The Obligations of the Lonely

Mankind has gone through some transitions already related to the presence or absence of aliens in our Milky Way. For a long time, there was no knowledge whatsoever about other planets and therefore about other life on them. Buddhist myth says the heavens are full of other inhabited worlds, but this is an isolated concept, and does not impinge very strongly on Buddhist belief. Other belief sets do not discuss other worlds.

Until Lippersley's invention of the telescope in 1608, little was understood about the universe. Following that, starting with Galileo's observation of Jupiter and its moons in 1610, astronomical discoveries continued without stopping. The details are not important to this post, but for four hundred years knowledge has been accumulating about the solar system and its location in the Milky Way. Huygens in the seventeenth century had computed the distance to another star, assuming it was just like the sun, so by that time the sun was thought to be like other stars, and the question of whether other stars had planetary systems had to be so obvious that is was commonly discussed. The idea of other life, including alien civilizations, on such planets cannot have been far behind.

Thus, aside from a few deep thinkers, during the many millennia of mankind's existence, there was no thought of alien civilizations. The last four hundred years might be thought of as the second phase of mankind's relationship with other civilizations; during this time it became possible to conceive of it, but little knowledge was available to illuminate the concept. During the first period, humanity understood that it was alone in the universe, as there was no universe known for any aliens to inhabit. But during the progression of the second phase, it was gradually realized that mankind might not be alone in the universe, and specifically, after Galileo observed the Milky Way and realized what it was, a collection of stars, alone in the Milky Way.

The knowledge that we might not be alone in the Milky Way does not seem to have affected human society at all. No one writes polemics about how we should change our behavior because of other civilizations on other planets. Millions write polemics about how we should change our behavior for various reasons, so it is not a lack of interest in behavioral change that has blocked this. It is the lack of consideration that it would make any difference in our lives if there were or were not alien civilizations orbiting some other star in the Milky Way. Fiction writers have filled in this gap, and have produced uncounted numbers of short stories and novels involving alien civilizations, but no movement has arisen to exhort us to change something, anything at all, on the basis of some possible alien civilizations. They are supremely unimportant.

The most recent developments in astrophysics and astronomy, where exo-planets are being discovered by the thousands, has gained much popular interest. Now, it is common to hear about new super-Earths or other planets being found, and large, expensive observatories are being built to find more and to find out more about the ones we already know exist. Still there is no cry for us to change something about our world because there are other inhabited worlds in the billions of planets in the Milky Way. No one seems to have come up with a reason why the presence of alien civilizations should mean anything to us, other than a curiosity or a subject for fantasy and science fiction.

That might change if we enter a third phase of our relationship with alien civilizations and we actually detect the existence of some. There are a great many responses possible to the detection of an alien civilization on an exo-planet in the Milky Way, and most likely, all of them would be spoken of by different people and some ways to interact might be explored.

The changes that we might see here on Earth from the detection of an alien civilization might strongly depend on their technological level. If they were still in an agricultural phase, perhaps stuck there, we might not be so interested in contact. If they were in an phase further advanced than ours, we might want to have contact, or to avoid it if there was a fear that they would want our planet for their own. If they were in an agricultural phase, following a collapse of their advanced technology civilization, we again might not want to go there, but instead might take the alien civilization as an exemplar that we might try to avoid.

There would certainly be a large flux of thinking about how to interact, what we could learn, and what precautions we might take on the chance they were not going to treat us nicely. It would be a fascinating era in human history. But there is an option not yet mentioned.

What if we discover, after some thorough investigation, that we are alone in the Milky Way? Science fills in all the missing knowledge needed to conclude this, for example by determining that some preconditions for life happen to be so rare that there is no chance there would be a second civilization in the Milky Way, and maybe that most galaxies would be barren of life. We are it.

This sounds like a nice scientific tidbit that might get mentioned in passing but largely ignored. Science fiction writers might be the ones most devastated by the news, meaning they would have to stick to time travel or some other concept for their fantasies. Or perhaps it would be transformative.

Up to the present day, all through the first and second phases discussed in this post, human decision-making has been governed by factionalism. Factionalism occurs at every level, from the individual level where humans compete with one another, up to the larest groupings, the national scale, where again there is intense competition. Competition is the engine that evolution uses, and so there should be no disparagement of it, as without it, there would be no life, no humans, no cities, no brains, not much of anything. But despite its importance, the entrance into the third phase of our relationship with alien civilizations, where we encounter the vacuum of no life anywhere, there might be some change.

To illustrate, consider this example. A catastrophe happens, and all human life is eliminated, except for one family, living far from all civilization, who are unscathed. Do they change the way they live, or their attitudes toward life? Before the catastrophe, they want to survive and prosper, but after the catastrophe, they realize that if human life is to go on, they will have to make it happen. If they lived in a plentiful area, without much stress on their survival, would they change how they live? Would they modify their choices, perhaps to have more children? Would they be more motivated to prepare for extreme events? How would their psychology change once they realize they are the only pathway forward for human life?

Would human society react to finding a life vacuum in the Milky Way by deciding that their existence was critical, as life was rare in the extreme, and determine to preserve it? When we, as individuals, find something rare, like a beautiful geode or a interesting shell, there is an impulse to save and preserve it. What if we are the rare thing? Would our civilization, after a century of knowing we are alone and the only representatives of life perhaps anywhere in the Local Group of galaxies, transform itself into being less factional and devote a great amount of time to trying to ensure of survival as a species and also ensure life itself continues? It might be more of a change for us to find nobody was there than to find somebody is.

What Would Aliens Like?

There probably is a word in all alien languages for 'like'. This assumes that aliens all evolve brains using neural networks, which is the only kind we know of or have thought of, except for robots with computer chips for brains.

The reason for investigating what aliens would like is because many people here on Earth make statements like 'aliens would do this' or 'aliens would do that', based not upon logic or reasoning, but because they like the 'this' or the 'that' and assume everybody of high standards would. Aliens are of high standards because they have lived a long time or have become very intelligent. This blog is full of statements about what aliens would do, but it is not based on liking, but on what physics or chemistry or neurology or resource shortages force them to do, or on what is the most efficient thing to do, which is coupled to the assumption that they have become both aware of efficiencies and prone to use them.

There is a large chasm between thinking aliens are smart like myself and all my friends, and therefore they would have my opinions on politics or economics or whatever, and thinking aliens are smart and therefore figure out good strategies for living and efficient ways to conserve their resources. Maybe this chasm can be portrayed by thinking about the word 'like'.

Before turning to the dictionary, let me first say that stating 'aliens would do this' because some author or commenter likes 'this', does not mean they do not 'like this'. It simply means that making analogies to the author's likes is not a sufficient basis for concluding it. There has to be some more firm grounds for the contention.

A person 'likes' something when there positive associations with that something in his/her/its brain. A layered neural network, such as all mammals on Earth have, is a wonderful device that evolution has bestowed upon us to save us coding humongous amounts of information in the genome. Lesser animals are largely programmed with fixed neural codes, so their behavior is fixed: a stimulus happens and a response is dictated. Slight amounts of flexible storage is possible, but virtually nothing.

Humans are at the extreme of non-programmed neural networks. Human babies are perhaps the least capable young of the mammals, yet the power of associative programming of the brain leads them to become the smartest of the mammals, provided there is enough education. Associations are laid down to prior associations, until down to the first and lowest layers, where they connect with the few instincts we have, such as suckling or the desire for affection. When something associates with a previous layer that is in the positive bin, it is logged and if repeated or sufficiently impressive, is remembered as something that is 'liked'. This isn't what the dictionaries say, but they do not tend to bring contemporary neurology into their definitions.

This means that if someone grows up in a monarchy, and has a great time under it, everybody being positive about it, they will like monarchy, and possibly think aliens would also. If someone grows up under an oligarchy, and has a great time under it, everybody being positive about it, they will like oligarchy, and possibly think aliens would also. If someone grows up under a caste system, and has a great time under it, everybody being positive about it, they will like a caste system, and possibly think aliens would also. If somebody grows up under a … pick your own preference here and continue the paragraph.

The same argument goes not just for the high-level style of government, but also the various rules by which a society operates under. If you had grown up in ancient Athens, you might like democracy with the franchise limited to adult males who were not slaves, and you might like the institution of slavery as well. If you had grown up in imperial Rome, you might like dictatorship moderated by a small board of elite advisors. If you had grown up in late imperial China, you might think having an emperor with absolute power is ideal, plus a court of thousands of eunuchs. If you had grown up in Scandinavia during the Viking era, you might think raiding is an ideal occupation. If you had grown up during Mayan times in Central America, you might think that independent theocratic city-states were the best way to organize, but if you had grown up eight hundred years later a bit north, in the Aztec empire, you might not think city states were good at all, but a single central authority was best.

What you associate with good things depends on where and when you live, assuming you have a good station within the existing social arrangements. None of these qualify as a 'must-have' for alien civilizations. To figure out what aliens would 'like' instead of our 'likes', we need to conceive of how the alien civilization operates, how it evolved, and what threats it would face.

A few basic principles assist in figuring out these details. One is technological determinism. Technology determines the outline of social organization, and much of the details of it. Another is asymptotic technology, the end state of science and engineering. If we can conceive of it, we can picture an alien civilization's, as it will be identical with every other alien civilization's technology, at the limits. With the technology understood, social organization can be addressed.

Once this is appreciated, the realization comes that technology will continue to change society, leaving all our ideas of social organization in the dust-bin of history. New ways of organizing will become available, and will be the ones that an alien civilization would have. And they will all be rather similar, as their technology will be.

The principal threat that faces an alien civilization that has conquered all fields of science and engineering is straightforward: running out of things. Nothing continues forever, and the inputs that an alien civilization needs are limited. Facing this universal threat, there are a few solutions they can take, and this will provide more details as to how their civilization has to be organized.

As for 'liking' things, their society will understand neurology and the brain, and will inevitably figure out how to make what is in society and what the citizens like converge. In other words, they will like what they need to like, as society can be more efficient with all citizens aware and concurring on the decisions that have to be made. We have a lot of amateur efforts on Earth involved with getting humans to like one thing or another, in fact a tremendous amount of it. It will become a science, and get better and better. It is not much of an assumption to state that aliens will do this better than we do, in a more organized way, and with fewer repercussions and contradictions. Thus the answer to the title question is that they will like their own society's unique social arrangements, not ours, either current or historical ones.

Where is the Rest of our Atmosphere?

Atmospheres are simply an outer coating of gases wrapped around planet's solid cores. Sometimes, with large planets, there might not be any boundary because the pressure is so great the lower part of the atmosphere is past the critical point where there is a difference between gas and liquid.

It's much simpler on a planet like Earth where there is mostly solid, a bit of liquid sloshing around on the surface, and then a very thin layer of gas. When the planets consolidated from the pre-planetary disk, the solids around proto-Earth solidified, maybe some water oozed out to form the liquid contribution, and the light stuff that wasn't cold enough to condense got trapped in the gravity well of the solid core and made an atmosphere. Simple, simple, simple.

If there was more gas, there would be more atmosphere. There is nothing magical about what stays in the atmosphere. The lightest gas, hydrogen, escapes first from lighter planets, then helium, then others in order of molecular weight. Some gases, chemically reactive ones like oxygen and the halides, react and join the solid mass. Nitrogen and carbon dioxide are pretty heavy compared to hydrogen, and stay around longer. If their residence time is longer than the age of the planet, they are still there.

The amount of the atmosphere depends on how much of these atmosphere makers was in the gas cloud which made up the planetary disk. There was clearly some ratio of atmospheric gases to heavy mass, and that ratio, less any chemical reactions with those elements that do that, should be the one that dictates how much atmosphere is on a planet.

Here's the question. Venus is a a neighbor planet and was near Earth in the pre-planetary disk when it formed into planets. So Venus and Earth should have about the same amount of atmosphere. We need to take into account that plants grew on Earth and sucked up the carbon dioxide, and spewed the excess oxygen back into the atmosphere. Fine, maybe that's a factor of two or something. But, Venus has a lot more atmosphere than Earth does. Why is that? Where's the rest of Earth's atmosphere?

Venus' atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide. The claim is that chemical combination made the carbon dioxide on Earth into carbonates, mainly calcium carbonate, and that solid is common near the Earth's surface. Water is pretty low in atomic weight, and the atmosphere of Venus is much hotter than Earth's, so it should have evaporated faster there. Venus' gravity is also less than Earth's, so water would escape a bit easier. The Earth has a mesosphere, a cold, rarefied layer of gases, where water vapor condenses into ice clouds. Water has high intermolecular attraction, and forms ice easily, which serves as a barrier to escape. No similar barrier has been identified on Venus. It has a cold, rarefied mesosphere, but the clouds there are sulfuric acid.

That leaves nitrogen. There is four times as much of it in Venus' atmosphere as in Earth's. Because Venus gravity is less, its temperature is greater, and it has no internally generated magnetosphere to protect the upper atmosphere from the solar wind, there should be less not more. There are also possibly factors related to the very long day there also indicate more nitrogen would be lost per milennia from Venus than from Earth. So, did Venus get hit by a passel of nitrogen meteorites? No. Earth has lost most of its nitrogen, when it should not have.

Earth has a large moon and Venus has none. However, it is simply not close enough or large enough to draw off most of Earth's nitrogen in recent gigayears. However, that may not be true for the impact processes that formed it.

There has been speculation, perhaps since humanity started looking at the sky, about where the moon came from. One idea is that it is a binary planet, formed like binary stars do. But that requires a strange distribution of angular momentum in the preplanetary disk. So other theories have arisen where it was formed when a large planet, nicknamed Theia by some, plowed into it. Theia may have been jostled out of its orbit by one of the giant planets and crossed Mars' orbit to intersect Earth's.

If the hit was a head-on collision, the energy involved might have broken up both of them if the relative speed was of the scale of orbital velocities, or might have resulted in a merged planet if they were very small. If the hit was just a glancing blow, Theia would have proceeded on past Earth and done some other interactions elsewhere. If the hit was between these, and the velocity less than of the scale of orbital velocities, there would have been a temporary merger as the mutual gravity tore the crusts off both of them and merged the mantles and cores. But a non-direct hit has huge angular momentum in the center-of-mass frame and this must be preserved over the short period it takes for the interaction. An elongated blob of molten matter would form and then split in two. The Earth would be one blob, the big one and the moon, the other one. At that time, the moon would be in close orbit over the surface of the new Earth.

The division of mass between the two is such that the Earth's gravity could hold onto the moon and the angular momentum would be divided between the two. However, almost instantly afterwards, the mass that was between the two would fall back to the Earth as it resumed its spherical shape. That mass would have been rotating at the same speed as the dual blob that formed the two bodies, the Earth and the moon. As it falls back, the Earth would have to speed up to maintain the total angular momentum. That means the Earth would have to be rotating faster than the orbital rotation rate of the moon around the new Earth. With the two bodies so close, tidal interactions would be extreme, and the new Earth would begin slowing down its rotation, while the moon would be pushed out further and further with the new angular momentum it was collecting through tidal interactions.

What happens to the atmosphere of the old Earth through this process? There is a huge shock wave rushing through the old Earth, leading the atmosphere to act like a spallation layer and move outward. Some would keep going and be lost, and the rest would fall back. The temperature of the atmosphere would be greatly elevated, leading to escape losses as well. Lastly, the moon in its orbit, starting only a few Earth diameters over the Earth, would be tearing off gas readily. It would be no surprise if only 10 percent remained.

The Theia theory has some other interesting features. One is that the atmosphere, being mostly carbon dioxide, nitrogen, some hydrogen still left, some sulfur chemicals, plus vaporized rock, would be turning itself into a chemical stew. That great heating episode would lead to chemical reactions occurring at a rapid rate and making more varieties of molecules that anyone could list. Among them would be plenty of organics, which could condense into a liquid when the atmosphere cooled down. Maybe even a layer of immiscible ones might cover the re-condensed oceans. Wouldn't that be nice for life?

Early Origination of Life – Organic Oceans – Part 6

The life origination theory discussed here, Organic Oceans, has as a basis that on the very early Earth, and possibly other planets in the liquid water zone (LWZ) of their stars, had not one type of liquid pools, but two. One of course was water. The other was a combination of organic compounds, immiscible in water. The organic ocean was, in places, a layer on top of the water oceans. There was a meniscus between them, and organic molecules which were partially hydrophobic and partially hydrophilic would be stuck at that meniscus, with the appropriate ends of the molecule in the appropriate liquid. Amino acids, nucleotides, lipids are all like this. In short, many of the key molecules which are likely to have played a role in the origination of life would concentrate on the meniscus. The concentration of these ambiphilic molecules (both hydrophilic on one end and lipophilic on the other) on the surface would greatly increase the interaction rate. Membranes could be formed by polymerization of oriented lipids. Polymerization of amino acids might lead to some replication.

This post is about phosphorus. When people normally think about life, they think about hydrocarbons, as that is the largest component of an animal body, except for water. Maybe they know that nitrogen plays a giant role in most of the molecules involved with cellular life. But phosphorus might be not appreciated, unless you are a gardener and know you must add fertilizer containing it, along with nitrogen and potassium. Phosphorus makes up about 1% of our body weight. It is crucial to every cell membrane. It is crucial to the energy storage and transport within the body. It is crucial to DNA coding. It is crucial to signaling within the cells. It is a critical element in almost every function the body does.

In order to originate life, there has to be phosphorus. Nitrogen is in the atmosphere and dissolved in the oceans. Hydrogen and oxygen are water itself. Carbon exists in the form of carbon dioxide, a common molecule in the atmosphere. Phosphorus, like calcium, potassium, sodium and the trace elements needed in an animal body come from rocks. Somehow it has to get to the location of life origination.

Most phosphorus in rocks near the surface of the Earth is recycled. It is in sedimentary rock, deposited in the ocean and either still there or thrust up to the dry surface through tectonic motion. The sediment has apatite, which is one of the few minerals in the body, making up bone and teeth. Dead creatures accumulate on the seabed and after some huge length of time, accumulate into minable minerals. But before life existed, there was no sedimentary rock with phosphorus. It exists in trace quantities in granite, transported up from the mantle, and exists also as a separated form in apatite there as well. It also occurs in other minerals such as feldspar.

Sodium and potassium phosphate are soluble in water, as is almost sodium anything and potassium anything. But calcium phosphate is not. This does not mean that if you dissolve sodium phosphate in water it will stay there, if calcium is present. Calcium phosphate precipitates. It gets even worse in hot water, and precipitates more. So how do you get the phosphate from the rock to the meniscus where is is absolutely needed in life origination?

Combining the phosphate ion with one or two hydrogens from the water helps, as that is more soluble than phosphate alone. But calcium is more electropositive than hydrogen, so that will not solve the precipitation problem.

Recall that solubility is all about the attraction between solvent molecules and solute molecules. If there is no attractive force between a solvent molecule and a solute molecule, but there is between two solute molecules, the solute molecules will stick together, make a nano-crystal or a nano-droplet, depending on the melting point, and precipitate out. Since we do not yet have a clear idea of what might be in the organic ocean, figuring out solubility of calcium phosphate or other phosphorus-containing compounds there is a bit chancy, but there are two rules of thumb that will help.

One is that 'like dissolves like'. Polar molecules like water dissolve other polar molecules, and, to a lesser extent, non-polar molecules dissolve better in non-polar solvents. So there is a good chance that there will be a solubility pathway to transport the phosphorus to the meniscus in this early Earth scenario.

The second thing about solutions is that cosolvents usually increase solubility. It is unlikely that the organic ocean will be all benzene or all octane or all toluene or anything else, but a mixture of many mutually tolerant organics. Alcohols will dissolve in the water, and any other larger hydrocarbon molecule else with bonds similar to water will, and the rest will not. So, the phosphorus compounds would have an easier time in this potpourri of organics than in anything pure. It needs to find something to attract to, in order to displace some space between the solvent molecules. And since they are dissimilar, the forces between them will be less than in a pure solvent, especially a smaller or symmetric one.

Thus, it looks like phosphorus may have a pathway to the life origination site that is much easier, meaning much more can be transported per century, than just a water ocean alone. So far, we have not talked about other elements that might be a problem in transporting them, like sulfur. Sulfates are similar to phosphates in their water solubility characteristics. Halides would of course take the water route.

Something related may have an even bigger effect. If the phosphate compounds interact with something in the organic ocean, making some large molecule which is ambiphilic, it will gradually drift to the meniscus. If the transport time is significantly shorter than the lifetime of such a molecule, there would be an accumulation of phosphorus compounds at the meniscus, just waiting there for some random events to form them into the lipids needed to make a membrane, or the nucleosides needed to form some type of replicator.

On first hearing the term, organic ocean, some people might think of the methane lakes expected to be on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. The biochemistry of life origination there would be completely different that that on early Earth.

Malthus and Bacon in Alien Civilizations

Everyone in the Western Civilization here on Earth seems to know who Malthus was. Thomas Malthus is sometimes termed the first economist. He lived in England around the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, and his ideas can be crystallized in a very compact way. He figured out that people have children when they can, and as many as they can. This means that when living standards rise and things get better for the average person, they have, on the average, more children, and then this cuts down the living standards to the minimum required to maintain the family. This happens on the average, and the sum for the whole population means that population rises to drive down living standards.

In a previous post, we have talked about the choices an alien civilization might make when scarcity looms on the horizon. They can cut living standards or cut population. It is the product of these two that determines the usage rate of resources, and when resources get short, something has to give. Malthus did not use the term living standard, but instead subsistence, by which he meant food. Famine has happened in many cultures at many times, and all living around Malthus' time were familiar with it in their own history. So Malthus' most remembered insight is that when food is plentiful, people have larger families, and this reduces the per capita amount of food. When famine hits, the population drops down to match the available food, so the population an subsistence balancing works both ways.

Since we would expect alien civilizations to emerge from the animal kingdom, still possessing the same survival and reproduction instincts, we would also expect to find that the early eras of any alien civilization would have a Malthusian population, which is one limited by available resources. But what about the grand transitions?

In another previous post, the technology changes that are necessary for an alien civilization were listed, and the earliest ones, the agricultural and the industrial one, happened when the population was still Malthusian. By that time, nothing had happened to enable or to motivate a departure from these circumstances. The agricultural transition allows a larger amount of food to be grown, meaning more subsistence in Malthus' terms, and according to his insight, this would mean population would increase to match the level of food production. It did on Earth, and the mechanisms have to be in place for it to happen in alien civilizations as well. The early portion of the industrial transition does the same thing. More subsistence generated per capita, meaning a higher reproduction rate, meaning back to living at the marginal levels, where population lived at the minimum level necessary to maintain the population.

The seeds of Malthus' insights becoming no longer valid has already been sown by his time. A century before, Francis Bacon, often termed the father of the scientific method, had already written about how to expedite invention and technology development, along with the progress of science. There is a timing that was going on during the earlier eras, in that changes of technology, as in the agricultural revolution, took much longer to come into effect than the generation time of humans, which was about twenty-five years. Information flowed slowly, and was often not accepted without delay or even the dying off of the generation that used the old technology. There was little communication even within a country, much less between them. All these slowdowns meant that Malthus could see that population could change faster than technology, and conclude that for millennia, populations had stayed at a living standard just able to maintain the population, or saying it a different way, population would grow to match the growth of technology. Bacon's invention changed these time scales, but it took over a century for it to happen. The same slow transmission of information meant that his scientific method would not be accepted in enough places fast enough so that Malthus would see the difference and modify his insight.

Bacon's scientific method has a strong feedback loop, however. As inventions increased, so did knowledge of how to produce them. As scientific knowledge increased, so did knowledge of how to obtain more. Technology affected communication and the recording of technology, another speed-up of the changes.

Now on Earth, technology is changing faster than ever before. Furthermore, technology has already changed society that population growth doesn't track technology growth. Here there are still Malthusian populations in some regions, as knowledge penetrates slowly into non-receptive populations, but once it seeps in, it brings with it the feedback loops that increase the penetration. A century or so is all that is necessary.

So, where is the relevance to alien civilizations? Here: Does a Bacon arise in every civilization and beat their Malthus? It is not a personal contest between different genii, but a question of whether the scientific method is a necessary result of the agricultural era having progressed. Is it possible that there would be no Francis Bacon equivalent in an alien civilization? This would condemn the alien planet to being what we have labeled a plateau planet, with perhaps the highest level plateau. Other plateaus might be with only sea life or only chemotrophs or no mitochondria or no something else along the evolutionary track from microbe to intelligent and technologically-proficient aliens. These plateaus are certainly conceivable, as we do not yet have the understanding of evolution necessary to eliminate them. The one where Malthus prevents the alien civilization from getting through the industrial grand transition is the last one, as once the alien civilization does finish it, then it will move into the genetic grand transition, from which no return is possible.

There was only one Bacon here on Earth. For the millennia before 1621, no one arose to proclaim the scientific method. If Bacon himself had not been accused of bribery, he would have stayed in the king's service, and not had years of disbarment during which he could think of science and write about its methodology. By favor of the king, he was not imprisoned, which, considering the conditions in prisons of the day, would have likely ended his life early and likely prevented him from writing his tomes on the scientific method. Thus, it is by no means clear than an alien civilization would have a Bacon to help them escape the clutches of the Malthusian predicament.

Planetary Disks

You can't have aliens without an alien planet, at least to start. Planets condense out of planetary disks, so understanding them a bit might just shed some light on where the aliens are or where they originated. So, let's begin.

A solar system starts with a large gas cloud, mostly hydrogen, some helium, and small amounts of other elements and some molecules. It is rotating, meaning it has angular momentum, which is a dominant contributor to what happens. If the cloud is left alone, meaning other clouds or stars don't come too close to it, it may cool down some and begin to condense. As it shrinks in size, the angular momentum it has forces it to spin faster. This changes the shape to being more spheroidal and then like a disk. The central core of the cloud is growing in gravitational attraction, and as it cools more, it starts to shrink into a spinning sphere. Most of the angular momentum stays out in the disk; for example the sun's angular momentum is less than 5% of the total in our solar system. This division is likely typical.

During this later condensation period, there is a strong gravitational pull from the cloud that is condensing into the star. This is analogous to the Earth's gravitational pull on its atmosphere, and the same thing happens. Heavier stuff drifts toward the star and lighter stuff drifts away from the star. It can't all drift one way or the other because angular momentum is preserved. This means that heavier elements and nano-particles of condensed heavier elements move toward the star, while the lighter gases and molecules get farther out.

Then as the star condenses further and begins burning, the mass of dust and gas that is circling it also condenses further, and starts to form planets. Consider the cloud that formed the solar system we live in. Most of the angular momentum is in Jupiter, which orbits at about 6 AU. If the cloud that formed our solar system was rotating faster, in other words, had more angular momentum, Jupiter would have to be further out, or heavier, or both. If the cloud was rotating slower, Jupiter would have to be further in, lighter, or both. Angular momentum is a kind of random in clouds, with some going faster, some slower, and some peaked curve showing the distribution.

Let's put these ideas together. Most of the mass is hydrogen, so that is what the giant planet or planets would mostly consist of. In a cloud that was slowly spinning, the giant planet would wind up fairly close to the star. But the heavier elements drifted closer to the star than the hydrogen and other light elements, so the likely location of rocky planets, made of the heavier elements, is inside the orbit of the giant planet. Of course, weird things can happen and planets can be tossed to different orbits when they interact, but that is probably unlikely. So the usual case is that the rocky planets coming from a slowly rotating cloud are way inside the star's liquid water zone (LWZ).

The other side of this is that clouds that were really spinning a lot would have their giant planet out far away, and the rocky planets spread over the area between the star and the giant planet. One of them might be in the LWZ.

Planets interact gravitationally, and if their orbits are too close, they will interact and swap angular momentum. Typically this means they spread apart, so a usual solar system would be like ours, with no two planets on orbits close to each other. There are radii ratios which tend to draw the planets together, and ratios which push them apart. Too close is part of the push apart zone. When there are two large planets in a solar system, they would find themselves after some millions of years at the boundary between a push apart zone and a pull together zone. Since they carry most of the angular momentum, the other planets have very little chance of moving them. The only thing the light planets can do is to drift to another boundary where they will no longer drift inwards or outwards.

After the star ignites, it gradually builds up to where there is a solar wind, provided the initial mass of the cloud was enough to make a larger star. The solar wind pushes the residual light gases out of the inner part of the solar system. This leaves the planets and the planetoids without much interaction except for with each other. This is a stable solar system.

If you want to find planets with aliens, in other words, solo worlds, you need to find a solar system with a giant planet out far enough so that there is space for the rocky planets, and not the other way around, with a giant planet in close to the star and smaller planets out further. The latter case will likely not be good for the origination of life.

As a off-hand comment, another post commented that seeing an alien civilization might only be done by seeing their interplanetary mining ships, except for a short window of time when electromagnetics were blasting out to the universe and the night-side of the planet was lit up with some sort of lighting. Nowadays there is a tiny buzz about mining asteroids. Perhaps what we want to mine would be rare-earth elements and uranium, both candidates for enough value per kilogram to warrant flying them back to Earth. However, those are heavier elements, and the concentrations of them might better be found on the planets nearer to the sun. So, a cautious prediction: mining will be done on Mercury, not on the asteroids, if at all.

To observe alien mining ships, this would depend on the structure of their solar system. Do they have small planets in close to their star? If not, then they would have to go elsewhere for their loot. But if they do, and they use economical steady thrust engines, we might discover aliens before they come here to us.

Are We Detectable?

The question in the title goes two ways. Perhaps you thought the idea was that if aliens couldn't tell we were here, in other words, that Earth has intelligent life, that they wouldn't come here to see us. This is one possible answer to the question of where are all the aliens. But the title question can be interpreted in the opposite direction. In a previous post, it was surmised that aliens only look for colonizable planets to go to, and any one that already has an alien civilization, meaning we are the aliens to them, isn't worth going to. It is too hard to get rid of another intelligent species, even if the planet is just peachy for colonization.

Either way, the technological question is: are we detectable? The light travel time is not too important in this regard, unless it is something recent that is the only detectable thing. If there is an alien species, looking for a colonizable planet out to a thousand light years, they would know that they are seeing Earth as it was in the past. How they treat that delay might be interesting, if we knew how we were going to be detected.

One common idea is that they would hear our electromagnetic transmissions out into space, and recognize instantly that there was a technological civilization on Earth. From their point of view, they might think there is, or was, taking into account travel time, a pretty primitive technological civilization on Earth, but again, in the hundred or thousand years that light takes to get to their planet, we would have made great advances. And in the thousand or ten thousand years it would take their starship to get here, we would have made even more. We would probably have gotten to asymptotic technology, the limit of technology knowledge, just as they have. So seeing even the slightest indication of us being on the technological pathway means that when their starship gets here, a civilization with an equal level of technology is awaiting them.

That means they cannot exterminate us using some clever technology devices. It wouldn't matter if it was killer robots or monster carnivores or deadly viruses or long-lasting toxics or whatever, to us, at that distant time in the future, it would be just something we knew about centuries before and figured out how to deal with it. Our killer robots, being built here on Earth where we could build lots more of them and bigger ones too, would smack down theirs. We would probably just hunt down any monster carnivores, set our anti-viral bacteria out to absorb and nullify their viruses, and use some biological whiz-bang to take care of the toxics they dumped into our atmosphere. So, since you can't hardly carry anything at all on a starship, they wouldn't have a chance of wiping us out.

This means, to the aliens, that's them now, if they see any sign of technology or even a civilization that was getting ready to start technology, it's a show-stopper. Find another planet, please.

So, how would they see us? We need to be careful about assuming we are anywhere near asymptotic technology. We used to have tv stations broadcasting signals, and we still have some, but everywhere is getting wired up now, and the broadcasting will be more or less obsolete and not worth maintaining. We have radars that look for aircraft, and they might be recognizable if the aliens built a kilometer wide dish to receive it, but GPS is likely to eliminate the need for that. Perhaps there will be a few more decades of it, but all in all, there is only a short window in time when this type of broadcast would happen.

How about other signals, like cell-phone tower signals getting reflected off into space? When the world is wired up, with hotspots everywhere, these towers will be obsolete. And if arcologies become the order of the day, which is how a civilization does recycling to high percentages, there aren't any signals leaking out. Each arcology is wired to the others, and inside one, there is connectivity everywhere at high enough frequency that the atmosphere would absorb it pretty well before it gets out to space.

Maybe there would be the occasional transmission to a space probe. These are highly directional. Unless the beam just happened to pass over the star where the alien civilization was waiting to hear it, they would have no chance. Sidelobes are just not wide enough or strong enough. What's left – not much.

How about watching our sun to see a transit of Earth, and getting a spectroscopic view of what's in the atmosphere? Transits only are visible in the plane of the orbit and a bit around it, and they might be lucky and be there. If they were, they might detect man-made chemicals in the air, if there were any which both lasted a long time, and had great signatures for detection. But are we going to continue to dump these chemicals into the air? Maybe there are some which linger in the upper atmosphere for centuries, which would stretch the window of detection. Chemicals which are produced from the combustion of fossil fuels might be too similar to those which are produced from forest fires. A little investigation would be nice here, but the transit observation option is not immediately promising.

One thing they could likely see is the light pollution from our cities. Anyone with a huge visible wavelength detector that could block the light of our sun, which is pretty easy and we are even getting ready to do it ourselves, and look at the planet alone, would notice there is a lot of light on the dark side. What would they assume that is, huge populations of fireflies? It looks like that is a clear indicator of a technological civilization. If we move into arcologies, will there still be much light pollution? Quite possibly, there would be a lot less. Detectable? Who knows.

Just to put a generous range on things, we might be detectable easily in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but before that and after that, it would be questionable. So, if an alien civilization with asymptotic technology, that's us now in the future, would be a very serious liability for any colonization attempt, there is just a short period of time to observe ground emissions or atmospheric pollution reliably. What else is possible?

Spaceships, of the interplanetary kind. If we start to mine asteroids and satellites of the gas giant planets, the rocket exhaust might be visible to a huge dish, with some luck as to orientation. This mining is likely to go on during the whole period of technological civilization, so the window when it could be observed is long indeed. A small ship bringing back diamonds from Titan, or whatever, would be hard to see, but how about something vacuuming up hydrocarbons from the atmosphere of Jupiter? How about a ship bringing back megatons of iron from Ceres? This is one possibility that needs to be examined. It would be necessary to consider what types of engines might be used, and how the burns would be scheduled.

As noted elsewhere in this blog, the alternative is to send a probe. This is a serious delay, but is the only alternative to remote detection or taking a chance, perhaps one of the most expensive bets an alien civilization could afford – sending a colonization ship to a possibly inhabited planet. These questions are well worth considering in more detail.

Large Observatory or Interstellar Probe?

Here's a chain of reasoning which might explain why aliens haven't come knocking at our doors. First, just assume there are a lot of them, they maintain their civilizations by migrating, they communicate with other inhabited worlds, they have star travel, and from time to time, one solar system just runs flat out of resources and has to be abandoned. They move their civilization somewhere else, as they are category A2 aliens, who value their civilization and want to preserve it.

Second, colonization doesn't mean everybody on a planet packs up and gets on board a stellar transport and heads over to a new planet. That's way too costly. Even sending a colonization team might be too expensive, and also, unnecessary. We need to ask what their goals are, and the answer is, by assumption of what category alien we are talking about, preservation of their civilization. This does not mean preservation of their population by moving them. Scarcity doesn't happen fast, but very slowly. There is no need for evacuation. Just for a colonization robot ship to go and bring everything necessary to re-construct their civilization there.

Think of the cost differential. Robotics doesn't require life support, which for a hundred to thousand year voyage, is immense. Asymptotic robotics, coupled with asymptotic genetics, would make setting up a new planet on a suitable world, a sweet spot world, child's play.

Don't imagine the negatives are like a famine on Earth. Nobody is running out of anything on the alien planet. They see their resources are running dry, do the starship thing, and gradually reduce their population over the centuries. They are busy substituting resources that are still available for resources which are growing to costly to obtain. Meanwhile they are waiting for communication to come back from the new world, so everybody will have a happy feeling about fulfilling their meme of civilization preservation.

They are all brilliant, so they see scarcity coming, and long before any crisis might occur, make plans to deal with it. Perhaps they do two or three starships, just to cover their bets. Reliability is will understood after asymptotic technology, and recreating life in a lander on the new planet will simply follow well-understood procedures, done on the home planet millions of times. There is one question however.

Would they need to send a probe to the potential new planets to do some detailed measurements before sending out the colony ship? The probe might be one tenth the size of the colony ship, and if there was a lot of uncertainty, some alien leader might suggest sending out ten or twenty, just to pick the best worlds. But is it necessary? Could an alien civilization use very large observatories in their home solar system to figure out everything they needed to know? Are probes superfluous?

To try and get some insight into that, think about what they would want to know. Just assume for the discussion they live on the solo planet that spawned them, or something similar to it. It is a tectonically quiet planet, with breathable air, life forms related to them everywhere in the natural areas or maybe life forms related to them by DNA type that they have created and used to replace the natural ones, not too much UV or radiation, full of resources, and probably a few more. This is a sweet spot world. It is just waiting for intelligent life to come to it. Can you tell one from a distance?

With a mind-boggling observatory in their solar system, out far from the sun for quiescence, able to sit and look for a century at potential home planets, these things can be figured out. Imaging the planet would be possible with kilometer-scale telescopes, and perhaps they could be built large enough to see if there were polar ice caps or land masses at middle latitudes. The atmosphere would be measured very accurately, and used to model the planet. The consistency of the model with all the known measurements would provide a great deal of confidence in what was on these planets. They could not rule out tectonics, but volcanoes put signatures into the atmosphere, and if you are monitoring the atmosphere for a century, you at least know how much volcanism went on during that time.

UV doesn't need the huge observatory to measure it, that is an easy one, knowing the sun and the atmosphere of the planet. What about radiation?

Let's not forget that the data from the observatory looking at these candidate planets is not the only source of information they have. They have generic information. They know how planets form, they know how to estimate what was in the premordial dust cloud that condensed into the planets. They of course know the lifetimes of radioactive elements. So they can comfortably predict the radiation.

Let's also not forget they have passed the genetic grand transition. They are not worried about some virus being present on the planet that would infect all the colonized life, and kill it off. Virus checks would be routine on their planet, and furthermore, their master computer network would be able to generate all possible types of viruses, and determine plans for detecting and eliminating them.. The same goes for microbes. What about hungry carnivores? Not a problem for defense.

They wouldn't even send a probe, as the remote observatory would be able to tell them whatever they wanted. The only ship to come would be the colonizing one.

This leaves one obvious problem. What about another alien civilization on the planet, not so far along in their development, but there and maybe in the hunting stage or the agricultural stage or the early industrial stage, or maybe later. Their starship is going to take centuries to get there, and what is such a civilization going to develop into within that travel time? Will they see the lander and set about to destroy it? This could turn a sweet spot world into a disaster. Could the aliens contemplating colonization figure out how to eliminate the other alien species without damaging the planet in some way. How hard would it be to do that? Doesn't that depend on how many of them there are and what technology they have accomplished? Even if they could measure how many of the new type of aliens were on the planet, how many would there be after a few centuries of travel time?

What exactly might be their strategy for taking over this planet, or rather taking it away from the homebodies? Robot exterminators – how to make enough of them? Poisons – how do you get it to all the aliens? Some plague – probably some would be immune. Maybe the best bet is to pick a planet with no civilization there, or where a civilization had destroyed itself.

So, if there have been a civilization nearby us, with the right timing so they were at the cusp of scarcity, and they looked at Earth in the last twenty thousand years with a gigantic observatory, perhaps they said, 'No, thanks, keep the planet, we'll go to another one.' If getting rid of aliens, especially ones with a nasty tendency to want to hang onto their only planet, is the hardest problem a colonist might face, this explains why nobody has come here. It's us.

Constant Thrust Trajectories

Many times, in making some calculations about star flight, someone will write that they are assuming a constant acceleration, sometimes equal to one g, sometimes not, and then start constant deceleration halfway through the flight. Thus they arrive at the destination star with zero velocity. Roaring by your target star at a fraction of light speed is considerably worse than missing your exit on the freeway. You can't make a U-turn and get back.

The real problem is that no starship captain would ever use his ship this way. A starship can be thought of as having two masses, the propellant mass and the payload, which is everything else, including the propulsors, the energy source, the habitat or the probe equipment, the communications gear, and everything else. Back in the Apollo days, chemical rockets were pretty much the only thing around, and so they were used. In this situation, you didn't have any separated propulsion power supply and propellant, they were the same. The propellant was a single solid or a pair of liquids, and it came with all the chemical energy you could pack into it. You burned it at some rate, and voila, you took off into space.

Now there are many options for stellar propulsion, some more hypothetical than others. But chemical rockets aren't the likely option. That doesn't matter for the arguments here, except for figuring out some practical cases, which we won't do.

The point of this post is that you are wasting your engine if you choose this trajectory. Suppose you want to get to the destination star at the earliest possible time. You start out, using your engine flat out. After you have gone some distance, and accumulated some speed, your propellant mass will be lower. If you continue to use your engine to the max, your acceleration will increase, as now the same thrust is pushing a smaller total mass, meaning the payload and the remaining propellant mass. So if you want to have the constant acceleration trajectory, you need to throttle back your engine, proportionally to the total mass of the ship as it exists. What this means is that you have an engine, but you are not using it to the maximum effect. You are not going to get to the target star in the minimum time.

The best you can do for a given mass of propellant is to run the engine at the maximum until you reach a particular point in the trajectory where you need to reverse thrust, and decelerate back down to approximately zero speed, when you hopefully will be at the target solar system. The time when you reverse thrust is not half way through the voyage, nor is it at the midpoint of the travel line stretching from the origin to the destination. It will occur much later than halfway through the trip. One way of looking at the situation is that at the reverse point, you don't have nearly as much mass to decelerate as you did to accelerate, as you have been throwing it all away out the engine. You have consumed more than half of the propellant by the reverse point.

By the time just before you arrive at the target star, you will have consumed all the propellant you designated for the trip. You might have saved some for some orbital maneuvers in the destination solar system, but that should be thought of as part of the payload for the interstellar travel portion. That means, your final deceleration will be with the same engine running at maximum output, but only having to slow down the payload plus a jot of residual fuel. The g load, i.e., acceleration, will be much greater at the end of the trip than at the beginning.

Consider a simple numerical example. There is only one critical parameter that needs to be considered, and that is the ratio of the payload weight, meaning everything but propellant, to the propellant weight. For a payload to propellant of 1 to 10, the turn-around time is about 76% of the total trip length. During the first three quarters of the trip, you are burning a lot of propellant accelerating the remaining propellant. After it is gone, you can decelerate much more readily.

You might ask, is the constant thrust trajectory the fastest way to get to another stellar system? It's obviously not. It's the economical way to get there. You could get a bigger engine, and blast yourself up to a high cruise speed, sit at that speed until you were close to the target solar system, and then decelerate in a hurry, using the bigger engine pushing against a smaller total mass. This trajectory, like all others that use the engine to its full power when thrusting, have a more abrupt slowdown than startup.

Having a larger engine comes with a cost. The cost is in the payload weight of the engine, as a larger thrust engine will have more mass, and therefore more payload, so the fuel you will have to carry will be larger. But that is not all. Since we are not using chemical rockets, there has to be a source of energy to ramp the propellant up to exhaust velocity. This could be a reactor, fission or fusion, or something more exotic. But whatever it is, it takes mass and having more thrust means more mass for the power source, not just the engine itself.

Recall that starships are going to be expensive, and while it might be great to want your starship to cruise at a high velocity, it might not be affordable. We are, in this blog, thinking about alien civilizations, and a starship would likely be a definitely noticeable item on their budget. Would they want to save some time in getting it to its destination faster? Why? It is going to be generations to get there anyway, and what would it matter if it was two or three or five or ten? They would still have to put the project into mothballs once the launch happened, and then rebuild an organization to use the data once the destination was achieved by the starship and was transmitted back.

So, if time is not of the essence in star travel, the constant thrust trajectory is likely to be the one chosen. This has some very, very interesting implications for us. A ship traveling silently and invisibly without any power, because it is cruising at high speed rather than rationing its propellant, would be hard to detect. A starship traveling under continuous power would possibly give off some signs. A starship that was accelerating would not look like anything else, as proper motion of anything doesn't do that. So, once noticed, it would be recognizable. That's good for us, if we ever spend a lot of time developing our observational powers for starships.

Early Origination of Life – Organic Oceans – Part 5

This blog is about finding aliens, or, barring that, finding out why they are hidden and not showing up, in particular here on Earth, which we all know is a very nice place to hang out. One of the essential requirements for having aliens showing up to hang out with us is aliens. There has to be some.

The hypothesis this subset of posts has been discussing relates to the origination of aliens, or more specifically, the origination of life which, under the right conditions, might evolve into aliens. You have to have life before anything else can happen. The peculiar hypothesis is that life does not spring into being on Earth as we know it. Specifically, it says that it springs into being only during a very early era on Earth, even before there was fossilization or almost any records, and then, once it did, it evolved in such a way that it could stick around for billions of years until it produced the ultimate in living organisms, human beings. Maybe not the ultimate. But us, anyway.

Furthermore, it says that this is the way to produce life anywhere and that life doesn't originate any other way, or at least it could say that. Maybe there is another way, but we haven't even found one way yet so the chances of there being two are fairly remote. To spell it out more explicitly, the organic oceans hypothesis says that life only originates in the very early formation stage of a planet's history, when condensing gases were making up the planet and they included lots of organic compounds, including those which were immiscible with water. After some time, chemistry eliminates such compounds, and the chances for life originating go to zero.

If we see a planet, and can get a rough concept of its age, probably by dating the star it revolves around, we know how long life has been around there, assuming it originated. If we are looking at a planet which is Earth-like, and we assume that the same length of time for life to evolve from some chemicals on a meniscus to cities of ten million inhabitants holds for that planet, we know what stage they are in. If this is a star which formed after ours, there may be life, but it might still be in the alien dinosaur stage, rather than the aliens we talk to stage. If this is a star which formed considerably before ours, we can figure the alien civilization there ran through its resources and is all burned out by now. Nothing there, probably, but some hunters living on the bounty of the planet, meaning its renewable resources.

Of course there is a variation in the speed at which various critical steps of evolution would take place. When we understand a little more about evolution, we can figure out if the rate is governed by the rate of mutation or by something else. Is there a 1% variation or a 5% or a 10%? For the interim, we might assume 10% is a reasonable band, so that if a star is less than 90% of the age of the sun, life is still big lizards or whatever their equivalent is, and if it is more than 110% of the age of the sun, the alien civilization there is past its golden age, past its silver age, past its copper age, and has retrogressed back to its wooden age.

There are a lot of stars out there in the galaxy, and so if we are going to point listening devices at them, or do some detailed study of their atmospheres, or some other wonderful obserational technique that hasn't been invented yet, we might want to not waste our time with the <90% ones or the >110% ones, at least for starters. This might reduce our effort by something of the order of 10.

There are other implications as well. It is physically possible to build radio dishes so one planet in one solar system can communicate, albeit with long delays, with another planet in a different solar system, if they are not too far apart. In some posts here, we noted that it would be ever so nice if we happened to be close to the beam path between two planets that were communicating. Then we could at least detect the signals, even though we couldn't understand them. Now, by using the organic oceans hypothesis, this reduces the number of planets that could mount this technology, to those which possess the correct approximate age. There is no point in trying to totally eliminate those planets which do not meet this criteria, but for the first few we look at, we might as well pick the best bets.

Here's another implication. If we took the organic ocean hypothesis as something like a working hypothesis, it might be useful to try and figure out how long such an ocean might live on a newborn planet. What triggers the formation, besides the right temperature of the cooling planet, and what triggers the disappearance of it? Is the period of existence suprisingly short? Does the liquid ocean, with all its dissolved salts and what-not, eat away at it so it lasts only ten million years? That means that the origination phenomena happen relatively quickly, in a geological timescale. It also raises the concern that other planets may have had a shorter period, and therefore didn't make it to the stage of life which could transfer location to the water ocean. Perhaps the evolution of a G6 star is different than that of a G2 or a G8 or anything else, and this affects the duration of the unique conditions that might originate life.

Wouldn't it be the most interesting thing if some brilliant astrophysicists or exo-geologists found out that G2 stars like our sun have the longest time for such an ocean to exist? Different factors play a role, and it just so happens that G2's are at the maximum. The implications of this are obvious. Only a G2 has an organic ocean around for long enough to evolve life. There aren't aliens anywhere else.

Clearly such a surprise would only be possible after a lot of theorizing and computing and general thinking about the formation of planets from dust disks around stars, and how fast they condense, and what factor impacts play, and how does the geology settle out. Does the core form after ten million years or a hundred? How about the crust? What controls the temperature profile with time? Such interesting questions may lead us to a very deep understanding of our place in the universe.

Early Origination of Life – Organic Oceans – Part 4

Most molecules don't do anything. They usually sit, surrounded by others of their kind, in a bottle on the shelf in a chemical laboratory, just waiting for somebody to do something to them. The concept of them doing something to themselves, or to other molecules, is a bit far-reaching. Yet, the concept of chemical evolution demands it. How is this to be reconciled with what we know about ordinary chemicals?

What is the most we might expect of a molecule? Perhaps it could break a bond on another chemical by interacting with it, or perhaps join up with something else. The idea of a complicated molecule, say with ten atoms or more, much less a hundred or two, making another of the same kind is so extreme as to be unthinkable. Is that what we need a Replicator to do?

What happens in a real biological cell? Phenomenal things. DNA wraps itself up or unwraps itself at the appropriate time. Various enzymes produce proteins. The message coded into the DNA is turned into some unique proteins that accomplish some amazing things. The cell wall has a very sensitive permeability to things it wants to let in. There is a whole slew of energy producing molecules produced by microscopic energy factories. And on and on. The biological world is so complicated, so sophisticated, so engaging, that it leaves any chemical arrangement looking like nothing worth mentioning.

But perhaps there is something to be learned by analogy. An enzyme typically does not produce its target organic protein output out of elemental atoms. It is not juggling three hundred atoms and trying to make them all go to the right places. It is doing a simple cut or join of some other proteins or other molecules. Why couldn't we have chemical evolution doing something simple like that as well?

Suppose we have a strong of amino acids hooked onto the organic side of the meniscus membrane. Could they, perhaps aided by some ions floating around in the vicinity of the membrane, hook together a string of other amino acids which were just in the neighborhood? Could a ten amino acid combination somehow facilitate the production of a ten amino acid combination? Things don't have to be perfect. If the ten amino acid combination makes a hundred amino acid combinations before it is sundered into its parts, and ninety eight of them are random things and two are copies of itself or its mirror image in some system of pairing, then it is a replicator. In a cell, it would be insanely inefficient for an enzyme to make ten mistakes while producing one copy of the right protein, but chemical evolution is not taking place in a cell, it is taking place in an organic ocean, where detrius, meaning mistakes, can be flushed away, while the two correct copies adhere to the membrane and begin their own copying adventures. Efficiency can come much later.

In a cell, as far as we know, there is one energy currency, ATP. If an enzyme is busy making some join that is energetically not possible, ATP can come along and supply the energy needed to do it. Is there a possible energy source in the meniscus membrane situation? Could it be some ion is transported along the ambiphilic molecules from the water side to the organic side, but never into solution there, just to the amino acids or some other molecules hanging onto the lipophilic end? When the energy transfer is done, the ion is allowed to drift away connected to some small organic molecule. Where would this wonderful energy originate? In a cell, it could come from photosynthesis or from some complex carbohydrate that was available. In the oceans, perhaps it comes from photodissociation or from thermal effects or volcanic effluent or something else that can be stored in molecular form for a while.

If we make the assumption that almost everything in chemical evolution is done with amino acids, are there enough in the organic ocean to make it possible? Recall the enormous times available. If a typical replicator takes a year to make two copies, in a few decades the first such molecule will have taken over the oceans. Only one is needed to start, and if that takes ten million years for the first one, it is enough, as the period of life origination is many times that.

Could the meniscus membrane be fashioned from amino acids? If so, then fabrication of it at some later stage of chemical evolution might be easier. Are there any amino acids which are hydrophilic, perhaps with the addition of a metal ion or something else? Probably many are lipophilic. If none are or can be made hydrophilic, at least the organic ocean side of the molecule can be made of amino acids.

The organic ocean side is likely almost entirely made of molecules which do not interact with the meniscus membrane at all. Hundreds of organic molecules, anything with five or six or more carbon atoms, is likely to be a part of it. All these do not alter the molecule, do not adhere to it, and by and large do not do anything to whatever does attach to it. They serve to provide the liquid that makes the meniscus, and dissolve the interesting molecules.

If there is some depth to the organic ocean, it is possible to ask if there is any depth variation of composition. Do a thought experiment. If you have two miscible liquids, one of which is more dense than the other, and you mix them and put them in a very tall tank, is what is on the bottom the same as what is on the top? Does the relative density make any difference at all? It makes sense that the more dense one will be more concentrated at the bottom of the tank. There has to be a balance of the forces of gravitation and random kinetic motion of liquid molecules. For gases, this is pretty easy to figure out, but for liquids, harder. Anyway, it makes sense that more dense liquids would concentrate to a degree at the bottom of the organic ocean. Assuming that the combined organics are still lighter than salty water, they would be on top. The density surmise indicates that the light stuff, the five carbon stuff and close relatives, would be at the top, and down by the meniscus, heavier molecules. Like amino acids, for example. If they were produced by lightning at the top, they would drift down. Sometimes, things just seem to fit together.

Early Origination of Life – Organic Oceans – Part 3

http://stanericksonsblog.blogspot.com/2016/02/early-origination-of-life-organic-oceans.html and Part 2 of this subset of posts detailed a different theory for the origination of life. The theory came into being because it was asked, what conditions might have been different in the early days of planet Earth, when life did originate. One condition, which vanished sometime after that, was the possible existence of bodies of organic liquids, possible a melange of all the ones which were either immiscible with water, or much preferred an organic solution to a water one. This of course means the relative solubility is much different, not that the particular organic was wholly insoluble in water.

The concept of an organic ocean is remarkably simple. An organic ocean exists when there are large quantities of organic compounds on a planet, and they liquify at whatever temperature the planet is providing for them. Planets probably start out hotter, because they are formed from gravitational infall, plus planetesimals crashing into them at incredible speed, and between the heat generated by the gravitational infall plus the heat generated by the great compression caused by the thousand of kilometers of mass, together with the heat of impacts, the whole planet would start out hot. Then, like everything without an internal source of heat, it cooled down. And as the condensation point of each organic was passed, in the downward direction, it would join in the organic ocean. Once the condensation point of water was formed, there would be both organic oceans and water oceans. Likely, the organic ocean would overlay the water ocean, from a guess at what the density of the organics would be.

Various things happen. One thing, the only really interesting thing from the origin of life point of view, is that there would be a meniscus, and certain molecules would have a preference for staying on it. These are molecules, perhaps longer than most others, with a hydrophilic molecule on one end, and a lipophilic one on the other, hence the name ambiphilic. One interesting question is that if there are more than one variety of ambiphilic molecules in the dual ocean, would they tend to segregate, or somehow collect in like groups. Another one, and a critical one, is would there be any of them which would adhere to like molecules, leading to the formation of a flexible membrane.

The organic ocean hypothesis for the origin of life assumes such a membrane can exist, and then molecules of other types can attach to them. This provides a high density and perhaps some orientation preferences for molecules. There is also assumed to be a set of molecules which interact with each other, as well as the membrane, and as well as with ions reaching the membrane from the water side, and are able to replicate themselves.

Thus, instead of having to solve the very difficult proposition about a cell membrane forming from chemical processes alone, some physical chemistry is brought in to help, and it is not the responsibility of the replicating chemicals to produce it. This makes it easier to find some set of molecules that, under some conditions as described in the organic ocean hypothesis, can make other molecules which include their own types.

This isn't life, of course, as it doesn't meet the definition of life that is current now: something is alive if it can reproduce, feed, avoid damage, and adapt to change. That does seem to be a tall order, but labeling these chemicals as alive is really a meaningless distinction. What does matter is the existence or non-existence of a pathway to more complex collections of molecules. Specifically, is there such a thing as chemical evolution?

If there is chemical evolution, then the endgame of the organic ocean hypothesis is obvious. Each generation of the set of molecules which can replicate, albeit in the unusual situation of being attached to an ambiphilic membrane located on the mensicus between a water ocean and an organic ocean, has the chance of some change being induced by any of a wide variety of events, and some of these changes will be successful. Non-lethal is not the right word for a non-living thing, but that's the idea. Some successful changes will be more prolific and numbers will favor them.

Sooner or later, there would have to be some mutation which makes one component of the membrane, and maybe later, both components. Once that happens, the number of membranes goes up, and the latest version of them comes equipped with some set of molecules which makes their components. Do they reproduce now? Yes. Do they feed now? Yes. Do they avoid damage? No. Do they adapt? No. Two out of the four criteria for life isn't a bad start.

Consider the avoiding damage criteria. Exactly what might be causing damage to this weird little collection of molecules, or single gigantic molecule as they are all joined together one way or another. Chemicals might. Some chemical in the water side might break bonds of the molecules on the organic side. If the membrane had selective porosity, so that damaging ions or ionic chemicals or whatever bad stuff there was, couldn't get through, but the useful ions that involved providing energy to the whole gang of molecules or contributed to the construction of a copy, could get through, it would be remarkably superior in replication power. Chemical evolution just came through and provided the third criteria.

As for damage protection, there might be some molecules on the organic side which might disassociate something in the molecule set, but, since there is no membrane of the organic side to protect the molecular machinery there, no damage protection can go on. Unless, of course, the membrane bends around and closes. As long as all the needed molecules can get through, but the ones which disassociate, or even get in the way by attaching to some critical juncture where something else was supposed to attach, cannot get through, we have damage protection in spades!

We also have something which has one more characteristic of a cell, an enclosing membrane. It isn't alive, as the fourth criteria isn't met, but it is beginning to appear like life.

Can chemical evolution happen? Can it happen in some situation which is completely advantageous for it to happen? Perhaps chemical evolution cannot happen in any situation on Earth now which exists anywhere on the planet, but it could long ago. There is no clear boundary between chemical evolution and biological evolution, so if chemical evolution can happen, there seems to be no reason why it cannot continue on past the point where it has graduated to life and biological evolution.

If I had a big physical chemistry lab, and I wanted to find out about the origin of life, under the organic ocean hypothesis, I would start by experimenting with solubility, so it would be possible to figure out how any combination of molecules would divide themselves up. Much is known about solubility, and some general principles are that like dissolves in like, meaning that non-polar molecules are likely to dissolve in any bath of non-polar molecules. But what kind of exceptions arise?

The next thing I would do would be to make a catalog of ambiphilic molecules, and see how may hundreds or thousands there are. Do they segregate into groups? Do those groups tend to bond, or if there were any particular things on the water side of the meniscus, like an ammonium ion or anything else, that would cause such a bonding? Is some unique molecule from the organic side needed to form such a bond? This sounds like good fun for physical chemists.

What things, say starting with amino acids, like to bond onto some of the lipophilic ends of these molecules? How stable is the bonding? Again, is it mediated by something from the water side, the organic side, or both together?

After a whole lot of physical chemist-years of work, it would be time to search for replicating combinations of molecules. Once that is found, chemical evolution would be as good as proven, and the origin of life would be in the headlights, straight ahead.