise phenomenon began getting noticed in all kinds of physical processes. In the 1940s, British hydrologist Harold Hurst discovered similar ups and downs in the water levels of a river. He was trying to figure out how to predict what the highest water level might be in the future for the Nile River in Egypt so he could recommend appropriate heights for dams and levees. Lives hung in the balance for this work, because flooding of the cities that neighbor the Nile River had already proven extremely dangerous. While studying the high-water marks of the Nile River from year to year, he noticed that there was a gradual ebb and flow of high variability values for several years, then low variability values for several years, and then high variability values again. The values of the Nile River overflow from years long ago were influencing the values of recent overflows. Essentially, the river seemed to have a “memory” of previous floods. This form of long-term correlation over the noise signal in a time series (or sequence of events over time) became known as “long-term memory” in the time series. Since the data pattern adheres to a straight line when plotted on a logarithmic graph, the pattern is often referred to as a “power law” that is scale invariant or “scale-free,” meaning that the general pattern of data is observable at just about any temporal or spatial scale you look at (e.g., months, years, and centuries or meters, miles, and hundreds of miles). The data pattern is fractal. (That said, some seemingly power-law data patterns are actually better described as having lognormal structures or a power law with an exponential cutoff.) If you found it hard to swallow the idea in chapter 7 that plants have “memory,” how does it make you feel to read that a river’s ebbs and flows over years are described as having a memory? I wonder.
Danish physicist Per Bak discovered that earthquakes and avalanches appear to follow a similar power-law pattern in their magnitude and frequency. In his book How Nature Works, Bak points to this scale-free pattern showing up in a number of living and nonliving systems. Not only did Per Bak fit his 1/f equation to data from real earthquakes and avalanches, but he and his colleagues also designed tiny avalanches in the laboratory by using piles of sand and piles of rice. As your laboratory apparatus sequentially drops a single grain of rice onto a pile again and again, you can record the magnitude of a given avalanche of rice and then keep track of how frequent different magnitudes of avalanches are. Tiny rice avalanches are extremely common, medium-sized avalanches quickly drop to being moderately rare, and finally large rice avalanches are extremely rare. There doesn’t really seem to be a category of avalanche that is moderately common. You get lots of tiny avalanches and earthquakes, and rather few medium or large ones—which was thought at one time to be evidence for two different seismic mechanisms that produce the two types of avalanches or earthquakes. But when you put these data on logarithmic coordinates, they tend to make a straight line, suggesting that the large, medium, and small avalanches may be governed by the same physical mechanism—one that functions on a logarithmic scale. Per Bak suggested that this power-law pattern is a kind of statistical fingerprint that systems display when their function relies on what he called “self-organized criticality.” When a form of autocatalysis allows a system to emerge and self-organize, part of that system’s method of self-maintenance (or homeostasis) involves balancing itself on a critical point between chaotic nearly random behavior and stable periodic behavior (a bit like Ilya Prigogine’s exuberance and conservatism mentioned in chapter 7).
In the case of earthquakes, Per Bak’s point was that, since they are all the result of a process that is scale-free, events at the small spatial scale of inches and meters in Earth’s crust actually play a causal role in determining the magnitude of an earthquake, along with events at the larger spatial scale of miles and tens of miles. That is why earthquake magnitudes are essentially impossible to predict. There’s no way we could ever measure all those miniscule forces at the scale of inches and meters.
For his mathematical models of weather patterns, mathematician Edward Lorenz described a similar form of wide-reaching contextual dependence in his “butterfly effect” metaphor. The Lorenz equations for a weather system gave rise to the understanding of how tiny differences in initial conditions, even at the tenth decimal place in your measurements, can lead to quite large differences in behavior of the system over time. Lorenz likened it to how the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil could, in principle, influence the timing and path of a tornado that forms days later in Texas: the butterfly effect.
As a result of these three properties of autocatalysis, 1/f pink noise, and scale invariance, nonliving systems have a beauty and complexity that makes them seem a little bit like they are alive. For example, when you look at the photos in science writer (and daughter of Frank) Nadia Drake’s Little Book of Wonders, you can find a dozen examples of nonliving systems that look like vibrant artwork that has come alive—like sand dunes, but better. It could be the curvy green iceberg that looks like an organic alien spaceship, the flowing colors of the aurora borealis, or the complicated lattice structure of a snowflake under a microscope. The intricate formations of caves, waterfalls, hot springs, precious gems, lightning, and rainbows all reveal the splendor that nonliving systems are capable of producing. Scientists are now understanding how these gorgeous natural artworks are self-organized. Nonliving systems are not separated from their environment. They share a causal interdependence with their broad context and therefore exhibit sensitivity to initial conditions and frequently generate cyclical rhythms in their behavior. As a result, they often exhibit autocatalysis, pink noise, and scale invariance. In fact, living systems routinely exhibit these same three properties as well. It is as if we are all (the living and nonliving among us) formed and driven by the same fundamental mathematical laws—because, of course, we are.
After decades of physical scientists identifying the three properties of autocatalysis, pink noise, and scale invariance in chemical solutions, electrical currents, river levels, avalanches, atmospheric pressure, sunspots, and even in layers of mud sediment, finally biologists and social scientists started measuring these properties in the behavior of living things as well. Living systems of all kinds routinely exhibit these same three fingerprints of self-organization in their anatomy, physiology, and behavior. For instance, the fundamental chemical process from which all carbon-based cellular living systems evolved over a billion years ago, that of converting glucose into energy, has inside it an autocatalytic cycle that is conceptually similar to the BZ reaction. Pink noise has now been identified in the time series of heartbeats, neural activation patterns, and reaction times in lengthy cognition experiments. Scale invariance has been observed in animal foraging behaviors, the dynamics of human memory tasks, and the velocity of human reaching movements, to name just a few examples. Thus, a little bit like Per Bak’s rice pile avalanches, tiny, medium-sized, and large behaviors all appear to live on an approximately straight line when plotted on logarithmic coordinates. Just like the dynamics of many nonliving systems, the dynamics of animal behaviors look pretty much the same across small, medium, and large scales of analysis.
So, as we come to the end of this section, let’s take stock of what we have learned about naturally occurring nonliving systems. We noted that nonliving systems often have a rhythmic cycle to them, much like living systems do. From the interaction of many different rhythmic cycles come three interesting properties. First, we see a complexity in those nonliving systems that can take the form of autocatalysis (a process that starts itself and maintains itself), a bit like a biological cell maintaining homeostasis. Second, we see pink noise in their time series (a pattern of correlation over time that indicates a form of “memory” and self-organized criticality). Third, we see a scale invariance that reveals their formation and structure adhering to a common mechanism irrespective of when they are happening as small-, medium-, or large-scale events. Those statistical processes allow a variety of nonliving systems to exhibit Turvey and Carello’s behavioral signatures of physical intelligence: flexibility, prospectivity (planning), and retrospectivity (memory). In fact, we see that living systems also frequently exhibit these three properties. Maybe living systems and nonliving systems aren’t that different from one another after all.
Nonliving systems are everywhere. They are smart, they are complex, they are part of you, and they are beautiful. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that we living systems have so much in common with nonliving systems. After all, we multicellular life forms evolved from single-cell life forms, which in turn evolved from, well, nonlife forms. Maybe we shouldn’t think of evolution as a biological process that began only after an insanely lucky break took place, where a bunch of simple proteins randomly stumbled into complex structures and began to self-replicate. Maybe evolution is something that nonbiological material was already doing even before “life” originated on Earth. Maybe living matter is just one particularly sharp transition that took place in the one big evolutionary process (of generating ordered structures inside partially confined regions of space-time that thereby initiate increased entropy production outside those partially confined regions). This evolutionary process was going on before there was life on this planet, using only nonliving matter, and now continues with both nonliving and living matter intertwined in their earthly dance. A few billion years ago, chaotic combinations of molecules, fueled by heat and energy and following physical laws of self-organization, eventually self-assembled into formations that produced simple amino acids and other organic compounds. Those nonliving organic compounds self-assembled into protein formations that were more complex, shaped themselves into cell membranes, and eventually formed living bacteria. The same kind of evolution then continued as that living matter proceeded to self-assemble into structures that are more complex, eventually forming you and me.
We living systems share part of who we are with nonliving systems. Patterns of mineral surfaces facilitated the origins of life on Earth billions of years ago, and early microbial life in turn facilitated the diversification of mineral formations. These reciprocal influences promoted a coevolution of nonliving matter with living matter. That is, it’s not just that Earth happened to be friendly to all life by chance. Over many millions of years, the beginnings of life on Earth helped make Earth even more friendly to more kinds of life. In fact, thanks to this continuous back and forth between life and nonlife, Earth grew into the most mineralogically diverse planet in our solar system. Evidently, diversity isn’t just a good thing among people; it’s a good thing among minerals, too. In his book The Story of Earth, astrobiologist Robert Hazen traces this reciprocal relationship over the course of 4.5 billion years. He shows how the evolution of terrestrial life is inextricably intertwined with the evolution of Earth’s mineral composites, or rocks. The microscopic concave pockets on mineral surfaces served as excellent breeding grounds (or test tubes) for sugars and amino acids to aggregate and form peptides, which eventually evolved into microbes. The formation of this primordial life, in turn, began to alter the shape of those mineral surfaces. In fact, microbial life probably aided in the gradual formation of a continental crust, allowing landmasses to finally rise above the seas and become microcontinents. But make no mistake, living systems depend on Earth more than Earth depends on living systems. In Hazen’s epilogue, you can almost see his wry smile when he points out that conservationist movements for preserving safe air and clean water are not going to “save the planet.” If they work, they will “save the humans.” The planet will not need saving. Mother Earth has replanted her garden several times already, and she will do it again if she has to. The planet could continue without humans and other large mammals just fine thank you very much. Clearly, life on Earth has had a dependency on minerals since the very beginning. We do not merely live on Earth. We live of Earth. If you don’t believe me that nonliving rocky matter is an important part of who we are, then I dare you to tell your mother to stop taking her mineral supplements. And if you do believe me, then don’t just hug a tree to show your gratitude for Mother Earth. Hug a rock!
Now that you can see how primordial microbes collected in microscopic concave pockets to facilitate their growth, perhaps you can also imagine how primordial humans also collected in macroscopic caves for protection from the elements, aggregating, feeding, and breeding in those receptacles just like so much microbial life. Those caves may have been fundamental not only to our early existence but also to our early belief systems. It is not just the physical material making up our bodies that has evolved of Earth. Informational and sociocultural patterns that are intrinsic to humanity have also evolved of Earth. In fact, there are particular places in Earth where some of our most cherished human inventions may have been spawned. Imagine being an early human, tens of thousands of years ago, or even a modern human several thousand years ago, and using cave structures for shelter. Near the entrance to the cave, you still experience the light and day cycle that supports hunting and foraging for food, but deep inside the cave, there are dark zones that never see light—until you bring some in with a torch. According to archaeologist Holley Moyes, those dark zones of the cave just might be one of the key places where myths, fiction, and creativity were first fostered in early human minds. With nothing but a flickering torch in the dark zone of a cave, the shadows can play tricks on your eyes, and the mythical story being told by your shaman can come to life. You can find yourself ready to believe in magic, the supernatural, and other things that you never witness in the light of day. (The Hopi tribe of Native Americans in Arizona might remind us that hallucinogenic plants probably helped with developing that belief in magic as well.) Holley Moyes has collected compelling archaeological evidence from ancient caves in Central America suggesting that the dark zones may have played an important role in the cultural evolution of magical thinking and belief in the supernatural. She finds that those “cave dwellers” actually made their residences around the mouths of caves, not inside the caves per se. Around the entrances to caves, she and her colleagues routinely find archaeological artifacts related to everyday living, such as pottery and tools of various kinds. By contrast, deep inside those caves, she tends to find more ceremonial appliances, such as incense burners, altars, and burial sites. The darkness that resides deep inside a cave may be exactly what makes it easier to believe in something that you can’t really see. If you were a modern human from a few thousand years ago, it just might make sense to bury your dead deep in those caves so that they can be closer to that invisible supernatural force that you sometimes seem to contact down there—plus it’s a whole lot better than letting them decompose in your kitchen.
Returning a body to the Earth from whence it came is a cultural practice that humans have embraced for quite some time. In fact, archaeologist Mark Aldenderfer and his colleagues have traced underground burial rituals in Tibet and Nepal back thousands of years before the start of the Christian calendar. Sometimes it’s a square tomb carved into the rock, and sometimes it’s a circular tomb. Sometimes the body is placed in a wooden coffin, and sometimes it is placed in a hollowed-out tree trunk. We are of this Earth before we are born. We are of this Earth while we are aggregating, feeding, and breeding, and we are still of this Earth when we die. (And even scattering one’s ashes, or a “sky burial” for that matter, returns a body to Earth to some degree as well. I guess it’s all a question of whether you want your remains to be consumed by fire in a ceremony, by vultures on a mountaintop, or by microbes underground. Take your pick.) Aldenderfer’s discoveries in Tibet and Nepal tell us that the species Homo sapiens has been burying its dead in earthen tombs (or carved-out caves) for millennia, essentially recognizing that Earth is the place to which that body should be returned.
Humans don’t live and die in concave pockets in the earth anymore like so many microbes before them, because we have developed materials for building our own cavelike structures above Earth’s surface for aggregating, feeding, and breeding. We build our “caves” out of dead trees (wood), melted and reshaped minerals (metal), and liquefied stone (plaster). These trees, minerals, and stone form a fundamental component of our material culture, providing a permeable “cell membrane” that ensconces us in protection from the elements. Cognitive scientist John Sutton has studied the cultural evolution of humans’ use of materials and found that it reveals a great deal about our cognitive history. From the religious artifacts they worship, to the places they bury their dead, to the tools and furniture they use, to the clothes they wear, to the written language they disseminate, these nonliving materials are all part of the informational patterns of humanity: our culture. When some far-future life form (descended from us or perhaps not) digs up these nonliving materials after humanity is long gone, they will rely heavily on them as archaeological finds that reveal to them who we were. But John Sutton isn’t waiting for that far-flung future. He is analyzing our present material culture, like a cognitive archaeologist or cognitive historian, right now.
According to Sutton, the materials and events that form the physical matter that constitutes an individual mind consist of at least four things: a brain, a body, a physical environment with material artifacts, and the social/industrial practices embraced by the culture. All that stuff is the physical matter that makes up a mind. When you add some more brains and bodies to that analysis, you no longer have an “individual mind” per se. You have a distributed cognitive ecology, or a kind of “hive mind.” This hive mind of Earth is made of both living matter and nonliving matter. You are part of it, and it is part of you. As we humans change those material artifacts and social and industrial practices over decades of cultural evolution—at a much faster pace than those brains and bodies can evolve biologically—the hive mind itself changes into something else. Who we are is changing quite rapidly now compared to previous human eras and especially compared to eras that preceded modern humans.
To be sure, the development of spoken language, and then writing, must have been fundamental to finally allowing Homo sapiens to formulate and spread shared plans, shared belief systems, and shared values. It must have marked a dramatic transition from loosely bonded tribes to much larger coordinated societies. Philosopher Andy Clark points out that when we use language, it is a way of externalizing our thoughts—mental entities that would have otherwise remained private and unshared. This externalization of thought, via language, allows people to do more than just collaboratively reconstruct memories from the past and coordinate plans for the future. Linguistic externalization of thought allows one to generate some concrete overlap between the physical material (sound waves or written text) that makes up part of one person’s mind and the physical material that makes up part of someone else’s mind. Language—whether it be a tender conversation with a family member, choppin’ it up with friends, or reading a book like this one—literally facilitates a partial “mind-meld” between two or more people.
But make no mistake, the cultural evolutionary process of language spreading like a virus across Homo sapiens took several millennia to consume and reshape humanity into the civilized animal that it is today. Language use has been changing far more rapidly in just the last couple of centuries. Two hundred years ago, only 12 percent of the planet’s people could read—despite the fact that the printing press had been around for centuries. Now, 83 percent of adult humans have at least basic literacy skills. (That said, there’s still progress to be made. In one of the most advanced nations on the planet, the United States, 14 percent of its population is below the basic reading level.) And the way we use language now, with the internet and social media allowing anyone to instantly reach out to thousands of people thousands of miles away, is changing and morphing at its most frenzied pace ever.
In 1988, most adults didn’t even have an email account yet (and some of you weren’t even born yet), but systems ecologist Howard T. Odum had already seen the writing on the wall. That year, he wrote, “A frenzy of processes seems to be accelerating, as millions of human minds are being linked with flows of money, electronic signals, and information.” Howard Odum (and his brother Eugene) treated the air, the oceans, the biogeochemical cycles, living species (including humans), and knowledge itself as a large collection of forces that self-organize into one gigantic, mostly coherent ecosystem. In fact, he even developed a diagrammatic mathematical language for describing these energy subsystems (not unlike Richard Feynman’s diagrammatic language for describing quantum mechanical systems, or Len Talmy’s diagrammatic language for describing sentence meanings). The Odums built scientific quantitative models of large ecosystems, revolutionizing the way ecology was conceived and taught and thus helping pave the way for Lovelock and Margulis to propose the Gaia hypothesis. Earth and all its layered ecosystems, along with its interconnected information systems, can be scientifically modeled as one massive “alive” system, comprising both living and nonliving components. Gaia is much more than a pretty metaphor; it is a scientific theory.
Howard Odum built not only quantitative models of ecosystems but also real, living microcosms (ecologically balanced aquariums and terrariums of various kinds) to approximate naturally occurring ecosystems. His work even contributed to inspiration for Biosphere 2, where year-long enclosed living experiments were conducted with humans and plants in the early 1990s. Those brave experiments, in preparation for colonizing Mars, failed miserably, as plants and human relationships gradually died within the confines of the sealed biodome. Are you still feeling optimistic about sending humans to Mars? The University of Arizona now owns that Biosphere 2 building and uses it for science education. (The scientific exploration of Mars is surely crucial for us to learn more about how the universe works. That knowledge will help us extend the lifespans of Earth-bound living systems. However, the idea of actually colonizing Mars with humans just might turn out to be a fool’s errand of truly epic proportions.)
We are Earthlings, and we always will be. Earth is our biodome. Within it, we are one. And we are likely to remain here for the duration. Understanding how it all works as one mammoth complex ecosystem, as the Odums proposed, may be our only chance to keep it healthy—so our plants and human relationships don’t gradually die within its confines.
I address you as “Earth” here because if you have come this far in this chapter, then you are at least partially open to the idea that who you are includes all the biota and abiota surrounding Earth, on the surface of Earth, and inside Earth. You are Earth. We are all Earth.
Dear Earth, “sorry to disturb you, but I feel that I should be heard loud and clear.” Are you listening? Can we talk? Earth, I worry that you have too many internally conflicting predilections. Parts of you want to dominate other parts of you, plunder those parts for profit, or subjugate those parts for power. I’m afraid that those urges, if left unchecked, could bring everything crashing down. Since these are all parts of yourself, dear Earth, maybe some quiet internal reflection could help alleviate the tension. Maybe let yourself talk to yourself about how you can achieve some balance between your different parts. You need to preserve your sustainability. You need the whole of your self to “behave so as to persist.” Right now, I’m not sure you’re quite doing that.
Your nonliving parts, Earth, have provided a very specific and self-organized set of contextual constraints that allowed your living parts to thrive—most of the time. The nonliving components of other planets have not been anywhere near as life-friendly as yours have. On every other planet that we’ve been able to measure so far, life has not taken a firm and lasting hold. Thanks to NASA and its Mars probes, we now know that a very primitive form of life may possibly have formed on Mars at one time, but it was not able to last because the contextual constraints of the nonliving material on Mars did not provide the right environment for life to thrive. The living and nonliving material on Mars did not form one coherent complex system that, together, behaved so as to persist—but yours did.
Dear Earth, it just might be that you are cosmically unique. It is somewhat probable that there are other intelligent life forms somewhere out there in the universe, just too far away for us to ever contact. But what if there aren’t? Earth, your humans just might be the entire universe’s only example of its ability to examine itself, its ability to record a history of itself, its ability to “share its experience” with itself. Humans just might be the only life forms ever in the universe who are intelligent enough to industrialize their extraction of vitamins and minerals from the surface, grandiose enough to build spaceships that take them thousands of miles above the surface, and neurotic enough to write books about who we are. If there are other examples of the universe doing this, then they have likely come and gone with nary a trace. If any are still around, then they are so far away that you will almost certainly never come into contact with them. But, Earth, when you look at the 9 million or so species of life that you have cooked up over the last couple of billion years or so, it should be awe inspiring and humbling to come to terms with the fact that only one species out of all of them has ever developed an advanced, technologically adept intelligence.
Earth, my friend, please take a moment to consider how exceptional this is. Some of your nonhuman animals can use simple tools or solve simple problems. Chimpanzees, crows, dolphins, octopuses, and even crickets all do things that are moderately intelligent, but none of them have mastered fire, built a printing press, experimented with subatomic particles, or designed rockets to visit other planets. Complex technology is something that only your Homo sapiens ever developed. You should be proud of that part of you, but also sobered by the fact that it is evidently a one in 9 million chance for a species to do that. Most, if not all, other planets are not as lucky as you, Earth. You get to grow a part of the universe that tries to understand itself. Your humans are precious. Please take care of them. Like a wise man once said, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
Directions for Use
Let’s do a thought experiment. Set a timer for five minutes, so that it will tell you when to stop the experiment. Spend those five minutes imagining that there is no God (a bit like John Lennon said in his song “Imagine”). For some of you, this will be easy, but for others, it may be a bit frightening or unsettling. It may make you feel very alone, but don’t be afraid, because the timer will wake you out of this imagining in a mere five minutes. This is just a thought experiment, and your timer will bring you out of it before any damage can be done. I promise. During those five minutes in which God does not exist for you, you may initially feel a loss of companionship. Meditate on how deeply alone you feel without a benevolent higher power caring for you. Let it sink in for about one minute. You are truly alone during that first minute. Then, after hitting that rock bottom, gradually reach out with your senses, step by step, the way the chapters in this book did. Look at your hands and your limbs, and recognize that your brain is not alone. It has a body to carry out actions that your brain wouldn’t be able to carry out by itself. Love that body. That body is part of who you are. You know this from chapter 4. Then reach out another step to include the book (or electronic reading device), or some other object, that you hold in your hands. The object you hold in your hands is part of who you are. Love that object. Then reach out another step to sense the room or other environment that you are in. Love that environment. That environment is part of who you are. You know this from chapter 5. Then reach out with your senses again just one small step to include your family and friends, even if they are not physically present at this time. Those people have mental simulations of you in their minds, and you have mental simulations of them in your mind. Love them. They are part of who you are. You know this from chapter 6. Keep going now. Expand your sense of self to include your entire culture, other cultures, all humanity, and all life on this planet. Share your love that far out, because all of that is part of who you are, and you know this from chapter 7. Finally, use what you’ve just learned here in chapter 8 to expand your sense of self to include nonliving matter as well. You have in your body right now many of those minerals that are critical to keeping you alive. Nonliving matter everywhere has played such a crucial role in your being able to come into being in the first place that it seems inescapable that it is part of who you are. Love that nonliving matter. Now, in a mere four minutes of this thought experiment, you have expanded your sense of self to include everything that is scientifically observable in the universe. The formation of stars, the orbiting of planets, and the rise and fall of millions of animal and plant species over millions of years on Earth are essential components of how you came to be and of who you are now. By the end of this thought experiment, you should be busy being the universe—and loving the universe. But don’t forget that everyone around you, and everything else, everywhere else, is also busy being the universe with you. How can you possibly feel alone? Whoever you are.
The Ubiquity of Nonliving Systems
GJ357d is a planet 31 light years away that might harbor life. If it has a thick enough atmosphere, it might be able to trap water on its surface. However, it is 6 times the mass of Earth, so whatever life might form on it will not be large. With gravity 6 times that of Earth, any life on such a planet will likely be small and invertebrate. Perhaps their apex predator will be something like a banana slug. That said, there are surely some astronomers and astrobiologists (and self-reported alien abductees) who would disagree with my generally pessimistic take on humanity’s chances of detecting extraterrestrial life and communicating with it. The field itself has not reached agreement on the issue. Some estimates with the Drake equation predict dozens of planets with intelligent life developing in each galaxy, whereas other estimates predict an average of less than one planet with intelligent life per galaxy. Either way, Enrico Fermi was probably right when he suggested that if extraterrestrial life were smart enough, long-lasting enough, and close enough for us to ever communicate with it, then we really should have detected unmistakable evidence of its existence by now (Barnes, Meadows, & Evans, 2015; Drake & Sobel, 1992; Frank & Sullivan, 2016; Sagan & Drake, 1975; Shostak, 1998; Stenger, 2011; Tipler, 1980; Vakoch & Dowd, 2015; Webb, 2015; see also Randall, 2017; Tyson, 2017).
The Mental Lives of Nonliving Systems
The BZ reaction is not just an amazing discovery of a nonliving autocatalytic chemical solution that initiates and maintains its own oscillations, as if it were alive and breathing. It is also a lesson in the sociology of science. Boris Pavlovitch Belousov (the man who put the B in “BZ reaction”) was met with such disdain and disbelief when he submitted and resubmitted his scientific manuscript describing his oscillatory chemical reaction that he eventually gave up trying to publish it in a peer-reviewed journal at all. The editors and reviewers of the chemical journals to which he submitted this work were so entrenched in their conventional understanding of chemistry that they could not find it in themselves to lend any trust to Belousov’s laboratory observations—or to even try out the experiment themselves. An obscure conference abstract is the only report of it that he ever managed to publish during his lifetime. The world of science often prides itself on having an open mind about revising its core tenets, given the right evidence from carefully controlled experiments. However, occasionally it, too, can fall victim to conventional dogma pulling the wool over its own eyes for a decade or two. Belousov’s original (rejected) manuscript, translated into English, was eventually published in 1985 in the appendix of an edited volume by Maria Burger and Richard Field. I encourage you to look up video clips of the BZ reaction on the internet, and try to remind yourself as you watch these beautiful, vivid patterns grow that this clever little chemical solution is classified as a nonliving system (Belousov, 1985; Mikhailov & Ertl, 2017; Prigogine & Stengers, 1984; Steinbock, Tóth, & Showalter, 1995; Winfree, 1984; Zhabotinsky, 1964).
Before just willy-nilly building some living technology, we have to give it some thought first. Rather than manufacturing a complete humanoid puppet and hoping it will come to life, like Pinocchio, perhaps AI research should be nurturing a breeding reservoir for the self-organized evolution of abiotic life forms (e.g., Carriveau, 2006; Davis, Kay, Kondepudi, & Dixon, 2016; Dietrich, 2001; Dixon, Kay, Davis, & Kondepudi, 2016; Hanczyc & Ikegami, 2010; Harari, 2016; Ikegami, 2013; Kaiser, Snezhko, & Aranson, 2017; Kleckner, Scheeler, & Irvine, 2014; Kokot & Snezhko, 2018; O’Connell, 2017; Piore, 2017; Snezhko & Aranson, 2011; Swenson, 1989; Swenson & Turvey, 1991; Turvey & Carello, 2012; Walker, Packard, & Cody, 2017; Whitelaw, 2004; Yang et al., 2017).
We have to be careful, of course, not to accidentally let loose a virus of nanobots that infects, poisons, and kills all life on the planet permanently. That would be bad. Much of the abiotic evolution can initially take place in computer simulations of the process. This could be just like what roboticist Hod Lipson has been doing with evolution in virtual reality and then 3-D printing the resulting creature (Lipson & Pollack, 2000). However, instead of focusing so much on animals, perhaps we could start even simpler: with plants (e.g., Goel, Knox, & Norman, 1991). Maybe we could design an artificial plant that has no living biology inside it but carries out its own form of photosynthesis, draws molecules from the ground to use for its growth, and reproduces partial copies of itself (perhaps with asexual reproduction, so it doesn’t have to send artificial pollen into the open air). The plant won’t be edible, it won’t be our slave, and it won’t be dangerous. What the plant will do is teach us how to “grow” synthetic life, and it might even perform some much-needed carbon capture for us along the way.
The Complexity of Naturally Occurring Nonliving Systems
There has been a great deal of analysis and discussion of fractal 1/f scaling across wide ranges of natural phenomena. It is observed in the stock market, in human and other animal behavior, in plant growth, in weather patterns, and even in earthquakes, and it can make some truly beautiful patterns in nature (e.g., Bak, 1996; Crutchfield, 2012; Drake, 2016; Havlin et al., 1999; Hurst, 1951; Johnson, 1925; Kauffman, 1996; Lorenz, 2000; Mandelbrot, 2013; Strogatz, 2004; Turvey & Carello, 2012).
Sometimes a process can look as if it is mostly adhering to a power law but actually deviates a bit from a pure power law (Clauset, Shalizi, & Newman, 2009). For instance, the statistics of earthquakes may actually be better fit by a power law with a cutoff (or a tapering) than with a pure power law (Kagan, 2010; Serra & Corral, 2017). That is, great earthquakes (magnitude >8) are about half as common as would be predicted by a pure power law. Importantly, this suggests that there are some boundary conditions, or edge effects, that influence the way the statistical function shows up on paper. It doesn’t necessarily mean that one is forced to postulate two separate tectonic mechanisms for what causes great earthquakes and what causes all other earthquakes. One tectonic process (with both brittle and plastic capabilities) may still be what explains all earthquakes, large and small, but the process has slightly different effects when that process pushes up against the extreme edges of its range (near some boundary conditions).
The observation that fractal 1/f scaling shows up both in nonliving systems and in living systems points to the commonality that exists between them. Living systems evolved from nonliving systems. Every living system contains, at its molecular and atomic scale, many of the same elements that make up nonliving systems. Humans exhibit 1/f scaling in their vasculature and in the variance exhibited by their voluntary behaviors, their speech, their heart rate, their memory, and even their gait (e.g., Abney, Kello, & Balasubramaniam, 2016; Chater & Brown, 1999; He, 2014; Hills, Jones, & Todd, 2012; Ivanov et al., 2001; Kello et al., 2010; Linkenkaer-Hansen, Nikouline, Palva, & Ilmoniemi, 2001; Mancardi, Varetto, Bucci, Maniero, & Guiot, 2008; Rhodes & Turvey, 2007; Usher, Stemmler, & Olami, 1995; Van Orden, Holden, & Turvey, 2003; Ward, 2002). We literally walk and talk in pink noise. In fact, one potential indicator of the early stages of Parkinson’s disease is the loss of 1/f noise in the way you walk. Rather than a healthy correlated noise in the time series of leg movements, Parkinson’s patients exhibit uncorrelated noise in their sequence of strides. Cognitive neuroscientist Michael Hove has shown that Parkinson’s patients can regain that healthy 1/f noise in their walking pattern by using a rhythmic sound stimulus over headphones (Hove & Keller, 2015; Hove, Suzuki, Uchitomi, Orimo, & Miyake, 2012).
You Are Coextensive with Nonliving Systems
Microbial life on Earth probably arose from autocatalytic chemical networks, self-organizing processes that start themselves (e.g., Grosch & Hazen, 2015; Hazen, 2013; Hazen & Sverjensky, 2010; see also Dawkins & Wong, 2016). The very idea of something starting itself should twist your brain in on itself a little. How can something be responsible for bringing itself into being when obviously it wasn’t around to do anything before it came into being? When the chain of cause and effect loops back onto itself, strange things can happen. Since most objects-and-events are conglomerates of many smaller objects-and-events, those smaller objects-and-events can often feed into each other, undetected, long before the larger object-and-event is even noticed. Thus, the coalescing of those smaller objects-and-events into one larger object-and-event can often look as if it came out of nowhere. Since no other large object or event caused this large object-and-event to come into being, we find ourselves concluding that the large object-and-event caused itself into being. It might be that the laws of causality have violated the arrow of time or that we have to look at both the small scale and the large scale at the same time in order to truly understand emergence. See Johnson (2002), Kauffman (1996), Laughlin (2006), Mitchell (2009), Rosen (1991), Spivey (2018), and Turvey (2004).
It’s not just humans and their material culture that self-organize into the “hive mind” that is society (e.g., Sutton, 2008, 2010; Sutton & Keene, 2016; see also Malafouris, 2010). It’s our pets, too. Homo sapiens not only returned their dead to the earth in a variety of underground burial methods (Aldenderfer, 2013; Moyes, 2012; Moyes, Rigoli, Huette, Montello, Matlock, & Spivey, 2017), but some tribes even buried their pet dogs alongside those human burials. As long ago as 8000 BCE, domesticated wolf-coyote hybrids were treated as “part of the family” and gently buried in the family cemetery next to grandma and grandpa (Perri et al., 2019). For more discussions of the hive mind to which we belong, see Clark (2008), Grinspoon (2016), Hutchins (2010), Lovelock & Margulis (1974), Odum (1988), and Smart (2012).
Dear Earth
In the 1980s, the rock band XTC wrote a song titled “Dear God,” where the lead singer, Andy Partridge, speaks directly to God, saying, “Sorry to disturb you, but I feel I must be heard loud and clear.” In that song, Partridge points out to God all the reasons why he can’t believe in him. I’m not sure if the addressee ever heard those words, but they are powerful. I borrow the phrasing here to call attention to the fact that this omniscient natural power, Earth, is in need of a wake-up call as well. Earth, in the sense of all its nonliving and living matter, is reading this chapter through your eyes right now. I hope we are paying attention.