Seeing Further (52 page)

There were many ‘origin stories’ of earlier cultures, but these gave little thought to how the universe came to be, beyond simple stories. Ancient times, until the nineteenth century, preferred eternity to process. As the
Bhagavad Gita
says, ‘There never was a time when I was not … there will
never be a time when I will cease to be.’ Since time and space began together – as both St Augustine and the big bang attest – the
Bhagavad Gita
has a point. The chicken and the egg arrived at the same time.

Yet Newton thought that the universe had to be eternally tuned by God’s hand, or else gravitation would cause it to collapse. This view held fairly well until a new theory of gravity and time arrived.

When Einstein developed his theory of general relativity in 1915, physicists believed in a perfectly static universe without beginning or end, like Newton. Though he had a theory of curved space-time, and so could consider all the universe, Einstein inherited this bias. He attempted the first true cosmology – that is, a complete description of the universe’s lifetime, from simple assumptions – under the influence of the ancients.

To make his early equations describe a universe unchanging in time, he added a cosmological constant to his theory to enforce a static universe. It had matter in it, which he knew meant that gravitation favoured collapse – but he demanded that it be a time-independent, eternal universe. Analysis soon showed that Einstein’s static universe is unstable. A small ripple in space-time or in the mass it contained would make the universe either expand or contract. Einstein had brought his own concepts of time to the issue, and so missed predicting the expanding universe. Soon enough, astronomers’ observations showed that our universe is expanding from an earlier, smaller event. After this era, cosmological ideas of time moved beyond him.

Modern cosmology developed along parallel observational and theoretical tracks in the twentieth century. Correct cosmological solutions of general relativity emerged, and astronomers found that distant galaxies were apparently moving away from us. This comes from the expansion of space-time itself, not because we are uniquely abhorrent. Tracking this expansion backward gave a time when space-time approached zero. St Augustine had proposed that God made both space and time, and the big bang told us when that was.

Through the twentieth century, observations of how fast distant galaxies seemed to rush away from us have pushed the age of the universe back to the currently accepted number of 13.7 billion years. By then relativity had altered and even negated our understanding of Intuitive Time, so cosmology’s enormous extension of Deep Time only added to the startling changes.

Now astronomers observe that the universal expansion is accelerating, perhaps because of the unknown effects represented by Einstein’s added cosmological constant. We now seem to occupy an unusual niche in the long history of this universe, living beyond the early, hot era, yet well before the accelerating expansion will isolate galaxies from each other, then stars, and finally may wrench apart all of matter as space-time stretches ever-faster. Time seems then like a judge, not a mere clock.

The essential dilemmas of being human – the contrast between the stellar near-immortalities we see in our night sky, and our own all-too-soon, solitary extinctions – are now even more dramatically the stuff of everyday experience. We now know what a small sliver we inhabit in the long parade of our universe. Who can glimpse these perspectives and not reflect on our mortality? We are mayflies. Yet we now know enough of time and our place in it to reflect upon truly immense issues.

Time is a fundamental, its nature slowly glimpsed. After all this time, we do not fully understand it.

It’s sometimes wrongly imagined that cosmologists and evolutionists must be serenely unconcerned about next year, next week and tomorrow. I conclude with a ‘cosmic perspective’ which actually strengthens my own concerns about the here and now.

The stupendous timespans of the evolutionary past are, through the work of Darwin and the geologists, now part of common culture. But most people still regard humans as necessarily the culmination of the evolutionary tree. That hardly seems credible to an astronomer. Our Sun formed 4.5 billion years ago, but it’s got 6 billion more before the fuel runs out. It will then flare up, engulfing the inner planets and vaporising whatever remains on Earth. And the expanding universe will continue – perhaps for ever – destined to become ever colder, ever emptier. As Woody Allen said, ‘eternity is very long, especially towards the end’.

Any creatures witnessing the Sun’s demise 6 billion years hence, here on Earth or far beyond, won’t be human – they’ll be as different from us as we are from bacteria. As Charles Darwin himself recognised, ‘not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity’. Post-human evolution – here on Earth and far beyond – could be as prolonged as the Darwinian evolution that’s led to us – and even more wonderful. Life from this planet could spread through the entire Galaxy, evolving into a teeming complexity beyond what we can conceive.

However, even in this ‘concertinaed’ timeline – extending billions of years into the future, as well as into the past – the present century may be a defining moment. It’s the first in our planet’s history where one species – ours – has Earth’s future in its hands, and could not only jeopardise itself but foreclose life’s immense potential.

Suppose some aliens had been watching our planet for its entire history, what would they have seen? Over nearly all that immense time, 4.5 billion years, Earth’s appearance would have altered very gradually. The continents drifted; the ice cover waxed and waned; successive species
emerged, evolved and became extinct.

But in just a tiny sliver of the Earth’s history – the last one millionth part, a few thousand years – the patterns of vegetation altered much faster than before. This signalled the start of agriculture. The pace of change accelerated as human populations rose.

Then there were other changes, even more abrupt. Within fifty years, little more than one hundredth of a millionth of the Earth’s age, the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere began to rise anomalously fast. The planet became an intense emitter of radio waves (the total output from all TV, cell-phone and radar transmissions). And something else unprecedented happened: small projectiles launched from the planet’s surface and escaped the biosphere completely. Some were propelled into orbits around the Earth; some journeyed to the Moon and planets.

If they understood astrophysics, the aliens could confidently predict that the biosphere would face doom in a few billion years when the Sun flares up and dies. But could they have predicted this unprecedented ‘fever’ less than halfway through the Earth’s life?

If they continued to keep watch, what might these hypothetical aliens witness in the next hundred years? Will a runaway spasm be followed by silence? Or will the planet itself stabilise? And will some of the objects launched from the Earth spawn new oases of life elsewhere?

The outcome depends on us. Wise choices will require the idealistic and effective efforts of natural scientists, environmentalists, social scientists and humanists – aided by the insights that twenty-first-century science will surely bring.

The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature of your e-book reader.

Note: Page numbers in
italics
refer to illustrations.

Acharius, Erik, 196

action principles, 101

Adams, George, 140, 153

aerodynamics, 358

Aeschnogomphus,
185

$$ther, 65

Agricola, Georgius,
De Re Metallica,
303

airflow, analysis of, 357–58

alchemists, 39, 91, 124

Alecto Historical Editions, 191

algebra:

abstract, 356

Boolean, 349, 350–51 and Internet communications, 356

linear, 356

Ammann, Othmar, 246

Ancient Monuments Protection Act (1882), 14

Andromeda, 326,
327

apocalypse:

climate change and, 408, 417, 418–19

in fiction, 406–12, 415–17

human longing for, 412–15

Hyde Park speakers on,
413

impact events,
407

nuclear, 408,
408

personal survival in, 420–23

Apollo space programme, 271

Arbuthnot, John, 48

archaeology, 5, 197

Archaeopteryx,
186–88,
187,
191, 192, 201

Argentinean ant,
282
, 283

Aristotelian worldview, 90, 111, 114, 119, 298

Aristotle, 85, 469

empiricism of, 114, 119, 121, 298

and laws of syllogism, 115

on motion, 110, 117, 127

Posterior Analytics,
115

on space and time, 64, 71

view of the cosmos, 109

“Ark, The,” Lambeth, 197

Arlandes, Marquis d’, 159, 169

art:

geometric figuring, 71

landscape,
392
, 393, 400

linear perspective in, 71

medieval, 67,
68
,
69

Renaissance, 71

Ashmole, Elias, 197

Ashmolean Museum, 197–98

Astbury, Bill, 256, 257, 258

Asteroid 2008 TC3, 401–2

astrobiology, 328

astronomy, 469, 474, 478

and Copernican principle, 323

Earth seen via, 388–89, 401

astrophysicists, 469

Atacama Desert, 331

Athill, Diana,
Towards the End,
410, 415

Atiyah, Michael, 482

atomism, 91–92, 93, 123–24

Aubert, Alexander, 172

Aubrey, John, 5, 28

Augustine, Saint, 463

Bacon, Francis, 111,
112
,
299
, 468

death of, 120

empiricism of, 113, 120, 121–22, 123, 128, 301,476

followers of, 127, 317, 319

Instauratio Magna,
299

“knowledge is power,” 297, 314, 317

The New Atlantis,
300, 309,
309

Novum Organum,
299,
299

on practical science, 296, 299–301, 302, 310,315

Bacon, Roger, 70–71, 298

Bak, Per, 381

Bakelite,
310
, 311

Baker, Benjamin, 239

Baldwin, Thomas,
Aeropaedia
, 170n

ballooning, 158–65

demagogic potential of, 160–61

fashion accessories for, 160

first crossing of English Channel, 176, 179

first manned flight, 158–59, 163, 169

first scientific record of, 175

hot-air, 158, 160, 161,
162
, 163, 179

hydrogen, 158,
159
, 160, 161, 169, 174, 179

letters to and from Banks about, 166,
167
,168–69

and navigation, 172–76

practical uses for, 170–72, 180

Le Tableau de Paris,
161, 163

Banks, Joseph, 13, 137, 148,
168

and ballomania, 158–61, 163, 166–71, 172–76 178, 181

Banks’ Florilegium,
191

botanical collections of, 190–92, 195, 198

on the
Endeavour,
189–91

and Heckingham lightning rods, 140, 150, 152

Scientific Correspondence,
166

Barbour, Julian,
The Discovery of Dynamics,
99

Barlow, Peter, 237

Barnes, Julian,
Nothing to be Frightened of,
416, 417

Barrington, Daines, 193, 195

Barthes, Roland, 310, 311, 312

Baxter, Raymond,
264

Bayes, Rev Thomas, 2–3, 9

Bayesian inference on climate change, 433–34, 435

letter regarding logarithms,
4
, 5

Bayes Theorem, 2–3

Beaman, S. G. Hulme, 52

Bell, Thomas, 221

Bergmann, Torbern, 304

Bernal, John Desmond, 253, 258–60,
258
, 263, 268, 270, 271

The Social Function of Science,
259

on weapons of mass destruction, 259

The World, the Flesh and the Devil,
259

Berthollet, Claude, 161

Bessemer, Henry, 303–4,
304
, 306

beta lactam ring, 262

Bethe, Hans, 482,
483

Bhagavad Gita,
462–63

big bang, 326, 329, 338, 463, 470, 472

biodiversity, 196, 274–79

and accident, 277–78, 286, 293

and community structure, 287–89, 290

and extinction, 280, 283, 461, 480–81

and food webs, 288

inherited, 278

and invasive species, 280,
282
, 283

invention of the term, 279

on islands, 277–78, 289

and loss of habitat, 283

measurement of, 285–87

necessity vs. chance in, 278–79

and predation, 288–89

and randomness, 289–93

species concept of, 284–85

threatened, 279–81, 283–84, 480–81

bioengineering, 317

biogenesis, 333, 335

biology, synthetic, 319

biosphere, endurance of, 391

biotechnology, 154, 314–17

Birch, Thomas, 30

Black, Joseph, 160

black holes, 455,
458–59
, 460

Blagden, Charles:

and ballooning, 160–61, 167, 168, 171, 172

and Heckingham lightning rods, 138, 148, 149, 150, 152

Blake, William, 79

Blanchard, Jean-Pierre, 159, 160, 172, 173, 174–76

Blyth, Edward, 206, 208, 219

Bobbitt, John, 138, 144, 148

body and soul, dualism of, 65

Boole, George, 344,
345
, 349–51

Boolean algebra, 349, 350–51