Reconsidering our place in the Universe  

Well, it’s been a long time. In fact it’s been more than two years since I wrote my first two Steem posts on cometary panspermia, and much has moved on. A fascinating new article ‘Cause of Cambrian Explosion - Terrestrial or Cosmic?’  was published on the subject by a group of 33 international scientists in April 2018. This draws together much of the supporting evidence for cometary panspermia, and suggests, among other things, that the Cambrian evolutionary explosion and the unlikely evolution of octopi from squid was caused by the arrival of new genetic material on Earth, delivered here inside icy bolide meteorites. It also contains a great deal of evidence and references to a growing body of scientific research into the origins of life on Earth. I strongly suggest you give this paper a read if you are at all interested in this topic.   

Anyway, in the conclusion of my previous posts I promised that I would expand on Sir Fred Hoyle & Chandra Wickramasinghe’s theories with my own conjecture, and I’ve finally got around to doing so. Some of what I explain below may seem far-fetched without a grounding in the evidence that has got us to this point, so I suggest reading my previous posts ‘Fact Cannon #5: The Origin of Life on Earth’ and ‘Fact Cannon #6: Recent Evidence For Panspermia’, for a full explanation of the theory of cometary panspermia and the central concept of the universal gene-pool, along with the evidence available to back it up.   

Please remember that what follows is largely my own conjecture. I am an independent observer, and in no way attached to any of the scientific studies currently taking place. All views expressed are my own, except where otherwise stated. In some cases below I follow lines of reasoning to their logical conclusions which are beyond that which can be supported by currently available evidence. Nevertheless, although full evidence may not yet be available, logic is; and scarcity of evidence is no reason not to consider the possibilities and rationally evaluate the results.    

My hope is that this post will ignite an interest in cometary panspermia, and inspire readers to investigate the more serious scientific literature on the topic that is readily available on the internet.  

The Origin of Life in the Universe  

Having explained the process and evidence for Hoyle & Wickramasinghe’s cometary panspermia in my previous two posts, my thinking now gravitates towards exploring the origins of the process itself, so let’s consider the options for the origin of life in the universe, and what this could mean for the presence of extra-terrestrial intelligences. It seems we now have three potential alternatives, although hard evidence is not available for any of them:  

1. Terrestrial Abiogenesis  
   ‘Abiogenesis’ is defined as the original evolution of life or living organisms from inorganic or inanimate substances, ie the spontaneous and ‘natural’ creation of life from non-living matter. The orthodox belief is that this occurred on Earth alone. I personally suspect this is the least likely alternative, largely given the staggering improbability of such an event happening spontaneously in an environment as small as our own over the time scale available. In support of my viewpoint, many different models exist for possible mechanisms of abiogenesis, however to date it has not been possible to fully replicate any of these in the laboratory. Given that we cannot yet artificially recreate this in a controlled environment using our intelligence and relatively sophisticated technology, it seems unlikely that this happened purely by chance in nature. The very fact that we have many different proposals for candidate mechanisms suggests that we are still a long way from being able to explain how it occurred.    
   
   If you favour this option, you presumably do so on the basis that you think that abiogenesis is not a phenomenally improbable event. If this were the case though, it would seem likely that it must also have happened independently on billions of other worlds. The universe would almost certainly be teeming with life anyway, and we must accept that intelligences higher than our own may well exist.  
   
   If you cling to the ‘Rare Earth’ belief, ie that abiogenesis occurred here and nowhere else, then you are on an extremely sticky wicket from a probability point of view as discussed above. It would pay to keep an open mind on this question until we have firm evidence in one direction or another.    
   
   
2. Off-World Abiogenesis and Deployment Via Cometary Panspermia
   Unlike Hoyle, I can just about accept the possibility of abiogenesis taking place elsewhere in a universe with billions upon billions of possible originating environments, although this may be because I do not have the same grasp of the probability and numbers involved that Hoyle had.
   
   If we do eventually manage to provide indisputable evidence of off-world abiogenesis, there seems to be no reason why this theory would not coexist alongside cometary panspermia. It does not seem implausible that abiogenesis has taken place on some distant planet within the universe, and that life then arrived here via Hoyle and Wickramasinghe’s proposed method of dispersal. Although if this is the case, we must again accept that life is widespread throughout the universe and that life forms of greater intelligence are likely to exist.
   
   
3. Artificial Design
   Of course, Hoyle also put forward an alternative proposal which was not at all well received by the scientific community. In ‘Evolution From Space’ (1981), Hoyle suggests that biological life, as distributed by cometary panspermia, may have been created by an advanced machine intelligence.
   
   On first glance this does seem far-fetched. However, as discussed above, terrestrial abiogenesis also looks extremely unlikely, and given that evidence is starting to stack up in favour of panspermia, it does not seem unreasonable that this proposal should be reconsidered.
   

Artificial Design Is Not The Same As Intelligent Design   

Firstly, please note that I am using the term ‘artificial design’ as distinct from ‘Intelligent Design’. The latter is the name of a school of thought which has largely theological aims, which stands in opposition to the mechanism of natural selection. I am not talking about ‘Intelligent Design’ here.

Secondly, we must tackle the thorny issue of artificial design itself, as I suspect many people will object to the idea that we could be the ultimate product of artificial design. I too was uncomfortable with the creeping realization that I was being won over by a potentially creationist view point. I decided to put my initial objections to one side however, and came to the following conclusions after considering it in a detached and rational way:  

• Cometary panspermia, and an artificial origination for the process, in no way refutes natural selection. In fact, natural selection is a vital part of the mechanism proposed, and cometary panspermia actually reaffirms that all life we see around us is a product of evolution.
  
  
• It does not suggest that any aspect of any organism’s physiology has arisen by means other than natural selection, just that that selection may well have occurred in an extra-terrestrial environment. The idea simply extends the scope of natural selection to play out across the entire universe, and therefore across an exponentially greater number of environments, and much deeper timescales. This seems an eminently sensible thing to do given the startling diversity of life forms we see around us, and given the undisputed fact that many of these organisms possess traits which could not have arisen via natural selection on Earth, as they would have been of no evolutionary advantage in any environment that has ever existed here.
  
  
• Suggesting that humanity is one of many products of a mechanism designed by unknown creators is in no way analogous to saying that we were deliberately created by a God. It is not deferring the problem of the origin of life in a slopey-shouldered way, but merely acknowledging that we may not have all of the pieces of the puzzle at our disposal at this point in time. It could very well be that if we ever come into contact with our creators, we find that they already understand their own origin, or, if they do not, then it is possible that our science could be better placed to determine their origin than their own.
  
  
• It is entirely possible that our creators themselves may also have been created by natural selection.   

The argument is simply that DNA and genetic replication itself could be artificially designed. Given that higher intelligences could well exist in our unimaginably large universe, it is not at all difficult to believe that they could be orders of magnitude more advanced than ourselves, and be in possession of technology as far in advance of our own as ours is in comparison to the tools used by New Caledonian Crows, for arguments sake. On this basis it is not so great a stretch to accept that DNA could have been created by such a being.  

 Untying the Fermi Paradox 

Let’s for a moment accept that a being of higher intelligence may have designed our ‘life system’, by which I mean DNA and genetic replication. Why would they do this? The motives of any such being are essentially unknowable, but let’s consider what would appear to be the most straightforward explanation. Let’s suppose that it was designed as a means to efficiently explore and colonise the universe. There is a certain appeal in this idea, in that DNA can then be seen to embody all of the criteria necessary to be considered a von Neumann probe.  

A von Neumann probe is a hypothetical self-replicating spacecraft that could be used by an advanced civilization to explore and colonise the universe. Once deployed to a star system it seeks out raw materials, presumably on a barren moon, or in an asteroid belt, uses the materials to build copies of itself, and sends these on to colonise neighbouring systems. To paraphrase Wikipedia, in this way a conventional von Neumann probe could hypothetically colonise a milky-way sized galaxy in less than half a million years without resorting to faster than light travel.   

Personally, I have always imagined that we would one day build (or maybe encounter) robotic probes of this nature, equipped with exotic interstellar propulsion systems to power them between star systems, and sophisticated software capable of driving their self-replicating behavior. In fact, DNA and it’s proposed spread by cometary panspermia could be viewed as an extremely efficient and beautifully elegant von Neumann probe. 

From this viewpoint, cometary panspermia acts as a natural and obvious deployment mechanism, in much the same way as wind or tide dispersal of terrestrial spores, seeds, eggs or milt, with no need for an artificial transport mechanism. Massive energy expenditure on solar sails, ion or warp drives is not required. Ever-replicating and evolving genetic material is simply propelled around the universe by gravity, and wave fronts of natural sunlight provided by stars and supernovae; with the result that a universe-spanning ‘toolbox’ of increasingly complex life design templates builds up in the interstellar dust and comets. This is then transferred to planetary bodies by the actions of these comets and cosmic collisions, and, after millenia of planetary evolution, more sophisticated designs are returned to the interstellar medium by further impacts and supernovae. 

On arrival at a new planet, very little in the way of pre-existing materials are required to begin colonisation. Just add a source of energy, base elements and trace nutrients; much of which would be readily available around a hydrothermal vent, for example. These relatively commonplace raw materials would allow a foothold from which to start replication and evolution in the planetary environment, and therefore creation of a new planetary biosphere. Also consider that given the process proposed by cometary panspermia, highly resilient extremophile bacteria and spores could arrive ‘ready-made’ to exploit the new environment, bypassing the need for many billions of years of earlier evolution. 

Consider how successfully most ecological niches on Earth have been exploited; almost every new biome we discover already has a plethora of active residents. I suspect we will find similar evidence of colonisation in habitats throughout the solar system and beyond. Viewed in this way the DNA life system can be considered to be an unstoppable force, primed to exploit (or perhaps infect) pretty much any available environment. Just add a suitable substrate, and let natural selection do the rest! 

To add a little further weight to this, let’s reflect again on how life self-complicates and self-organises in successive generations, over time ‘deploying’ organisms tailored to perfection to their environments via natural selection, with successive generations better able to exploit their surroundings than their progenitors. How many other natural processes are we aware of that run contrary to entropy in this way? 

When thought about like this, the notion of DNA as an artificial von Neumann probe seems almost obvious, and the option of artificial design begins to become more compelling than abiogenesis. It also has the added benefit of simultaneously resolving the Fermi Paradox, which, posited by Enrico Fermi, is the contradiction between humanity’s probability estimates for the likelihood of the existence of extraterrestrial civilisations, and our failure to detect evidence of them or their von Neumann probes. So, in answer to Fermi’s question - “Where is everybody?” Well, everybody is already here. And most likely pretty much everywhere else we care to look as well.  

The Nature of the Probe  

So, to extend my thought experiment further, let’s take as a given that the DNA life system is an artificially designed von Neumann Probe. It’s now interesting to reconsider Hoyle’s conjecture that a machine intelligence was responsible for its creation. On reflection this does seem to have something going for it. Consider the following:  

• DNA is capable of self-replication. This is a very rare trait in itself, to my knowledge only exhibited by DNA, computer code and viruses, and in the not too distant future perhaps self-replicating robots or nano-bots. Is it coincidental that all three of these are comprised (at least partially) of encoded information?
  
  
• DNA is essentially a data storage system. In fact, by many orders of magnitude the most robust and long-lived code repository known to humanity, able to self-replicate and perpetuate its content over eons of time. And fully able to deploy its payload without outside assistance. There are clear parallels to computer code, although obviously it leaves our best efforts very firmly in the shade in terms of robustness, longevity, and bootstrapping ability.

Reflecting on these points, and again assuming that the DNA life system is indeed a von Neumann probe, then logic dictates that it must have been designed by beings who use a different physical mechanism of genetic replication in their own ‘life’ processes. Given the limited different types of self-replicating processes we are aware of, it becomes likely that the designers’ process involves nothing but raw code itself, ie the sort of process that would be used by an advanced machine intelligence. 

If this were indeed the case wouldn’t it be likely that they would base the DNA life system upon their own processes, but do their very best to remove any dependence on pre-existing hard or software? 

And, if they had the ability, wouldn’t they then design it to not only explore the universe, but to actively populate it with their own kind? 

But surely DNA is spreading biological life, not machine life, across the universe?  

Machine Intelligence  

Here is perhaps a frightening thought: Irrespective of how and where it originated, on this planet, life has evolved through a number of stages. It has been arbitrarily moulded by natural selection over huge depths of time, and could theoretically have developed in any of billions of different directions. However, here on Earth, conventional wisdom dictates that life has moved through countless ‘lower’ iterations. Through viral, bacterial, single to multi-cellular manifestations, all the way through to the development of self-awareness, intelligence, a propensity to use tools, understanding of mathematics, and the development of complex machinery. Curiously, over the last century or so, it has displayed an all-consuming urge to deploy autonomous strong AI. And don’t doubt that the urge is all-consuming. Many books have been written on the likely impact on humanity of the advent of strong AI (I heartily recommend Nick Bostrom’s ‘Superintelligence’ (2014)). Yet, even in the full knowledge that this may present an existential threat to the species, humanity has not, and will not, make any moves to curtail or even curb the trajectory of this work.

So, in view of the above, can we be certain that we are not simply an intermediate product of a von Neumann probe which is ultimately designed to deploy machine life throughout the universe?

Or, if you would prefer a more positive spin, perhaps the ultimate payload is simply consciousness – awareness – itself?

The Smoking Gun?  

I guess a number of you will still need convincing of the merits of artificial design, so here is the final piece of potential evidence dredged up by my research. In May 2013, Icarus, well respected establishment planetary science journal, published the article ‘The “Wow! Signal” of the Terrestrial Genetic Code’, detailing the research findings of Vladimir shCherbak and Maxim A Makukov. In this peer reviewed paper, the authors assert that the canonical genetic code contains ‘arithmetical and ideographical patterns of symbolic language, which appear as a product of precision logic and nontrivial computing rather than of stochastic processes’, and that the code ‘displays readily recognizable hallmarks of artificiality, among which are the symbol of zero, the privileged decimal syntax and semantical symmetries.’ The authors also cite mathematical proof rejecting the possibility that this ‘language’ has arisen by chance, evolution or other natural processes.  

So there we have it. The genetic code itself seems to be a signal of artificial origin, and the scientists who discovered it have suggested that the main body of a further message could be embodied in genomic DNA. 

Of course, even if this signal is proved to be unequivocally real, although it would be highly suggestive of the artificial origin of DNA, it would not constitute absolute proof. It would, however, at the very least prove that someone has tampered with it along the way, ie it would prove the existence of a non-human intelligence capable of manipulating the code, and also prove DNA’s distribution by panspermia. 

In fact, it could be that there are messages from multiple different intelligences within the genomic code. Consider that… All life on Earth full of interstellar graffiti. A potential treasure trove of new knowledge, maybe even containing some useful contact addresses?  

Religious Nonsense?   

So, to sum up, this is absolutely not creationism with a capital C. In no way does considering artificial design in this way compel you to believe that the Earth was made in 7 days by a white bearded Christian God, or for that matter a God of any other religious persuasion. You are not obliged to believe that the fossil record was falsified to tempt the faithful from the one true path, nor should you choose to. You are not required to subscribe to an irrational line of thinking that requires heavy reliance on an unchallengeable dogma created by an entrenched establishment, leaving little room for your own thinking and deductive powers. You can, and absolutely should, keep an open mind. An inquisitive and sceptical mind. 

As a final thought though, it seems increasingly likely that we will create a conscious autonomous strong AI in the next decade or two, and of course, we will be this being’s creators. The quality of this being’s awareness will presumably have little to differentiate itself from ours, so where exactly is the difference? 

What gives us the right to think that we’re so special?  

---

FACT CANNON: Puffing thick clouds of pipe smoke into your faces since 2016.  

---

Inspiration: 

‘Evolution From Space’ – Sir Fred Hoyle & Chandra Wickramasinghe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hoyle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandra_Wickramasinghe

Previous editions of FACT CANNON you may find interesting:
FACT CANNON #6: Recent Evidence For Panspermia
FACT CANNON #5: The Origin of Life on Earth – Panspermia and Cosmic Ancestry
FACT CANNON #4: Pholcus – The Other People Who Live In Your House
FACT CANNON #3: The Sad Tale of Paul The Psychic Octopus

Image Credits:
All images released free of copyrights under Creative Commons CC0.
Spaced Out Head, Odd DNA and Fractal Spore Thing from Pixabay.com
Mud, The Code and A Touchy Subject from FreeImages.com

If you enjoyed this edition of FACT CANNON, please upvote, comment, share and follow me. Perhaps I'll write some more stuff, and maybe it won't take so long next time!