ROGER & FRANS PAGES
 
 
           


 

OCCASIONAL PHILOSOPHICAL AND OTHER THOUGHTS

 

 

 

#009 DOES ZUCKERBERG UNDERSTAND IRONY?

This is a précis of an article by Annalee Newitz published in the New Scientist dated 27th November 2021. I agree with the concerns voiced - namely that whizz kids who have developed and run the Worlds major Social Media platforms are generally "techie geeks" - and that as such they lack the sense of irony necessary to understand the Frankenstein nature of their inventions.

SURREAL news from Silicon Valley: Facebook has rebranded itself as Meta. This is because the boss, Mark Zuckerberg, wants to exploit his procurement of Oculus - a company making virtual reality headsets - to launch a product called The Metaverse, a shared virtual reality world.
First let's consider this insanely bad rebranding. Meta was the name of a very dystopian virtual reality empire from Snow Crash, a 1992 Sci-fi novel in which an insane media mogul ruthlessly controls the Metaverse, forcing everyone to buy subscriptions to his cable service, eventually securing his product by unleashing a "neuro-linguistic virus" that causes users brains to crash so that they can only ever access the World via his virtual reality Metaverse.  Surely this cannot be the best brand name to select for a very similar - but very real life - product !  In Mr Zuckerberg's defence, it is notable that Silicon Valley does have a track record of using inappropriate names for rebranding. In 2003 billionaire Peter Thiel named his software firm Palantir after the magical surveillance devices in The Lord Of The Rings. The problem is that the fictional Palantir lies to it's users as often as it reveals the truth! Not the best choice of name for a company specialising in doing data analysis for intelligence agencies. The problem extends to powerful entrepreneurs outside the IT industry. Rob Rhinehart named his food replacement drink Soylent after the nutrition wafers in the 1970's movie Soylent Green. In the movie these wafers were made from the recycled bodies of dead people. But the serious point of this article is that the very very clever technical people responsible for these companies do not seem to see the irony.
Annalee doesn't think this cluelessness is because techies don't read. The problem runs much deeper; and the fact that these tech executives seem to have no sense of irony is a sign of a fundamental problem with the way they operate their businesses.
The first step in understanding irony involves holding two contradictory thoughts together and navigating the dangerous, and sometimes absurd, ambiguity that lurks between them. In the Boolean logic world of silicon valley there is no room for ambiguity. A thing is either cool, or it is not, and we measure this in how many users, or "likes", of dollars the thing attracts. This failure to grasp the concept (or even existence) of irony may explain the inability of many big tech companies to deal with the many contradictory ways in which their products can be used to find love or top sow hate; to spread lies or reveal truths. It can amplify the voices of the oppressed, but also lead to their oppressors tracking and silencing them.  Like many other Social Media companies, Meta plans robustly for one or two very nice uses for its apps. Negative uses are considered to be marginal edge cases, assigned the lowest priority and the fewest resources. In other words, Meta doesn't understand that the awesomeness and the horror of it's products are equally meaningful, and require equal attention.
As we look ahead to see what the Metaverse may bring, we have to assume that the company will build a three dimensional virtual world with the same foibles it already exhibits in the current two dimensional digital world. We know that the Oculus headsets which will be key to navigating the Metaverse are already capable of mapping peoples environments (for that read people homes) and uploading them to the cloud; so users working from home will be sending a map of their home and data about their movements. It is easy to see a future where employers track their employees to ensure that they are keeping their eyes glued to their work. Worst of all, Meta's lack of irony means that it doesn't even begin to understand why controlling the Metaverse could be simultaneously good for the company, but bad for people in general.
Extend this thought process to Artificial Intelligence controlled weapons, and be fearful.


 

#008 CLIMATE-FRIENDLY COMPUTING?

Well, Climate-Friendlier anyway. Against a background of recent headlines about Bitcoin mining using as much energy as a Country the size of Paraguay, there has been one small piece of good news. Small is the operative word. IBM have built a 2-nanometre chip, which it claims potentially uses 75% less energy and delivers 45% higher performance than the current 7 nanometre chips in general production.
The new chip is a working computer processor with fifty billion (that is 50,000,000,000) transistors in an area the size of a small fingernail ! This makes it the smallest and densest computer chip yet produced. If it is adopted for use in everything from personal commodities like phones and tablets to data centres which need high performance server chips and supercomputers it could slash the amount of energy required for computing.  And because the circuits have components closer together (the speed of light being a limiting factor in the speed of current processors) the processing is significantly faster. Potentially an added benefit might be greater reliability due to the ability to dedicate some of the extra processing power to improved security and error checking.
IBM's new 2-nanometre chip has transistors which are just 12 nanometres wide....  That is equivalent to about 24 silicon atoms in width !  They claim up to 45% higher performance and up to 75% lower energy use than the 7-nanometre chips in production today. Mukesh Khare at IBM reported that the prototype chip was made at IBM's HQ in Albany, New York State, and that the process involves "hundreds and thousands of steps". IBM expects production to commence late in 2024.
Chips as we know them today evolved from the solid state transistor made by Bell Labs in 1959, where transistors were made by carefully oxidising a piece of silicon. The miniaturisation and automated production of chips has famously been governed by "Moore's Law" - which stated that the number of transistors on a chip would double every two years. While a general truth in early days, the rate of doubling has slowed in recent years as the devices have approached their fundamental physical limits. Clearly the tracks need to be at least one atom wide in order to create an electric circuit, and getting down to a twenty four atom wide track is getting very close to that physical limit.
Data centres currently consume about 1% of the Worlds energy usage, a figure likely to grow as the World industrialises and email, social media and video streaming become more ubiquitous. So reducing power consumption may at least partially compensate for such growth.

~
based on a report by Matthew Sparkes in New Scientist.

 

 

#007 I LIKE THIS QUOTE ABOUT LOVE

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defences, you build up a whole suit of armour so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain."

~ Neil Gaiman

 

 

#006 HOW MUCH DID WE GAIN BY LEAVING EUROPE ?

The answer seems to be not a lot, and overall we have a lot more rules to follow when we need to trade with Europe. The following article by Chris Morris was published on the BBC News website after the agreement had been published. It is noticeably silent on the vexed issue of controlling immigration of non-EU citizens. That is because the rules have not changed - we already had the rights and control responsibility for agreeing how many non-EU migrants came to the UK. The concept of "taking back control" was one of the principle lies put about by the Brexit campaigners. What we have achieved is to control the level of EU migrants - at the expense of excluding the rights of British citizens and Companies to be able to access European countries.
 

Brexit deal: What is in it?
A post-Brexit agreement on trade and other issues has been agreed, just a week before the transition period between the UK and the EU comes to an end.
Here are 10 initial questions and answers:

1. Fishing

One of the most difficult issues in the negotiations: How many fish will EU boats be able to catch in UK waters in future, and how long will any transition period last before new measures come into full force? Officials involved in the negotiations say the UK initially wanted an 80% cut in the value of the fish caught by EU boats in UK waters, while the EU initially proposed an 18% cut. Who has given more ground?

Answer: The value of the fish caught by the EU in UK waters will be cut by 25% - which is a lot less than the UK initially asked for. The cut will be phased in over a transition period lasting five and a half years - which is a lot shorter than the EU initially asked for. Once the transition period is over, the UK will fully control access to its waters, and could make much deeper cuts If it decides to exclude EU fishing boats they can be compensated for their losses, either through tariffs on UK fishing products or by preventing UK boats from fishing in EU waters.

2. The "level playing field"

What will the rules on fair competition look like, to ensure that businesses on one side don't gain an unfair advantage over their competitors on the other? The definition of what constitutes reasonable levels of state aid, or government subsidies for business, will be important.

Answer: There are level playing field measures which commit both the UK and the EU to maintain common standards on workers rights, as well as many social and environmental regulations. This was a key EU demand. They don't have to be identical in the future, so the UK does not have to follow EU law, but they do have to be seen to protect fair competition.
The UK has also agreed to stick to common principles on how state aid regimes work, and to an independent competition agency which will assess them. But it can choose to develop a system which only makes decisions once evidence of unfair competition is presented. That is different from the EU system which assesses the likely impact of subsidies before they are handed out.

3. Dispute resolution

This will be the subject of years of negotiations to come. How will the deal actually be enforced if either side breaks any of the terms and conditions? If the UK chooses to move away more radically from EU rules in the future, how quickly can the EU respond? Will it have the ability to impose tariffs (or taxes on UK exports) in one area (for example on cars) in response to a breach of the agreement in another (fish, for example)?

Answer: If either side moves away from common standards that exist on 31 December 2020, and if that has a negative impact on the other side, a dispute mechanism can be triggered which could mean tariffs (taxes on goods) being imposed. It is based around a "rebalancing" clause which gives both the EU and the UK the right to take steps if there are significant divergences. This clause is much stricter than measures found in other recent EU trade deals, and was a key demand on the European side. It is a mechanism we may hear a lot more about in the coming years. The overall policing of the trade agreement also means that tariffs can be targeted at a specific sector as a result of a dispute in another. There will be a binding arbitration system involving officials from both sides. It means that even though this is a tariff-free agreement, the threat that tariffs can be introduced as a result of future disputes will be a constant factor in UK-EU relations.

4. European Court of Justice (ECJ)

The EU's highest court will remain the ultimate arbiter of European law. But the UK government has said the direct jurisdiction of the ECJ in Britain will come to an end. So, will the European court play any role in overseeing the future relationship agreement?

Answer: The EU has dropped its demand that the ECJ should play a direct role in policing the governance of the agreement in future. That was a clear British red line. One place where the ECJ will still play a role is Northern Ireland, which has a special status under the terms of the Brexit withdrawal agreement. It will remain subject to EU single market and customs union rules, which means the European Court will remain the highest legal authority for some disputes in one part of the UK.

5. Travel

What will the rules be for British people who want to travel to the EU from 1 January 2021? We already know some of the details but will there be any additional agreements on things like social security or vehicle insurance? And will there be any detail on any arrangement to replace the European Health Insurance Card (EHIC)?

Answer: UK nationals will need a visa if they want to stay in the EU more than 90 days in a 180-day period. They will still be able to use their EHICs which will remain valid until they expire. The UK government says they will be replaced by a new UK Global Health Insurance Card (GHIC), but there are no further details yet on how to obtain it.
EU pet passports will
no longer be valid, but people will still be able to travel with pets, following a different and a more complicated process.
The two sides agreed to co-operate on international mobile roaming, but there is nothing in the agreement that would stop UK travellers being charged for using their phone in the EU and vice versa. UK citizens will not need an International Driver's Permit to drive in the EU.

6. Financial services

The trade agreement is primarily about the rules for goods crossing borders. It will say far less about the trade in services. Is there going to be a separate statement from the EU which will recognise UK rules governing financial services as roughly "equivalent" to EU rules? That would make it much easier for UK firms which export services to continue doing business in the EU market.

Answer: There is, as expected, not a lot in this agreement for service companies to cheer about. The UK will still be hoping that the EU issues an "equivalence" decision on financial services in the near future, but service companies in general have not got as much help in this deal as the British government had been pushing for. The guaranteed access that UK companies had to the EU single market is over.

7. Data

This is a really important issue. What will the data protection rules be for UK companies that deal with data from the EU? Again, the UK is hoping the EU will issue separately what's known as a data adequacy decision recognising UK rules as equivalent to its own. But the detail will need to be scrutinised carefully.

Answer: Both sides say they want data to flow across borders as smoothly as possible, but the agreement also stresses that individuals have a right to the protection of personal data and privacy and that "high standards in this regard contribute to trust in the digital economy and to the development of trade."
That's why an EU decision to recognise formally that UK data rules are roughly the same as its own is so important - and we're still waiting for that. In the meantime the EU has agreed to a "specified period" of four months, extendable by a further two months, in which data can be exchanged in the same way it is now, as long as the UK makes no changes to its rules on data protection.

8. Product standards

We know there will be more bureaucracy and delays at borders in the future, for companies trading between the UK and the EU. But will the two sides agree any measures to make things a little easier? There's something called "mutual recognition of conformity assessment" which would mean checks on products standards would not need to be nearly as intrusive as they otherwise might be.

Answer: There's no agreement on conformity assessment even though the UK government had hoped there would be. It's just one reminder of how many new barriers to trade there are going to be. In future, if you want to sell your product in both the UK and the EU, you may have to get it checked twice to get it certified.
On other border issues, there is also no agreement on recognising each other's sanitary and safety standards for exporting food of animal origin, which means there will have to be pretty intrusive and costly checks for products going into the EU single market.
There will however be some measures which cut technical barriers to trade, and the mutual recognition of trusted trader schemes which will make it easier for large companies to operate across borders.

9. Professional qualifications

A lot of people, from accountants to chefs, work in different EU countries and didn't have to worry about crossing borders multiple times while the UK was part of the EU. But will UK professional qualifications be recognised across the EU in the future, and what restrictions will there be?

Answer: The short answer is no - they won't be recognised automatically. That will make it harder for UK citizens supplying any kind of service to work in the EU. They will often have to apply to individual countries to try to get their qualifications accepted, with no guarantee of success. There is a framework in the deal for the UK and EU to agree on mutually recognising individual qualifications but that's weaker than what professionals have now.

10. Security

It's not just about trade. The UK will lose automatic and immediate access to a variety of EU databases which the police use every day - covering things such as criminal records, fingerprints and wanted persons. So what kind of access will they have, and how will security co-operation work in the future?

Answer: The UK loses access to some very key databases but will have continued access to others, including the system which cross-checks fingerprints across the continent. But overall, security cooperation will no longer be based on "real time" access. And in some cases, such as access to data on which flights people take, that data will only be made available under much stricter conditions.
An agreement has been reached on extradition, and the UK's role in Europol, the cross-border security agency, allows it to sit in on meetings but not have a direct say in decisions. Both of these are positive, and on a par with the best other countries have achieved.
Disagreements over data will be dealt with by a new committee, not by the European Court of Justice - again, a red line for the UK. But taken together, the speed with which the UK gets important data, and the influence it has on decisions, has been reduced.
 

 

 

#005 DEEPMIND FOLDING PROTEINS

Based on the leader article from The New Scientist - 5th December 2020 - it is reproduced without anybody's permission.

 

Almost a century ago, a chance discovery revolutionised medicine. Alexander Fleming left a petri dish of bacteria out while he went on a two week holiday. On his return he found that the dish had been contaminated by a fungus that produced an antibacterial substance. He named it penicillin, and it has since saved millions of lives.
Even in the modern world, drug discovery still essentially relies on chance. Pharmaceutical companies often screen thousands of compounds trying to find one with the desired effect.
The dream, though, is to make drug development a much faster and more rational process.  Almost all the machinery of life is made of proteins, and pretty much every drug we have works by binding to proteins and changing what they do. In principle, it should be possible to use computers to work out the shape of proteins and then design drugs to bind to specific sites.
There are twenty different amino-acids in a chain to make a protein and thanks to the genome revolution, it is now easy to discover the DNA recipe for any protein. However, figuring out their shapes still requires expensive experiments that can take years. As a result of DNA analysis we can know the recipes for the amino acid chains of some180 million proteins, but so far the shapes of only about 170,000 of them.  less than 0.1% !  A key method of discovering the shape is X-ray Crystallography, which involves analysing the diffraction pattern formed when an X-ray is fired at a protein crystal. "This is exceptionally difficult" says John Jumper, who leads the AlphaFold team at DeepMind. "Making crystals of some proteins is hard, and interpreting the diffraction patterns can be tricky".
That is about to change, thanks to Artificial Intelligence. DeepMinds AlphaFold system solves protein shapes like a jigsaw puzzle. It works out the easy bits first, based on what it has learned about other proteins; and then gradually puts all the other parts together over a matter of days.  It is the first computer-based system to achieve results that match those of experimental methods - but much, much, faster.
The hope is that this kind of approach can be extended to predict how proteins interact with other molecules, to find or design drugs that have specific effects. Accomplishing this would revolutionise medicine all over again.
Biologists will still have to carry out lab experiments and clinical trials. Biology is too messy and complicated for current artificial intelligence to do all the work. But AlphaFold and it's ilk should greatly accelerate the already astonishing pace of progress, and millions more lives could be saved.

horizontal rule

 

 

#004 PHILOSOPHY OF FLINT
Not philosophy at all - physics and geology really...  but I always wondered where flint came from
This is an article by David Bone of West Sussex Geology and is reproduced without his permission


The formation of flint is a complex process which began in the chalk seas millions of years ago and is summarised below:

Organisms such as sponges (on the macro scale) and radiolaria/diatoms (on the micro scale) use silica from sea water to manufacture the biogenic opal which forms their skeletons. When the organisms die and the organic parts decay the microscopic silica is scattered on the sea bed and becomes incorporated in the accumulating sediment.

At depths of 1 to 5m within this sediment, the biogenic opal breaks down, enriching the water between the sediment particles (sediment pore water) with silica.

At sediment depths of less than 10m, there is an oxic-anoxic boundary where hydrogen sulphide rising from the decomposing organic material within the sediment diffuses upwards and meets oxygen diffusing downwards from the water column above. At this interface, the hydrogen sulphide is oxidised becoming a sulphate and creating hydrogen ions as a by-product. The hydrogen ions lower the local pH, dissolving the chalk and thereby increasing the concentration of carbonate ions. These act as a seeding agent for the precipitation of silica.

The molecule-by-molecule replacement of chalk precipitates out as silica; which is initially in the form of crystalline opal but gradually transforms to quartz (flint) during later burial and with time.

The chalk sea bed is deeply burrowed by many different organisms, such as shells, echinoids and worms etc. Some of these burrows are quite deep or branching, or have open living spaces. The burrows fill with sediment after the organism has died, but this is a slightly different material from the sediment around it and forms a preferential pathways (conduit) for the chemical reactions to occur. Flint therefore tends to form within these old burrows, often with a nodular shape which reflects the whole, or part of, overgrown remnants of such burrow systems.

Flint also tends to form in bands or layers - a less well understood phenomenon for which there are two current theories. Firstly this might be because both chalk sedimentation and climate change (which impacts the flora and fauna within the sea) occurs in cycles; and secondly because the process described above exhausts the silica within a given depth of sediment and flint formation can only recommence when enough new sediment has accumulated with enough new silica to start the process again.

horizontal rule

 

 

#003 EXISTENCE IS THE MOTHER OF ALL HUMOUR
The following joke made me laugh - therefore proving to myself that I am human:
 

A horse walks into a bar and orders a pint....
The barman says "You're in here pretty often. Do you think that you might be an alcoholic?"
The horse replies "I don't think that I am" - and vanishes from existence.

Actually this story is about Descartes' famous philosophy of "I think, therefore I am" - but to explain that before the story would have been putting Descartes before the horse.
 

horizontal rule

 

 

#002 IT'S LIFE JIM, BUT NOT AS WE KNOW IT

The following extract from The New Scientists "2018 Collection" shared on 29th August 2018:
 

This is a précis of an article about whether there is other life in the Universe.
This extract deals with how simple life is created and suggests that while life itself it is probably extremely common, the development of complex multi-celled life is probably extremely rare

How do living cells work?
Living things consume an  extraordinary amount of energy, just to go on living. The food we eat gets turned into the fuel that powers all our living cells, and this fuel is continually recycled. Over the course of a day, humans each churn through 70 to 100 kilograms of the stuff. This huge quantity of fuel is made by enzymes, biological catalysts fine-tuned over aeons to extract every last joule of usable energy from reactions. The enzymes that powered the very first life cannot have sprung into existence being anywhere near this efficient; and it is very likely that the very first cells must have needed significantly more raw material energy to grow and divide - probably thousands, or even millions of times as much energy input that modern cells consume. The same is likely to be true throughout the Universe.  This phenomenal energy requirement effectively disproves old ideas about chemicals being bombarded with lightning or ultraviolet radiation - besides which, we are not aware of any living cells which obtain their energy in this way. First life was not mobile enough to go looking for energy, so it must have arisen where energy was plentiful.  Today, most life ultimately gets its energy directly (or indirectly for carnivores) from the sun via photosynthesis by plants. But photosynthesis is an enormously complex process which appears to have evolved - so it probably didn't power the first life. So what did?

Making organic  molecules: easy.  Making complex organic molecules: hard.
Reconstructing the history of life by comparing the genomes of simple cells is fraught with problems. Nevertheless, such studies all point in the same direction. The earliest single living cells seem to have gained their energy and carbon from the gases hydrogen and carbon dioxide. We now know that the reaction of H2 with CO2 produces the organic chemicals required to build cells, and also releases energy. However it doesn't produce nearly enough energy for those components to form even simple molecules. It takes buckets of energy to get them to join them up into the long chains that are the basic building blocks of life.

Where does the energy come from?
The energy harvesting method of all known life forms was not identified until 1961 when British biochemist Peter Mitchell proposed it. His proposal led to two decades of heated debate before it became generally accepted.  Mitchell's suggestion was that cells are not powered by chemical reactions at all - but by an electric field; specifically by a difference in the concentration of protons (the charged nuclei of hydrogen atoms) across the membrane of the cells surface. Because protons have a positive charge the difference in concentrations on opposing sides of the cell membrane produces an electrical potential of about 150 millivolts.  This doesn't sound a lot, but it is operating over a membrane only five millionths of a millimetre thick - a field strength equivalent to around thirty million volts per metre. That is a significant bolt of lightning - and happening all the time the fuel is being processed. Mitchell called this force the "proton-motive force".  Once you have this the cells can stick together in long replicating structures (RNA) - and you have potential life. And seen very simplistically, once the RNA gets doubled up (which assures consistent replication) you have DNA - and you have the basic building blocks to enable you to make sustainable, replicable, life.

May the force be with you
Essentially all cells are powered by the force, which we now know to be as universal to life on earth as the genetic code.  This tremendous electric potential can be tapped directly, to drive motion of flagella for instance, or to make the energy rich fuel Adenosine triphosphate (ATP). However, back to primordial life. Because the proton gradient mechanism is universal to life on Earth, it is a good bet that it evolved very early. We already noted that the first manifestation of cellular life was probably a lot less efficient at energy processing, it seems sensible to consider whether the earliest cells had some kind of environmental encouragement.  A current favourite answer was proposed at the turn of the twenty-first century by geologist Michael Russell.

Alkaline Thermal Vents
Russell had been studying deep-sea hydrothermal vents. These are not the "black smokers" associated with plate tectonic movements, but are much more modest structures. They are formed as seawater percolates down into electron-dense rocks found in the Earths mantle, such as the iron-magnesium mineral Olivine. Olivine and water react to form serpentine in a process that expands and cracks the rock. This allows more water in, perpetuating the reaction. "Serpentinisation" of Olivine produces alkaline fluids rich in hydrogen gas, and the heat it produces drive these fluids back up to the ocean floor. When they come into contact with the cooler ocean waters, the minerals precipitate out, forming towering vents up to sixty metres tall. The hydrogen bubbling up through the precipitation forms tiny interconnected cell like spaces enclosed by flimsy mineral walls. The walls contain the same catalysts - notably various iron, nickel and molybdenum sulphides - used by cells today to catalyse the conversion of carbon dioxide into organic molecules. Russell realised that such vents provided everything needed to incubate life - or rather, they did, four billion years ago.  Back then there was very little, if any, oxygen, so the oceans were rich in dissolved iron. There was also a lot more carbon dioxide than there is today, which would have made the oceans mildly acidic - that is, they would have had an excess of protons.  The reaction of carbon dioxide and hydrogen required to start life is hard to get going - but in the alkaline hydrothermal vents of the ancient acidic seas there would have created a natural proton gradient which would be easily enough to get things moving.  There are many more complications and components than the main thrust described here, but water and olivine are the most abundant substances in the universe - so the generation of living cells is probably not a rare event in this, or any other solar system.

Prokaryotes v Eukaryotes.
By deduction the generation of simple life forms - bacteria and archaea (prokaryotes) is probably extremely common throughout the Universe - there is evidence that generation still happens here and - of course - evolution still happens. When we eventually visit Mars or some of the more promising moons of Saturn, we will not be surprised to find evidence of such simple life forms. However, the step from a simple reproducing living cell to a more complex organism - a Eukaryote - appears to be a much rarer event. It seems to have happened only once in this planets four billion year history - and from that happy moment all plants, fish, insects, dinosaurs, and mammals, are descended. Indeed all complex life on Earth - Animals, plants, fungi and so on - are eukaryotes; and from DNA studies we now know that they all evolved from the same single common ancestor. The conundrum is that while simple cells like bacteria and archaea can evolve into other simple cells, they just don't have the right cellular structure or energy availability to evolve more complex forms. The real issue is that to get bigger the cell has to acquire more genes - but the extra energy generated by having a larger membrane area gets absorbed by these extra genes; so the more genes a simple cell acquires, the less it can do with them. And a genome full of genes that cannot be used is no evolutionary advantage - so prokaryotes stay simple. This limitation is a tremendous barrier to growing more complexity because making a fish, or a tree, or us, requires thousands more genes than a bacteria possesses.

Complex life seems to be a fluke of nature
We know from assessments of DNA that complex life on earth - plants, insects, vertebrates and fungi - all evolved from one single common ancestor, a "eukaryote" - a "cell" which has the ability to generate enough ATP power to build large cellular structures and to be able to afford to specialise in whatever other tasks it evolves to achieve. This development was so rare that it only seems to have happened once in four billion years. The emergence of complex life seems to hinge on a single fluke event - the acquisition of one simple cell by another. A cell within a cell. Such association is a regular feature among cells making up complex life - in which these internal "mini-cells" are called mitochondria; but it is an alliance not seen in simple cells. The current theory is that about two billion years ago one simple cell somehow accidentally ended up inside an other, and both miraculously survived. The identity of the host cell isn't clear, but we know that it "acquired" a bacterium which began to divide within it. These "cells within cells" competed for succession in classic evolutionary style - those that replicated fastest without losing their capacity to generate energy were likely to be better represented in the next generation and so on. These "endosymbiotic" bacteria evolved into tiny power generators containing both the membrane required to generate ATP and the genome required to control the membrane. This evolution into mitochondria has honed the genome of the original bacteria from a typical bacterial load of perhaps three thousand genes, to just forty or so genes today. And the mitochondria are now an essential component of all complex cells - a squadron of living "generators" inside the main structure. Meanwhile, for the host cell it was a different matter. As the mitochondrial genome shrank and the generation of ATP became more efficient, the amount of energy available to the host cell increased and its genome could expand. Served by squadrons of mitochondria the cell was awash with ATP and was free to accumulate DNA and grow larger. It had become a eukaryote and could spend time evolving into much more complex structures.

Life on other planets
This tremendous "fluke" may explain why we've never found any sign of extraterrestrial aliens. In an infinite universe the fluke is certain to have happened somewhere else, but it probably remains an exceedingly rare event. It therefore seems likely that there are very few other intelligent beings in our galaxy. However, if we do meet them it is highly probable that they will have mitochondria too.

 

horizontal rule

 

 

#001 INSIGNIFICANCE?

The following extract from an episode of BBC Radio 4's "The Infinite Monkey Cage"
by Robin Ince and Professor Brian Cox/

 

There is a problem of insignificance, especially when looking at the night sky.
It takes four years for the light from the closest star to Earth, Proxima Centauri, to reach us.
It takes 16,000 years for the light from V762 Cas in the constellation of Cassiopeia, the furthest star visible with the naked eye, to reach us. The light we see from there is older than our civilisation.
Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is a hundred thousand light years across; and is just one of billions of galaxies.

You can understand that when dealing with such magnitudes, people can feel like specks - less than specks - barely the dust of our universe.

After watching a lecture on the grandeur of the Universe, hearing about the light years between the billions of galaxies and the speed of expansion of the Universe, with everything getting further apart by the second; that sense of tiny speck-ness can become palpable.  You don't have to travel far from the Earths surface for human beings to become indistinguishable from the rivers, rocks and sea; and from a little further away you'll find that there is no visible trace of the civilisation which from our perspective glows and pulses as we walk through it.

The average human is insubstantial next to Mount Everest, negligible compared to the size of Jupiter, and almost nothing in comparison to the large Magellanic Cloud. However, this insignificance is just one of size. It is judging magnitude solely by height and girth.  But size is not everything.

We may not stand tall, but we are incredibly complex by the standards of everything else we have observed so far in this Universe. Our structure and behaviour is far less predictable than that of a planet or a galaxy. How many more equations are required to summarise the behaviour of a gnat compared to the equations that predict the behaviour of a pulsar? What processes are required to crawl and catch a fly, compared to the comparatively simple processes that cause a star to shine?  We can understand nuclear fusion in the heart of our sun - the conversion of hydrogen to helium and the light produced - yet we have very little idea of how and why we can be consciously aware of that sun - far less understand what it is that drives us, among all other animals on the planet, to question how it works!

Our temperament can be volcanic. Our behaviours can be giddy. Our emotions can be tumultuous. Our ability to predict even our own changes of mental state can be scant at the best.  It is our ability to perceive our insignificance that marks out our significance.

Most of space is "empty". If you were teleported to a totally random place in the Universe, it is highly unlikely that you would find yourself near anything solid.  if you were lucky enough to land yourself on another planet, it is highly unlikely - from what we know and currently understand - that the planet would be able to sustain life, let alone complex life.  Already you are significant despite being a speck!

Added to the complexity of your biological structure, even by Earth's standards, your brain is exceedingly complex and questioning. You may be small but you are unusual, and you know it, and there is nothing else in this solar system beyond earth that could say that. Or indeed, could say anything at all!

Every human, therefore, is a thing of great significance in a restricted but very important sense. On a cosmic scale our physical presence is of no consequence, We are each a temporary assembly of ten billion billion billion atoms which in a century or less will all be returned for recycling. But for the briefest of moments these atoms are able to contemplate themselves and other atoms.  The atoms we are composed of were born in stars and spent an eternity in darkness before we existed; and they will spend an eternity in darkness when we are gone; Our purpose should be to extend their moment in the light as best we can.

 

horizontal rule