Aura of Irrationality

Nuclear Bluff or the Aura of Irrationality

In a very deep psychological sense war is murder writ large. When our illusions about ourselves are challenged by any circumstances, when our well-being is threatened, we tend – some of us at least, to fly into murderous rages (when the same provocations are applied to nation states, they too, sometimes fly into murderous rages, egged on often enough by those seeking personal power or profit).

As the technology of murder improves and the penalties of war increase, a great many people must be made to fly into murderous rages simultaneously for a major war to be mustered – and because the organs of mass communication are often in the hand of the state, this can commonly be arranged.

However, nuclear was is the exception and it can be triggered by a very small number of people. What is often called the strategy of nuclear deterrence is remarkable for its reliance on the behaviour of our nonhuman ancestors.

Adopt a credible pose of irrationality, get used to it and it becomes pretense no longer (Megan Jorgensen). Illustration : Elena

Henry Kissinger, a contemporary politician, wrote : Deterrence depends, above all, on psychological criteria. For purposes of deterrence, a bluff taken seriously is more useful than a serious threat interpreted as a bluff.

Truly effective nuclear bluffing, however, includes occasional postures of irrationality, a distancing from the horrors of nuclear war. Then the potential enemy is tempted to submit on points of dispute rather than unleash a global confrontation, which the aura of irrationality has made plausible. The chief danger of adopting a credible pose of irrationality is that to succeed in the pretense you have to be very good. After a while, you get used to it. It becomes pretense no longer.

Murderous rages or Rage is War

A very big war can be triggered by a very small number of people. What we see, is a conflict between our passions and what is sometimes called our better natures – between the deep, ancient reptilian part of the brain, the R-complex, in charge of murderous rages, and the more recently evolved mammalian and human parts of the brain, the limbic system and the cerebral cortex.

In the past, when humans lived in small groups, when their weapons were comparatively paltry, even an enraged warrior could kill only a few. As our technology improved, the means of war also improved.

Rage Is War. Photo by Elena

We have learned to temper our anger, frustration and despair with reason. And we have ameliorated on a planetary scale injustices that only recently were global and endemic. But our weapons can now kill billions.

Are we teaching reason as effectively as we can? Have we courageously studied the causes of our rage, anger, irrationality, the causes of conflicts? Why do we sometimes fly into murderous rages?

Quotation from Colin Maclaurin

Quotation from Colin Maclaurin

The author of Nature has made it impossible for us to have any communication from this Earth with the other great bodies of the Universe, in our present state; and it is highly possible that he has likewise cut off all communication betwixt the other planets and betwixt the different systems.

We observe, in all of them, enough to raise our curiosity, but not to satisfy it. It does not appear to be suitable to the wisdom that shines throughout all nature, to suppose that we should see so far, and have our curiosity so much raised, only to be disappointed to the end.

This therefore naturally leads us to consider our present state as only the dawn of beginning of our existence, and as a state of preparation our probation for farther advancement.

Colin Maclaurin, 1748.

What are you? From where did you come? The Creator Raven looked at Man and what surprised to find that this strange new being was so much like himself (Eskimo creation myth). Illustration: Elena

Origin of Life

Origin of Life

Beyond the Earth’s atmosphere, on the other side of the sky, is a universe teeming with radio emission. By studying radio waves you can learn about planets and stars and galaxies, about the composition of great clouds of organic molecules that drift between the stars, about the origin and evolution and fate of the universe.But all these radio emissions are natural – caused by physical processes, electrons spiraling in the galactic magnetic field, or interstellar molecules colliding with one another, or the remote echoes of the Big Bang red-shifted from gamma rays at the origin if the universe to the tame and chill radio waves that fill all of space in our speech.

In the scant few decades in which humans have pursued radio astronomy, there has been a real signal from the depths of space, something manufactured, something artificial, something contrived by an alien mind.

There have been false alarms. The regular time variation of the radio emission from quasars and, especially, pulsars had at first been thought, tentatively, tremulously, to be a kind of announcement signal from someone else, or perhaps a radio navigation beacon for exotic ships that plied the spaces between the stars.

Ice Watch. Argus had been in full operation for many years. There had been glitches, bogeys, intimations, false alarms. But no messages. Image : © Megan Jorgensen

But they had turned out to be something else – equally exotic, perhaps, as a signal from beings in the night sky. Quasars seemed to be stupendous sources of energy, perhaps connected with massive black holes at the centers of galaxies, many of them observed more than halfway back in time to the origin of the universe.

Pulsars are rapidly spinning atomic nuclei the size of a city. And there had been other rich and mysterious messages that had turned out to be intelligent after a fashion but not very extraterrestrial. The skies are now peppered with secret military radar systems and radio communication satellites that were beyond the entreaty of a few civilian radio astronomers. Sometimes they were real outlaws, ignoring international telecommunications agreement. There were no recourses and no penalties. Occasionally, all nations denied responsibility. But there had never been a clear-cut alien signal.

And yet the origin of life now seem to be so easy – and there are so many planetary systems, so many worlds and so many billions of years available for biological evolution – that it is hard to believe the Galaxy is not teeming with life and intelligence.

Project Argus was the largest facility in the world dedicated to the radio search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Radio waves travel with the speed of light, faster than which nothing it seem, could go. They are easy to generate and easy to detect. Even very backward technological civilizations, like that on Earth, would stumble on radio early in their exploration of the physical world.

Even with  the rudimentary radio technology available – now, only a few decades after the invention of the radio telescope – it is nearly possibly to communicate with an identical civilization at the center of the Galaxy.

There are so many places in the sky to examine, and so many frequencies on which an alien civilisation might be broadcasting, that it requires a systematic and patient observing program.

Cosmic Dreams

Cosmic Dreams

In India there are many gods, and each god has many manifestations. The Chola bronzes, cast in the 11th century, include several different incarnations of the god Shiva. The most elegant and sublime of these is a representation of the creation of the universe at the beginning of each cosmic cycle, a motif known as the cosmic dance of Shiva. The god, called in this manifestation Nataraja, the Dance King, has four hands. In the upper left hand is a tongue of flame, a reminder that the universe, now newly created, will billions of years from now be utterly destroyed.

These profound and lovely images are a kind of premonition of modern astronomical ideas.

These great ideas are tempered by another, perhaps still greater. It is said that men may not be the dreams of the gods, but rather the gods are de dreams of men. Neither of modern cosmologies may be altogether to our liking.

In one, the universe is created, somehow, ten or twenty billion years ago and expands forever, the galaxies mutually receding until the last one disappears over our cosmic horizon. Then the galactic astronomers are out of business, the stars cool and die, matter itself decays and the universe becomes a thin cold haze of elementary particles.

In the other, the oscillating universe, the Cosmos has no beginning and no end, and we are in the midst of an infinite cycle of cosmic deaths and rebirths with no information trickling through the cusps of the oscillation. Nothing of the galaxies, stars, planets, life forms or civilizations evolved in the previous incarnation of the universe oozes into the cusp, flutters past the Big Bang, to be known in our present universe.

Human beings and our descendants, whoever they might be, can accomplish a great deal in tens of billions of years, before the Cosmos dies. Image: ©  Elena

The fate of the universe in either cosmology may seem a little depressing, but we may take solace in the time scales involved. These events will occupy tens of billions of years, or more.

If the universe truly oscillates, still stranger questions arise. Some scientists think that when expansion is followed by contraction, when the spectra of distant galaxies are all blue-shifted, causality will be inverted and effects will precede causes. First the ripples spread from a point on the water’s surface, then I throw a stone into the pond. First the torch bursts into flame and then I light it. We cannot pretend to understand what such causality inversion means. Will people at such a time be born in the grave and die in the womb? Will time flow backwards? Do these questions have any meaning?

Scientists wonder about what happens in an oscillating universe at the cusps, at the transition from contraction to expansion. Some think that the laws of nature are then randomly reshuffled, that the kind of physics and chemistry that orders the universe represent only one of an infinite range of possible natural laws.

Happenstance and Evolution

Happenstance and Evolution

Were the Earth to be started over again with all its physical features identical, it is extremely unlikely that anything closely resembling a human being would ever again emerge, because there is a powerful random character to the evolutionary process. A cosmic ray striking a different gene, producing a different mutation, can have small consequences early but profound consequences late.

Happenstance may play a powerful role in biology, as it does in history. The father back the crucial events occur, the more powerfully can they influence the present.

Thus, any given organism is the way it is because of a long series of individually unlikely steps. I do not think life anywhere else would look very much like a reptile, or an insect or a human – even with such minor cosmetic adjustments as green skin, pointy ears and antennae. But if you pressed me, I could try to imagine something rather different:

On a giant gas planet like Jupiter, with an atmosphere rich in hydrogen, helium, methane, water and ammonia, there is no accessible solid surface, but rather a dense, cloudy atmosphere in which organic molecules may be falling from the skies like manna from heaven, like the products of a chemical laboratory experiments. However, there is a characteristic impediment to life on such a planet: the atmosphere is turbulent, and down deep it is very hot. An organism must be careful that it is not carried down and fried.

Each Star System is an Island in Space, but it is also a Musical Creation. Image Purple Pretty © Elena

To show that life is not out of the question in such a very different planet, Carl Sagan and his Cornell colleague E. E. Salpeter have made some calculations. Of course, they cannot know precisely what life would be like in such a place, but they wanted to see if, with the laws of physics and chemistry, world of this sort could possibly be inhabited.

One way to make a living under these conditions is to reproduce before you are fried and hope that convection will carry some of your offspring to the higher and cooler layers of the atmosphere. Such organisms could be very little. Sagan and Salpeter called the sinkers. But you could also be a floater, some vast hydrogen balloon pumping helium and heavier gases out of its interior and leaving only the lightest gas, hydrogen; or a hot-air balloon, staying buoyant by keeping your interior warm, using energy acquired from the food you eat. Like familiar terrestrial balloons, the deeper a floater is carried, the stronger is the buoyant force returning it to the higher, cooler, safer regions of the atmosphere.

A floater might eat preformed organic molecules, or make its own from sunlight and air, somewhat as plants do on Earth. Up to a point, the bigger a floater is, the more efficient it will be. Salpeter and Sagan imagined floaters kilometers across, enormously larger than the greatest whale that ever was, beings the size of cities.