The Sky is Made by Life

The Sky is Made by Life

Life had arisen almost immediately after the origin of the Earth, which suggests that life may be an inevitable chemical process on an Earth-like planet.

Sex seems to have been invented around two billion years ago. Before then, new varieties of organisms could arise only from the accumulation of random mutations, the selection of changes, letter by letter, in the genetic instructions. Evolution must have been agonizingly slow. With the intervention of sex, two organisms could exchange whole paragraphs, pages and looks of their DNA code, producing new varieties ready for the sieve of selection. Organisms are selected to engage in sex – the ones that find it uninteresting quickly become extinct. And this is true not only of the microbes of two billion years ago. We humans also have a palpable devotion to exchanging segments of DNA today.

By one billion years ago, plants, working cooperatively, had made a stunning change in the environment of the Earth. Green plants generate molecular oxygen. Since the oceans were by now filled with simple green plants, oxygen was becoming a major constituent of the Earth’s atmosphere, altering it irreversibly from its original hydrogen-rich character and ending the epoch of Earth history when the stuff of life was made by non-biological processes.

Perhaps there are many other planets that today have abundant microbes but no big beasts and vegetables. Image Dark Colored Mosaic: Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

But oxygen tends to make organic molecules fall to pieces. Despite our fondness for it, it is fundamentally a poison for unprotected organic matter. The transition to an oxidizing atmosphere posed a supreme crisis in the history of life, and a great many organisms, unable to cope with oxygen, perished. A few primitive forms, such as botulism and tetanus bacilli, manage to survive even today in oxygen-free environments. The nitrogen in the Earth’s atmosphere is much more chemically inert and therefore much more benign than oxygen. But it, too, s biologically sustained. Thus, 99 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere is of biological origin.

For most of the four billion years since the origin of life, the dominant organisms were microscopic blue-green algae, which covered and filled the oceans. Then some 600 million years ago, the monopolizing grip of the algae was broken and an enormous proliferation of new lifeforms emerged, an event called the Cambrian explosion.

But life did not evolve much beyond blue-green algae for three billion years, which suggests that large lifeforms with specialized organs are hard to evolve, harder even than the origin of life.

If we plunged through a pore into a nucleus of the cell, we would find something that resembles an explosion in a spaghetti factory – a disorderly multitude of coils and strands, which are the two kind of nucleic acids: DNA, which knows what to do, and RNA, which conveys the instructions issued by DNA to the rest of the cell.

These are the best that four billion years of evolution could produce, containing the full complement of information of how to make a cell, a tree or a human work.

A fertilized egg takes many as long to wander from the fallopian tubes and implant itself in the uterus as Apollo 11 took to journey to the Moon; and as long to develop into a full-term infant as Viking took on its trip to Mars. The normal human lifetime is longer than Voyager will take to venture beyond the orbit of Pluto.

John Carter and Carl Sagan

John Carter and Carl Sagan

We can remember as children reading with breathless fascination the Mars novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. We journeyed with John Carter, gentelman adventurer from Virginia, to “Barsoom”, as Mars was known to its inhabitants. We followed herds of eight-legged beasts of burden, the thoats. We won the hand of the lovely Dejah Thoris, Princess of Helium. We befriended a four-meter-high green fighting man named Tars Tarkas. We wandered within the spired cities and domed pumping stations of Barsoom, and along the verdant banks of Nylosirtis and Nepenthes canals.

Might it really be possible – in fact and not in fancy – to venture with John Carter to the kingdom of Helium on the planet Mars? Could we venture out on a summer evening, our way illuminated by the two hurting moons of Barsoom, for a journey of high scientific adventure?

Even if all Lowell’s conclusions about Mars, including the existence of the fabled canals, turned out to be bankrupt, his depiction of the planet had at least this virtue: it aroused generations of eight-year-olds, myself among them, to consider the exploration of the planets as a real possibility, to wonder if we ourselves might one day voyage to Mars.

John Carter got there by standing in an open field, spreading his hands and wishing. Carl Sagan spent many an hour in his boyhood, arms resolutely outstretched in an empty field, imploring what he believed to be Mars to transport him there. It never worked. There had to be some other way.

Great secrets are wrested from Nature through a million years of patient observation and courageous thinking by our ancestors. Image: Computer Graphics CGI Computer Generated Imagery © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

Anyway, Sagan learned another astonishing fact. The Earth, which includes Brooklyn, is a planet, and it goes around the Sun. There are other planets. They go also around the Sun; some are closer to it and some are father away. But the planets do not shine by their own light, as the Sun does. They merely reflect light from the Sun. If you were a great distance away, you would not see the Earth and the other planets at all;; they would be only faint luminous points, los in the glare of the Sun. It stand to reason that the other stars must have planets too, ones we have not yet detected, and some of those other planets should have life (why not?), a kind of life probably different from life as we know it, life in Brooklyn. So, Car Sagan decided, he would be an astronomer, learn about the stars and planets, and, if he could, go and visit them. It was his immense good fortune to have parents and some teachers who encouraged this odd ambition and to live in this time, the first moment in human history when we are, in fact, visiting other worlds and engaging in a deep reconnaissance of the Cosmos. If Sagan had been born in a much earlier age, no matter how great his dedication, he would not have understood what the stars and planets are. He would not have known that there were other suns and other worlds.

Harmony Accommodates Experience

Harmony Accommodates Experience

Tycho Brahe’s Cosmic Mystery was disproved entirely by the much later discoveries of the planets Uranus, Neptune and Pluto – there are no additional platonic solids that would determine their distances from the Sun. The nested Pythagorean solids also made no allowance for the existence of the Earth’s moon, and Galileo’s discovery of the four large moons of Jupiter was also discomforting. But far from becoming morose, Johannes Kepler wished to find additional satellites and wondered how many satellites each planet should have.

He wrote to Galileo: “I immediately began to think how could be there any addition to the number of the planets without overturning my Mysterium Cosmographicum, according to which Euclid’s five regular solids do not allow more than six planets… I am so far from disbelieving the existence of the four circumjovial planets that I long for a telescope, to anticipate you, if possible, in discovering two around Mars, as the proportion seems to require, six or eight around Saturn, and perhaps one each round Mercury and Venus”

Mars does have two small moons, and a major geological feature on the larger of them is today called the Kepler Ridge in honor of this guess. But he was entirely mistaken about Saturn, Mercury and Venus. And Jupiter has many more moons that Galileo discovered.

We still do not really know why there are only nine planets, more or less, and why they have the relative distances from the Sun that they do.

The universe is stamped with the adornment of harmonic proportions, but harmonies must accommodate experience. Image: by © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

In fact, Tycho has commented Mars to Kepler because the apparent motion seemed most anomalous, most difficult to reconcile with an orbit made of circles. (To the reader who might be bored by his many calculations, he later wrote: If you are wearied by this tedious procedure, take pity on me who carried out at least seventy trials).

Pythagoras, in the sixth century B.C., Plato, Ptolemy and all the Christian astronomers before Kepler had assumed that the planets moved in circular paths. The circle was thought to be a “perfect” geometrical shape and the planets, place high in the heavens, away from earthly “corruption”, were also thought to be in some mystical sense “perfect”. Galileo, Tycho and Copernicus were all committed to uniform circular planetary motion, the latter asserting that “the mind shudders” at the alternative, because “it would be unworthy to suppose such a thing in a Creation constituted in the best possible way”. So at first Kepler tried to explain the observations by imagining that the Earth and Mars moved in circular orbits about the Sun.

The difference between a circular orbit and the true orbit could be distinguished only by precise measurement and a courageous acceptance of the facts: “The universe is stamped with the adornment of harmonic proportions, but harmonies must accommodate experience”.

Systems of the World

System of the World

All three of Kepler’s laws of planetary motion can be derived from Newtonian principles. Kepler’s laws were empirical, based upon the painstaking observations of Tycho Brahe. Newton’s laws were theoretical, rather simple mathematical abstractions from which all of Tycho’s measurements could ultimately be derived. From these laws, Newton wrote with undisguised pride in the Principia: I now demonstrate the frame of the System of the World.

Later in his life, Newton presided over the Royal Society, a fellowship of scientists, and was Master of the Mint, where he devoted his energies to the suppression of counterfeit coinage. His natural moodiness and reclusivity grew; he resolved to abandon those scientific endeavors that brought him into quarrelsome disputes with other scientists, chiefly on issues of priority; and there were those who spread tales that he had experienced the seventeenth-century equivalent of a “nervous breakdown”.

However, Isaac Newton continued his lifelong experiments on the border between alchemy and chemistry, and some recent evidence suggests that what he was suffering from was not so much a psychogenic ailment as heavy metal poisoning, induced by systematic ingestion of small quantities of arsenic and mercury. It was a common practice for chemists of the time to use the sense of taste as an analytic tool.

Magic is my name. Photo: Elena

Nevertheless his prodigious intellectual powers persisted unabated. In 1696, the Swiss mathematician Johann Bernoulli challenged his colleagues to solve an unresolved issue called the brachistochrone problem, specifying the curve connecting two points displaced from each other laterally, along which a body, acted upon only by gravity, would fall in the shortest time. Bernoulli originally specified the deadline of six months, but extended it to a year and a half at the request of Leibniz, one of the leading scholars of the time, and the man who had, independently of Newton, invented the differential and integral calculus. The challenge was delivered to Newton at 4 p.m. on January 29, 1697. Before leaving for work the next morning, he had invented an entire new branch of mathematics called the calculus of variations, used it to solve the brachistochrone problem and sent off the solution, which was published, at Newton’s request, anonymously. But the brilliance and originality of the work betrayed the identity of its author. When Bernoulli saw the solution, he commented: “We recognize the lion by his claw. “ Newton was then in his fifty-fifth year.

The major intellectual pursuit of his last years was a concordance and calibration of the chronologies of ancient civilisations, very much in the tradition of the ancient historians Manetho, Strabo and Eratosthenes. In his last, posthumous work, “The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended,” we find repeated astronomical calibrations of historical events an architectural reconstruction of the Temple of Salomon a provocative claim that all the Norther Hemisphere constellations are named after the personages, artifacts and events in the Greek Story of Jason and the Argonauts; and the consistent assumption that the gods of all civilisations, with the single exception of Newton’s own, were merely ancient kings and heroes, deified by later generations.

All Gods are merely ancient kings and heroes defied by us. Image: Emotional Roller Coaster, Talking Emoticon. ©  Elena

Universe: Life and Life

Universe: Life and Life 

 A common saying states that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Similarly, many will argue that art is subjective. Below is a collection of pictures designed to prove these two statements.

In the gallery you will find photos I like more than other pictures I have taken. I am not talking about artistic and professional qualities here. Just pics I love and I prefer. Some of them played an important role in my life. I regularly add photos to this gallery, so I invite you to come and see them from time to time.

Stars: Sketches and Other Images 

 Doubtless, stars have fascinated humanity since times immemorial. Below are some images, including a sketch (rough or unfinished drawing) – all featuring stars, or the stellar bodies that jointly with other elements, compose cosmic space.

Once upon a time, far, far East. Natural landscape sketch. Runes.

Young purple haired woman on a mountain top. Or just a branch of a tree.

A colorful portal to another world (fictional). Neon Light planet.

Forest. Or drawing of a photo in the fashion of the Old (Wild) West.

A stream brook, oil painting style. Geometric figures. Fractal?

In most cultures, this gesture signifies a greeting. But it's an abstract picture.

Turquoise fantasy. Three respectful eggs awaiting to pass to another dimention.

At high sea: When mountains get flooded and the world is going to vanish.

Wall decoration. Stick figures in the 21st Century. Or something else.

Animated fractals, a variant. Or maybe a painting of an ice.

Hum... or else waterfalls seen from below, genre: oil painting.

Blue, flying sculptures. Fafard Cow. Surreal!

Maybe a painting of a volcano erupting ash and smoke, or just peaceful scene.

The Stunning Sisters. Just to give the name to this nice scene in the forest.

Gorgeous white, fluffy and playful kitten (or squirrel, it depends on the Universe.

A shop window with plates. They patiently wait.

A very sad and dark scene of life, even when the sky is blue.

Decoration in face of a Toronto building on the Bay street.

When we die we are reborn as trees, they say.

Or we may be squirrels in our new life, who knows?

Try to live a bright life just no to end up in the dark.

Qhy do they like this sort of decoration on the streets?

Who this tree has been when it was a human being?

Just an exercise using some pictures, nothing serious.

Beautiful white cat with green eyes hidden behind the door.	When warm and cold tones meet, basket relief style.
A brave tree resisting to all the inclemency of the nature.	An artistic squirrel used to be a dancer when it was a human.	A lonely plane gooing far, very far away.