Tuesday Morning Quarterback: First Down and Light Years to Go

The ancient Greeks thought the universe eternal, without a starting point, though “universe” to them meant an area much smaller than what we’d now call a nebula. Currently the universe appears to be about 100 trillion times larger than the ancient Greek estimate of the cosmos—and that number is likely to rise, perhaps by a lot. As recently as a century ago, before Edwin Hubble’s 1925 finding that the universe extends beyond the Milky Way, there were thought to be perhaps a billion stars. Today it looks like there at least a septillion stars, or 1,000,000,000,000,000 times the estimate of a century ago. That number may rise, too. And again, by a lot.

Renaissance Christians thought the Earth was young. By the 1650 chronology of the Irish archbishop James Ussher, today the Earth is 6,021 years old. Instead it’s close to certain the Earth is around 4.5 billion years of age, with the cosmos seeming around 14 billion years old.

Ancient Greeks thought life has simply always existed, while Renaissance Christians thought life began ex nihilo in response to divine command. Today, while a great deal is known about biology and a moderate amount known about natural selection, there is still little more than loose conjecture regarding the origin of life. Evolutionary theory concerns how organisms that already exist respond to changes in their environments; Darwin was silent on how it all started.

All this is a way of saying that although humanity has acquired tremendous knowledge of the nature—of the cosmos and of the history of living things—we still hardly know diddly-squat. A rough guess might be that men and women currently know 1 percent of what is possible to know.

Every time cosmologists think they have creation figured out, they realize they do not, in fact, have it figured out: that the universe is vaster and older than once assumed, and does things whose explanations we can’t begin to guess. Every time anthropologists think they have the human family portrait drawn, a new dig throws the field into disarray.

Don’t let this discourage you! That creation is barely grasped is exciting; that human origins are shrouded in primordial mist indicates countless possibilities for new knowledge. It is not hyperbole that the current generation may learn more about creation than has been learned by all previous generations combined.

And don’t let the scale of nature discourage you! That creation is unfathomably vast and timeworn does not make us insignificant—rather, it makes us essential, to give meaning to the cosmic enterprise. What good are a septillion stars unless they shine on beings who think? On us, and on the other handful of, or perhaps the other quadrillion, societies out there?

Here for your holiday contemplation are some recent findings on the big questions of life and the cosmos:

What if we are not the first on Earth? We Homo sapiens assume we are the first intelligent species on this great spinning globe. Like awarding ourselves a name that means “wise man,” our assumption of being first reflects more than a little arrogance. Should Homo sapiens fail, within a relatively short span in geologic terms, it might be hard to determine that we had ever been here. The Earth has spun for 4.5 billion years; mammals have existed for perhaps 600 million years; who’s to say that others like us, or superior to us, have not already come and gone?

Researchers led by Michael Kipp of the University of Washington recently proposed that conditions suitable for the evolution of complex life have existed much longer than conventionally assumed, including before Earth’s atmosphere had the oxygen levels associated with mammal life. We like to assume that nobody but our magnificent selves could have built cities, invented silicon chips, or devised the breakfast burrito. Maybe we’re just Earth’s latest attempt at a society that does not destroy itself. On the other hand . . .

What if we are the first overall? At 14 billion years, to us the universe seems immeasurably archaic. But compared with itself, creation glistens with the dew of morning: The universe may have existed for only a tiny fraction of a projected life that will run deep into the trillions of years. (Hold that thought till the end of this column.) If the cosmos is youthful compared to itself, maybe there has not yet been enough time for intelligence to evolve.

Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has argued that life was unlikely in the primordial ages of the universe but will become more common with each passing eon. This may explain the absence of artificial signals from other star systems, indeed, the absence of any indications—laser beacons, microwaves, the emission lines of artificial elements such as plutonium—of advanced societies beyond our own.

Of course, other beings might choose to disguise their presence. What if they aren’t there yet—but will be, far into the future? Then someday genus Homo will be expected to play the role of learned guardians of the cosmos, righting wrongs while lighting the way for others.

When did people reach North America? For a generation or so, researchers have believed that the Clovis culture of the New Mexico area represented the oldest sign of men and women in this hemisphere, dating back to somewhere around 12,000 years ago. How they got here was mystery enough, even assuming a land bridge when the oceans were lower during the last ice age.

Recent digs in Florida and elsewhere have tended to push the oldest-settlement time back to 14,000 or 15,000 years in the past, though there is a lot of speculation on this point, considering fossils, pottery, and other proxies for the far past are a random record. Other contentions include modern women and men in Chile around 18,000 years ago.

Now there’s some evidence of human ancestors in the Western Hemisphere much, much farther back: perhaps 130,000 years ago. A study led by Stephen Holen of South Dakota’s Center for American Paleolithic Research found, in southern California, what sure look like indications that someone was hammering mastodon bones about 130,000 years ago, which “substantially revises the timing of arrival of Homo into the Americas” (to put it mildly). If an ancestor was in California 130,000 years ago, that’s barely possible under the out-of-Africa hypothesis of modern human origin in the East Africa basin, which holds that modern humans began leaving Africa from 45,000 to 135,000 years ago.

How could people have gotten all the way from East Africa to California so far in the past? Reaching China from Africa on foot over many generations, which is a little less daunting to conceptualize, might have happened as long as 120,000 years ago. As Jane Qiu has noted, researchers in China are working on a hypothesis that the tree of human evolution is much taller than commonly assumed, having far more branches. Will it turn out there were two or more separate human evolutions in parts of the globe? The past keeps offering surprise of types of persons who don’t fit any established evolutionary timeline. And every time researchers take a peek, they find Homo sapiens has been around longer than previously thought: for at least 300,000 years, surviving not one but two ice ages.

How many galaxies are far, far away? In the 1978 movie Superman, Marlon Brando, playing Jor-El, declares that the sentient computer he has constructed for baby Kal-El contains the wisdom of “the 28 known galaxies.” Looks like Krypton’s leading scientist was off by a factor of 70 billion. Researchers led by Christopher Conselice of the University of Nottingham have built a case there may be two trillion galaxies. Two trillion galaxies would suggest somewhere around 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars. That’s two million times greater than the seemingly-incomprehensible star census estimate at the top of this article.

Life keeps looking older. Latest indications are that life began on Earth at least 3.7 billion years ago, quite a bit farther back than once presumed. This gives credence to the possibility that life is not spectacularly improbable, rather, likely to arise whenever the proper range of elements, temperatures, and pressures are present.

Are deep-space “bursts” the muzzle flashes of weapons? Astronomers have puzzled for decades over gamma-ray bursts from deep space—brief, extremely energetic streams of gamma rays that are hard to explain. Lately fast-radio bursts also have been detected from deep space, and also are puzzling.

Scientists are trained to seek natural explanations for phenomena, but if there really are 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars, some must host worlds that build weapons (nuclear explosions release gamma rays) and communication devices. Perhaps gamma bursts are the muzzle flashes of cataclysmic combat from long ago, considering the time it would take for light to reach us; perhaps fast radio bursts are the Millennium Falcon calling the rebel base on Crait.

There may be natural explanations for bursts of gamma rays and energetic radio. It just seems presumptuous to suppose we already know enough about the enormity of the cosmos to rule out that large-scale distant events are indicators of other societies. Though, we can be reasonably confident an imperial dreadnaught near a star designated KIC 8462852 is not shooting beam weapons at us.

Who lost 94 percent of the universe? A generation ago the terms “dark matter” and “dark energy” were unknown, and now these two categories are said to account for 94 percent of the cosmos. The stuff that you and I and Ivanka Trump are made of, previously called “normal matter,” may be rechristened “peculiar matter” if research proves the thesis that the atoms and forces inside the Milky Way constitute a mere six percent of the universe.

Two conundrums—that galaxies move in ways that cannot be explained by their apparent masses, and the 1998 discovery that expansion of the universe is accelerating—have led to the assumptions that there are huge amounts of dark matter whose location is unknown (with about 25 percent of creation being dark matter) plus an extremely powerful form of energy (about 69 percent of creation being dark energy) that operates as the mirror image of gravity. Gravity is strong close up and weak at distance; dark energy is assumed to be weak close up and stronger the father away you are.

Thus, as the universe continues to expand, things get father away from other things, which increases dark energy and propels a faster expansion which will move things farther away and make dark energy steadily stronger which will accelerate the expansion which will increase the dark energy, and so on.

The problem is that er, well, ahem, no one has the slightest idea what dark matter and dark energy are, let alone how they originate. We can’t locate 94 percent of the universe, but trust us, we’re experts!

Attempts have been made to explain the observed acceleration of “recession velocity”—the farther away a galaxy is from us, the faster it travels—without resorting to the seemingly nutty concept of dark energy. But the attempts tend to turn on their own nutty ideas. One is that spacetime can warp in a manner that attracts galaxies to stuff in the extreme distance. This is pretty nutty, and hasn’t held up. My favorite is that the acceleration of expansion is really a gigantic illusion and thus does not have to be explained.

Attempts to elucidate the observed motions of galaxies have led to nutty ideas about there being zillions of very hard to detect black holes that have fantastic mass. But so far, “Physicists have found no particles that could comprise dark matter,” Natalie Wolchover has written.

Maybe dark matter exists but is impossible to localize with current knowledge and instruments; at some future juncture, it will become obvious what the dark matter was all along. Dark energy is way weirder. This strangeness not only must constitute 69 percent of the cosmos, it must be growing steadily stronger as time passes, drawing fresh energy from . . . where, exactly? If dark energy is the mirror image of gravity, bear in mind that while the equations of gravity are well enough understood to guide the probes moving among the outer planets, physicists still have no idea what gravity is or how its force originates. Dark energy may fall into the same mystery-force category.

Forget the two trillion galaxies: Our galaxy alone is, like, so, like, totally huge. Next year NASA is expected to launch a probe called Parker which, at a peak velocity of 432,000 miles per hour, will be the fastest manmade complex object. That sure sounds fast. But it’s 0.06 percent of the speed of light. At Parker’s velocity, it would take about 8,000 years to travel to the next star closest to our sun, and about 200 million years to cross from one edge of the Milky Way to the opposite edge.

Thinking about needing 200 million years just to go on a tour across the 100-billion-star local neighborhood of the far larger cosmic homestead is a way of grasping that we know almost nothing about the place where our planet lives, other than it’s really big and full of shiny objects. This is not discouraging: It’s exciting!

Stars are still forming. Because the cosmos is ancient compared to us, we conceptualize creation as running toward decay. What if instead creation is just getting started?

The Milky Way averages seven newly formed stars per year. That’s not in the primeval epoch following the Big Bang, that’s today, after 14 billion years of star formation. Stars are coalescing in the middle of nowhere in galactic terms, which Pierre-Simon Laplace would have called impossible. Creation isn’t creaking with age—creation is ongoing. Stars are still forming, and may continue forming for mindboggling spans of time.

At the risk of quoting myself—Wait, have I said that before?—let me quote this 1994 New York Times piece. The springboard of that piece was an astronomer’s finding suggesting the universe was “only” 8 billion years old; today the consensus is about 14 billion years. That could be wrong, too, of course. In a century people may say, “Can you believe that in 2017, readers of THE WEEKLY STANDARD actually thought cosmic expansion was accelerating based on invisible energy no one could locate? Thank goodness our prefrontal cortex implants would never allow us to believe something so ridiculous!”

Even if the details have changed since 1994, the principal contention of the piece remains: that creation is not running down, rather, just getting started. Now the quote: “When we raise our eyes to the night sky, what we behold is the light of sunrise.”

If the universe is just getting started, who can say what the cosmic enterprise may call for? Happy holidays.

Next Week: Regular TMQ returns.