Why Human Exploration of the Solar System

There is a debate within our country on whether we should pursue human exploration of the solar system. I think we should aggressively pursue human exploration of the solar system for the following reasons:

1. Exploration is a fundamental part of who humans are. Robotic exploration is not enough. Humans going to other parts of the solar system captures the human imagination and aspirations in a deeper way than just robotic exploration. The solar system is within reach for human exploration. Pushing the human exploration solar system addresses that deep aspiration. This is a deep story of human struggle, with its tragedies and triumphs, that will grip people around the world.


2. Human exploration of the solar system provides focused and well defined challenges for humans to overcome. We need to push our knowledge, technical ability, to keep growing as a civilization with really challenging problems that have reasonable chances for success. This kind of problem solving keeps us sharp. This spills over into other endeavors, not as direct "spinoffs" per se, but it expands our horizons, gives us different ways of thinking and solving problems, which helps in so many other fields and endeavors.


3. Solar system exploration is a constructive adventure that diverts human resources from other more destructive enterprises. National pride is better expressed in cooperative space exploration rather than military conquest and might. Space exploration requires tremendous allocation of resources that compete with the voracious requirements for an advanced technological military. While much of the technology for space could be used for the military, cooperative space exploration shares the technological expertise for space with other nations and lessens the chance of it being developed for military use.


4. Knowledge. Human exploration of the solar system will expand our knowledge of the solar system more deeply than just robotic exploration. The paradox is that per dollar spent, robotic exploration is more cost effective for gaining knowledge. However, the public will be more captivated by human exploration and lavish money on human exploration while being stingy on just robotic missions, hence the more expensive human exploration will achieve more knowledge because the public will be willing to spend the money to accomplish it.

There are a number of poor reasons to explore the solar system. These are reasons I've heard offer that are not realistic, in my opinion.

1. Provide raw mineral and other mined resources from asteroids, comets, moons and planets for use on earth. The energy in fuel, costs in mining, and the costs in returning raw materials from celestial objects in the solar system are prohibitively expensive to be cost effective for centuries.


2. Develop alternative homes for humans if a disaster or war wipes out human life on earth. This is unrealistic for the human settlement of the solar system since human settlements will be precarious outside of the hospitable environment of the earth. Perhaps over many centuries, or even millennia, if humans ferry out to the stars and set up independent colonies on habitable worlds this might be possible, however this does not make for a practical reason, in my opinion, to explore the solar system now.

Finally, exploring the solar system glorifies God. Exploring space reveals the diverse creative ways God created the universe. It reveals God's lavish creativity, power, beauty, long patience that unfolds over billions of years, and the awe inspiring forces that shape the solar system and the universe. As the Psalmist says:

The heavens declare the glory of God,
and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.

Transcendence and Immanence in the Game of Life

Two theological words: transcendence and immanence. These two words describe certain aspects about God. I'll explore just a few aspects of these words using analogies with the Game of Life that I described in an earlier blog post (see Simulation and Life). The word transcendence refers to something being in a transcendent state. Wikipedia speaks of the original definition of transcendent as:

"transcendent means that God is completely outside of and beyond the world, ..."

Theopedia defines the transcendence of God this way:

"It means that God is above, other than, and distinct from all he has made"

Paired with transcendent in Christian theology is the word immanent. Theopedia has a good working definition:

"The literal meaning of the immanence of God is “to be within” or “near” in relation to God’s creation."

In Christian theology, both of these words are essential to understanding God. Theopedia states why this is important:

"To affirm God’s transcendence and deny his immanence is to arrive at deism. To deny his transcendence and affirm his immanence is to arrive at pantheism."

Deism is the view that God initially set the conditions to create the universe and then has not intervened in any way since, having the universe run on its own through natural laws. In deism, there is no supernatural activity of God in the universe since its initial creation. Pantheism is the view that God is the sum of all things in the universe. Everything and everyone make up what God is.

Considering the immensity of the universe (the observable universe is 92 billion light years in diameter -- see blog entry How Big is the Universe?), how can God be above and beyond (transcendent) and near (immanent)? There are many ways to answer this, but I will give an feasibility analysis of this through an analogy. In stating this as a feasibility analysis I am not saying this is how God relates to the world through transcendence and immanence, but there exists at least one approach that shows that the concepts of  transcendence and immanence are not impossible.

Consider the expanse of the universe. As we look out into the night sky, especially if we are standing on the peak of a tall mountain, we are aware of three dimensions:  (1) the sky to the left and right of us, (2) the sky to the front and back of us, and (3) the sky above us and the universe that is beneath our feet on the other side of the world. Since Einstein, we like to talk about a fourth dimension: time. Time is interwoven with the other three dimensions, but for the moment we will consider just the three spacial dimensions of left/right, front/back, and up/down. One of the interesting things that many physicists propose is that the universe around us may have more than three spacial dimensions. Some versions of String Theory, M-Theory in particular, proposes 11 spacial dimensions. Granted, the dimensions of String Theory outside of the 3 we are familiar with are curled in microscopic, very tight and complicated ways -- but physics does not rule out (and in some cases, proposes) there are other large dimensions than the 3 we know about. How can such a universe with extra dimensions exist? How can we imagine such a thing? Here is where Conway's Game of Life comes in, along with a small book written in 1864 entitled, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin Abott Abott (see Wikipedia for a description). Flatland is a simple story of how higher dimensions can interact in a two dimensional world.

The important thing to remember about Conway's Game of Life is that everything happens on a 2-dimensional surface. Think of a sheet of graph paper where we draw the dots for square that are alive. All that the dots on the graph paper are aware of are the squares to the left/right and in front/behind them. There is no concept of up and down. The universe in the sheet of paper is 2 dimensional. We are ignoring that real sheets of paper under a microscope has a thickness to it -- we are considering the idealized example of a 2-dimensional sheet of paper.

Now, consider a cube that approaches the 2 dimensional sheet from above as shown in the illustration to the right. The cube is separate from the sheet of paper and illustrates that it is in some sense transcendent from the live cells on the sheet of paper and from the paper itself. But the cube can move extremely close to the cells and the sheet of paper without even entering it. It can get so close to each of the dots that it is closer to each dot than the other dots are to each other. In this sense the cube is immanent to the dots while being transcendent. But this looks like a small cube, it is not equally immanent to the entire 2-D surface. This is easily remedied by enlarging the cube to have the same or larger breadth and width of the 2-D surface of the Life universe. In this way we can see that both transcendence and immanence are possible in a 2 dimensional universe. In a similar way, God could exist in other dimensions around our universe and thus be transcendent and immanent to all of us and the entire universe.

Again, I am not saying this is how God is actually transcendent and immanent to us and the universe. There are many other ways to explain this that are more accurate statements about these two properties. However, what I have shown is that the properties of God's transcendence and immanence are not necessarily contradictory since there is at least one way of analyzing it that shows no contradictions.

This is certainly not the final word on the topic of transcendence and immanence. This does not even scratch the surface. Much has been written on the topic in religion, philosophy, and in particular in Christian understanding.

299,297,458 Meters/Second -- A Mere Suggestion

This past week European scientists published the results of an experiment where neutrinos appeared to travel faster than the speed of light. Neutrinos, subatomic particles, that were created in CERN outside of Geneva, Switzerland, traveled 730-kilometers in 2.43-milliseconds to to a cavern underneath Gran Sasso in Italy. If you do the math, 730,000 meters/0.000243 seconds = 300,411,522.6 meters/second. Light speed in a vacuum is 299,792,458 meters/second.

This is not a final word on overturning the speed of light as the ultimate speed limit. More experiments by other scientists over the next few years will either confirm this or invalidate this experiment. If it turns out that these neutrinos do travel faster than light, what are we to make of this? It should be noted I am not a physicist nor a scientist of any sort, but I like to follow these kind of things.

Many in the popular media said this could overturn Einstein's Special Relativity, which is one of the pivotal foundations that scientists have about knowing the universe. Special Relativity had its roots in the 1800s from the work of Scottish physicist and mathematician James Clerk Maxwell. He developed the elegant equations that unified electricity, magnetism, and light. One of the implications of Maxwell's work was that the speed of light was constant. In the early 1900s, Albert Einstein took this observation about the speed of light, which was puzzling at the time, and made two proposals:

1. The laws of physics are the same for all observers in uniform motion relative to one another (principle of relativity),


2. The speed of light in a vacuum is the same for all observers, regardless of their relative motion or of the motion of the source of the light. (from Wikipedia article on Special Relativity)

Uniform motion means traveling at a constant speed without speeding up or slowing down. There are a number of surprising results

1. When viewing someone else who is traveling at a different speed than you are you will see that their clocks are running slower than your clocks. Everything about them is running slower. The differences at speeds we are used to are very small so that we don't notice them. However, when you observe someone traveling faster than you at almost the speed of light, the difference is very noticeable.


2. When viewing the same person traveling at a different speed from you, you will see that their lengths aligned in the direction of motion are shorter. A yard stick or a meter rod will be shorter if held parallel to the direction of their motion. Again, this is not noticeable to our senses at speeds we are used to, but when the other person's speed is close to the speed of light, it is very noticeable.


3. For a variety of reasons, nothing can go faster, relative to you, than the speed of light in a vacuum. There are some known exceptions to this -- the most notable where space itself is expanding causing distant objects to move away from each other faster than the speed of light. It is even impossible to accelerate an object to the speed of light because to push an object to the speed of light would cause their clock relative to you to stop, their length to contract to zero, and their mass to become infinite.

Mass is a fundamental property of matter, the stuff that things are made of. In gravity, the force that pulls you down to the ground on earth, mass results in weight. Photons, the particles of light, have a "zero" rest mass, meaning that if a photon could stand still, it would have zero mass. Photons can go at the speed of light as a result. In fact, all massless particles travel at the speed of light. Neutrinos, on the other hand, have a very slight mass. Therefore, according to Special Relativity, they should travel slower than the speed of light.

So, what does it mean that the neutrinos in the CERN experiment were going slightly faster than the speed of light? I don't know and don't have the background to make an educated guess, but I'm going to do it anyway.

1. Special Relativity, and the theory that builds on it, General Relativity, will not be completely disregarded. Special and General Relativity have proved to be so useful in predicting things will see experimentally. It is used on some of our everyday technology, such as GPS satellites. Without the corrections made by the software in the GPS satellites, would GPS devices would not be accurate enough to be useful. What may happen is a revision of the underlying equations, the way General Relativity changed Newton's equations on gravity. General Relativity applied to objects traveling at "normal" speeds gives almost identical results to Newton's equations. In fact, NASA uses Newton's equations for all their spacecraft calculations, whether orbiting around earth, or going from earth to mars or elsewhere in the solar system. In a similar way, new theories and equations would probably under "normal conditions" give almost identical results as Einstein's equations.


2. We may find that neutrinos going faster than light only in limited circumstances. In 1987, a supernova was observed in an irregular galaxy that is close to our own Milky Way Galaxy (that is, compared to other galaxies). Supernovas generate a huge burst of neutrinos. About 3 hours before the light of the supernova reached us, a burst of neutrinos was detected. These neutrinos came when the central core of the star collapsed before the visible star explosion is seen. If CERN's experiential observations of the speed of the neutrinos is correct, and that speed holds under all circumstances, that neutrino burst would have been seen 4 years earlier. Warning, here is an Earl speculation: neutrinos may travel faster in a gravity field. I don't know why. Speculation: in gravity fields there are extra physical dimensions that provide a slightly shorter path for neutrinos to travel. Along that path, neutrinos travel slightly less than the speed of light, but the distance is shorter under stronger gravity fields. This might be a reason neutrinos don't interact with regular matter much. Neutrinos can happily travel through a light-year of lead and not be bothered but it because there are traveling in another dimension where the lead atoms don't reside. Perhaps neutrinos travel in this extra dimension and leak out to the regular 3 dimensions very infrequently. These extra dimensions would act like a "worm hole," a shortcut from our regular 3 dimensional space (4 dimensional when including time in space-time), but without some of the problems of true worm holes.


3. Earl Speculation: If we could measure time on the neutrinos at their point of interception in Gran Sasso, we would see that their time is negative from before the time they were generated near Geneva. From our point of view, these are neutrinos with times before they were generated. The clock in the neutrinos say they arrived in Italy before they left Switzerland. From the perspective of the neutrino, however, the neutrino would arrive in Italy after it was created in Switzerland.

Those are some of my thoughts for now. Take them with a grain of salt and consider the source.

Does Anybody Really Know What Time Is?

Continuing the series on Conway's Game of Life, simulation, and theology -- consider the pattern called a glider in Life. It consists of five live cells. As we step through the each sequence in Life, the glider pattern changes. It morphs from the initial pattern over a sequence of steps to back to its original pattern, shifted down one square and to the right one square. Each of these steps is a step in time. Five steps of time are shown above, from Tick 0 to Tick 4. Notice that these increments of time are referred to as ticks.

Ticks are the smallest units of time in Life in any practical sense. It might be possible to consider the underlying computer program that might run it and the program steps it takes, or the rules that are applied to each step by the human that plots the next set of live and dead cells as smaller steps -- but these "smaller steps" don't manifest itself in the diagrams shown above. In fact, the 4 basic rules of Life can be applied simultaneously or sequentially in any order. All that counts is the final result of the step. So, in considering Tick 0 and the next tick, Tick 1, all that matters is the resulting pattern from Tick 0 that shows up in Tick 1.

Time in Life, using the language of mathematics, is not continuous. This means that the passage of time can be divided up to individual ticks, but no further. Another word for this is that time in Life is discrete, composed of indivisible time ticks.

Time in Life is also independent, at least to some degree, of time that we humans experience. We can run life on a computer where hundreds, even thousands of Life ticks occur in a second of human time. We can also slow down the time ticks in Life to where a tick happens once a minute, or one an hour. We can also speed up and slow down the ticks in comparison to our time.

These speedups and slowdowns of Life ticks to our human time does not effect the world inside the Life game. In fact, nothing inside the world of Life can tell is there is a speedup or slowdown in the application of ticks in the world of Life. Time inside Life is governed by the Life tick and nothing else.

There is more that can be discussed about time in Life. But I'll end this post by noting that time steps in Life is something that is bound to the Game of Life universe and is distinct from the universe we live in. In a similar way, time for us is a feature that is part of the fabric of our universe. Even the ancient theologian Augustine noted that before the world was created time did not exist because it is a feature of our universe. When we think of God and time, we must note that God is not within the realm of our time, just as we are not within the realm of time in the Game of Life. Whether there is a time associated with God is something for another discussion. The Apostle Peter notes this separateness of God's time from our time when he wrote, "But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day." (2 Peter 3:8, ESV)  Looking at the Game of Life in relationship to us and our world we can more easily understand Peter's statement.

The Shape of Space

The next series of blog posts will explore some theological connections with Conway's Game of Life (see previous blog entry). What does does single-cell automata have to do with theology -- especially Christian theology? I'll explore that. First I need to lay out some concepts.

The previous blog entry introduced the "Game of Life" by the mathematician John Conway. It's not really a game in the typical every-day usage of the word, but it is a game in the sense a solitaire card game is a game, only that the human player sets up the initial conditions of the game by determining where the live cells are and then generates the resulting sequences of "moves" that automatically spring forth from the rules.


John Conway initially described the surface of playing area as an infinitely extending graph paper, extending in infinite directions left and right and up and down. Most computer implementations of the game don't follow that, instead having a limited number of grid lines extending up and down and left and right and then joining the right edge with the left edge and the bottom edge with the top edge of the graph paper. When a graph paper grid is joined in this way it geometrically (or topologically) describes a torus. A doughnut is an example of a torus. A torus is pictured above to the left. Pictured on this torus is a standard configuration of live cells known as a glider.


Life on a torus has some subtle differences from Life on an infinitely extending graph paper grid (or in geometrical terms, an infinite plane). Initially for the glider, the difference between the two surfaces is not readily apparent. Each cell has eight adjacent neighboring cells. Rates of travel in each kind of surface is the same. The space in the immediate area looks the same. However, differences show up over longer distances. A glider launched on an infinite flat plan or graph paper will travel in one direction over time, never to return or cross its path. A glider launched on a torus, like the one above, will circle from the outside of the torus into the inner circle and back around, repeating this cycle and eventually crossing where it once was before. The glider, which lives on the 2-dimensional surface of the torus cannot visualize the 3-dimensional doughnut shape of the torus, but can get a clue that it is on surface that wraps onto itself when it detects it has crossed where it has traveled before.


Believe it or not, astronomers and cosmologists have asked the question of whether our 3-dimensional universe we live in extends infinitely everywhere (the equivalent of the 2-dimensional infinite plane or graph paper), or if it wraps around itself like a sphere or torus. The universe could also "wrap away" from itself. All of these considerations means that the universe has a forth dimensional curve or shape to it (that is different from the idea of time being a dimension as in General Relativity). Like the glider on the torus, we cannot physically see this fourth dimensional curve since we are creatures of three dimensions living in three dimensional space and don't have the wherewithal to look at the fourth dimension.


To sound like a late night cheap TV commercial -- but wait, there's more. There are lots of reasons to think we live in a universe with more than three, four, five and more dimensions. But that is another topic for another time.


The point I want to make here is that both the glider in the Game of Life and ourselves in our world have our sight and imagination limited in great part to the dimensions and world we live in. There is a lot more to our world and universe than what we might initially think.

Simulation and Life

Back in 1970, Scientific American published in Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games a little "game" that is done on graph paper. The game, known as Life, was developed by British Mathematician John Horton Conway. I loved it. It went viral. Several of us played with it in the back corner of our high school Calculus class during the lecture. The rules, copied from the Wikipedia article on Life, are as follows:

"The universe of the Game of Life is an infinite two-dimensional orthogonal grid of square cells, each of which is in one of two possible states, alive or dead. Every cell interacts with its eight neighbours, which are the cells that are horizontally, vertically, or diagonally adjacent. At each step in time, the following transitions occur:

1. Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies, as if caused by under-population.
2. Any live cell with two or three live neighbors lives on to the next generation.
3. Any live cell with more than three live neighbors dies, as if by overcrowding.
4. Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbors becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.

The initial pattern constitutes the seed of the system. The first generation is created by applying the above rules simultaneously to every cell in the seed—births and deaths occur simultaneously, and the discrete moment at which this happens is sometimes called a tick (in other words, each generation is a pure function of the preceding one). The rules continue to be applied repeatedly to create further generations."

I have included a Google Gadget that runs life on a small grid. Each side of the grid connects the the opposite side of the grid. So if you move down beyond the bottom of the grid you move into the top. If you move off the right of the grid you are placed into the left side.

To play, click on the grid squares, it will generate a live cell. If you don't like it, click again and it will erase the live cell. When you have the pattern you want, click start. You will see patterns develop. Some will completely disappear, some will grow large, others will end in a static pattern.

In the next few postings on this blog I will draw some ideas to continue the thread I started on simulations based on Conway's Game of Life.

Reality Versus Simulation

I am not advocating that you and I are simulations. Neither are any group of physicists, at least in the mainstream of physics (not that I know any personally or am trained or practice in the field). We are not imaginary simulations of God, figments of God's fanciful imagination.

However, I do like to play around with different wonder-if scenarios.Why can't we play around with our imaginations and explore different situations and imagine what it would be like? Why leave the speculative fun to others? So, a wonder-if question I have is: what if we were simulations and are unaware of it?

A related question is what is the true nature of reality? Leaving the question aside of whether we have non-physical spirits that are not governed by the known laws of physics, there is a lot about our appearance and the world around us that is misleading. Over the last few hundred years our understanding of our composition, what we are made of, has changed considerably. We discovered that we are made of up of thousands of billions of individual units of life called cells. The cells are made up of a lot of structures, such as membranes, proteins, and long curled strands that encode our genetics. These are composed of atoms -- which in turn are composed of smaller particles and forces. If we were to see the actual particles themselves at the smallest level and see how much space it all takes up -- we'd discover the vast majority of the volume of space we occupy is nothing! We we look at the person sitting next to us, or a rock, or a mountain -- we are seeing the result of light and the electromagnetic force giving the appearance of solidity. But in reality, over 99.9999 percent of us is made up of nothing.

So, what if God made a simulation of our world, the universe, and us based on ephemeral mathematical formulas or patterns? How much different would we be in the simulation from us in the real world? Already we see that us in the real world is made up of the vast majority of nothing. How much worse would a simulation be? And if the simulation was really good, would it matter? When does a simulation stop being a simulation and cross into reality? What is absolutely crucial in our reality that is not captured in a simulation? And if that or those crucial elements about reality can be identified, would it be possible for God to simulate those to perfect fidelity? And if it were possible, what is the difference between the simulation and reality that is important?