NS: Cosmic Accidents: 10 Lucky Breaks for Humanity

[bystander]

Cosmic Accidents: 10 Lucky Breaks for Humanity
New Scientist | Special | 27 Sept 2010

[b][i](Credit: NASA/ESA/ESO/Wolfram Freudling et al. (STECF))[/i][/b]

---

• Here we are, small beings on a small planet orbiting an unremarkable star in a really rather ordinary galaxy in an otherwise undistinguished part of an unimaginably vast universe.
  
  Yet something about our existence feels, well, special. From the ructions of the early cosmos to the growing pains of our planet and life’s daring evolutionary leaps, not everything about how we got here seems obvious, or even likely.
  
  Perhaps in other corners of the cosmos other sentient beings are also pondering the implausibility of their origins. Perhaps that very implausibility means we are alone with such questions. Either way, follow the trail as we visit 10 turning points in our history - the cosmic accidents that led to us.

• 

  (Credit: Detlev Van Ravenswaay/SPL)
  • 13.75 bya: How we avoided the void
    
    We wouldn't exist if our cosmic neighbourhood had been just a bit less dense than average during the tumultuous moments after the big bang.
  

  (Credit: Lawrence Berkeley/SPL)
  • 13.75 bya: Tipping the antimatter balance
    
    Why isn't the cosmos a sea of bland radiation? The triumph of matter suggests that the laws of physics are biased.
  

  (Credit: SDO/NASA)
  • 4.6 bya: Sparking up our star
    
    What does it take to make a solar system? Hydrogen, helium, interstellar dust – and a spark to set it on fire.
  

  (Credit: KeystoneUSA-ZUMA/Rex Features)
  • 4.5 bya: Mars attacks
    
    A colossal interplanetary collision doesn't sound like a good thing – but without it, things might have turned out very differently.
  

  (Credit: NASA/Corbis)
  • 3.9 bya: Blasting the Earth into life
    
    The solar system's "late heavy bombardment" blasted our planet – but might also have delivered our water, and created nurseries for life.
  

  (Credit: Dr Gopal Murti/SPL)
  • 2 bya: One giant leap for a single cell
    
    A freak event created the ancestor of all multicellular life on Earth. Without this unconventional genesis, we might never have become more than bacteria.
  

  (Credit: Yva Momatiuk & John Eastcott/FLPA)
  • 635 mya: The age of heroic lichen
    
    Early life had to ride an oxygen rollercoaster – until humble symbioses of algae and fungus put an end to boom and bust.
  

  (Credit: Joe Tucciarone/SPL)
  • 65 mya: Killer asteroid with a silver lining
    
    A 10-kilometre-wide rock did for the dinosaurs, but smashed open a window of opportunity for unimpressive little animals called mammals.
  

  (Credit: Paul Souders/Corbis)
  • 6 mya: Brains or brawn – which was best?
    
    When the going got tough in prehistoric East Africa, some of humanity's closest relatives went for bigger jaws, rather than bigger brains. Big mistake.
  

  (Credit: Janek Skarzynski/AFP/Getty)
  • 70 kya: Inventing language, the easy way
    
    Fresh pastures meant a cosier life for early humans – if they hadn't, we would never have loosened up enough to learn to speak.
  

  (Credit: Prakash Singh/AFP/Getty)
  • No particular time: The certainty of chance
    
    Tiny changes at the beginning make big differences in the end. That's why our existence is perilously perched on a great pyramid of trivia.

[neufer]

Cosmic Accidents: 10 Lucky Breaks for Humanity
New Scientist | Special | 27 Sept 2010

The certainty of chance
Tiny changes at the beginning make big differences in the end.
That's why our existence is perilously perched on a great pyramid of trivia.

So THAT's why my existence is perilously perched on a great pyramid of trivia

[bystander]

So THAT's why my existence is perilously perched on a great pyramid of trivia

Probably due to The Butterfly Effect and Chaos Theory.

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

[Ann]

Yeah, well, I think we've been luckier than that New Scientist article suggests.

Here we are, small beings on a small planet orbiting an unremarkable star in a really rather ordinary galaxy in an otherwise undistinguished part of an unimaginably vast universe.

Well, I got slapped on my fingers recently by Chris when I suggested that our galaxy was perhaps not so ordinary, so I won't provoke his ire again by trying to suggest that it isn't. Our Sun, however, isn't ordinary. In terms of mass, it is in the top 5% echelon in the Milky Way. That doesn't make it ordinary. It could be a very unlikely coincidence that we find ourselves in orbit around a G2V star instead of one of the ubiquitous little red dwarfs, or perhaps it is no coincidence at all, if the truly "typical" M-type dwarfs just aren't good incubators of life.

In the thread discussing Monday's APOD, Art pointed out that Venus' lack of a magnetic field may well have something to do with that planet's slow rotation. Well, our Sun rotates very slowly indeed. I'm far from certain that the Sun's slow rotation is at all common or average among stars. If the Sun is unusual in its slow rotation, then its magnetic field may also be weaker than usual precisely because of its slow rotation. And if the Sun had had a more "typical" magnetic field, it is possible that it would have had frequent colossal magnetic outbursts that might have killed life on Earth. So not only may the Sun be suitable for life because of its comparatively high mass, but it may be particularly suitable for life even compared with other G2 dwarfs because of its slow rotation and mild magnetic field.

Don't forget the fact that our Sun is single, too. Very many stars aren't. Of the higher-mass stars in our vicinity, most are binaries or multiple stars, like Alpha Centauri, Sirius and Procyon. Quite a few optimists claim that it doesn't matter if a star is single or binary, because there will be room for stable orbits in the system anyway. Perhaps, but the risk for instability and chaos certainly increases. Anyway, if binaries present no obstacle to life, then we might just as well have been in orbit around Alpha Centauri A instead of the Sun. But we are not.

That list from New Scientist doesn't even mention how incredibly lucky we have been in the low eccentricity and "stability" of the orbits of the major planets here. The most elliptical and out-of-plane orbit is displayed by Mercury, the smallest planet, whose influence on the rest of the solar system may well be the least significant.

We know so little about the planets we have discovered in other solar systems, but one thing we know is that their orbits are generally not at all like the orbits of the planets in our own solar system. It seems certain that there could have been no life on Earth if the orbits of our solar system had been more like the strange orbits that seem "typical" out there.

The New Scientist article also doesn't mention how lucky we have been in that the Earth has remained wonderfully habitable and bursting with life for billions of years, while life on Mars may at best have eked out a meager and uncertain existence for a number of million years, and Venus has become an ecological catastrophe. Venus has suffered its fate despite its remarkable similarity to the Earth in terms of size and mass, and in spite of its beautifully circular orbit which is only a bit smaller than the orbit of the Earth. The fates of Mars and Venus tell us how easily things could have gone wrong on the Earth, too, despite our "friendly" Sun and almost-circular planetary orbits.

I've said it before, I think that we on Earth have been very, very, very, very lucky.



Lucky Luke. He is so lucky that he is faster than his own shadow. That may be us on Earth.

Ann

[neufer]

<<The Skin of Our Teeth is a play by Thornton Wilder which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It opened on October 15, 1942 at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, before moving to the Plymouth Theatre on Broadway on November 18, 1942. The main characters of the play are George and Maggie Antrobus (from Greek: άνθρωπος, "human" or "person"), their two children, Henry and Gladys, and Sabina, who appears as the family's maid in the first and third acts, and as a beauty queen temptress in the second act. The play's action takes place in a modern setting, but is full of anachronisms reaching back to prehistoric times. The characters' roles as archetypes are emphasized by their identification with Biblical and classical personalities.

For example, the name Lilly Sabina is a reference to the myth of Lilith and to the historical rape of the Sabine women, identifications made relatively explicit in the play's text. Henry Antrobus's name was changed from "Cain", following his murder of his brother Abel. This is a story from the Bible, in which Cain, the son of Adam, murders his brother Abel after God favors Abel over Cain regarding gifts. This implies that George Antrobus is Adam, and Maggie Antrobus Eve, further supported by an event at the beginning of the play when Mr. Antrobus composes a song for his wife in honor of their anniversary, in which the lyrics: "Happy w'dding ann'vers'ry dear Eva" appear, though Mrs. Antrobus is referred to as Maggie throughout the play.

The murder of Abel is an underlying theme in the play, Mr. Antrobus pays far more attention to his "perfect" third child Gladys than he does Henry, because of the murder of his favorite child. As this treatment of Henry continues, throughout the acts is seen progression of Henry slowly becoming more angry with his family, which reaches its climax in the third act.

While the Antrobus family remains constant throughout the play, the three acts do not form a continuous narrative. The first act takes place during an impending ice age, in the second act the family circumstances have changed as George becomes president of the Fraternal Order of Mammals (apparent references to Sodom and Gommorah but also to the Roaring Twenties), and the end of the world approaches a second time; the third act opens with Maggie and Gladys emerging from a bunker at the end of a seven-year-long war.

An additional layer of stylistic complexity is added by the occasional interruption of the narrative scene by actors directly addressing the audience. For instance, in the first scene, the actress playing Sabina reveals her misgivings to the audience about the play, in the second act she refuses to say lines in the play and tells the spectators things that cause a woman in the audience to run from the theatre sobbing, and, in the third act, the actor playing Mr. Antrobus interrupts to announce that several actors have taken ill, and asks the audience to indulge them while the "stage manager" of the play conducts a rehearsal with the replacements.
..............................................................................
Themes:

• * Mankind's history repeats itself, but as a gradual upward spiral, with kinks and spurts. Despite ever-increasing global interaction and a growing human capacity for both good and evil, the fundamentals of human character and human needs remain much the same.
  
  * Sabina's stock-maid monologue begins and ends the play in the same way; this "stage-play" goes on and on.
  
  * In her role as resident pessimist, lacking vision, Sabina says, "That's all we do—always beginning again! Over and over again. Always beginning again." After each disaster, they just rebuild the world again. She also says: "Don't forget that a few years ago we came through the depression by the skin of our teeth! One more tight squeeze like that and where will we be?" And later she says,..."My nerves can't stand it. But if you have any ideas about improving this crazy old world, I'm really with you. I really am."
  
  * The Ice Age/The Great Flood; we are always plagued by the potential for disaster, both natural and man-made.
  
  * Art and literature are ways of advancing our humanity: enhancing empathy, tolerance, vision. Improvements in technology, though, don't necessarily advance human nature at all.>>

[Ann]

I'm not sure how this thread slipped into the territory of human optimism versus human pessimism. (But with Art, anything is possible. )

My own hands-down favorite play about human optimism in the face of quiet, relentless, slowly approaching unstoppable disaster is Samuel Beckett's Happy Days:

Click to view full size image

A woman is on holiday(?) on a beach/dump/wasteland. The only one with her is her husband, who couldn't care less about her and is perpetually facing away from her, and often is not seen at all (but then, given the woman's talkativeness, I have a bit of sympathy for the man). During the first act, the woman is buried in the sand up to her waist, and this doesn't seem to bother her in the slightest. She isn't commenting on it in any way, even though words are continually streaming out of her mouth. In the second act she is buried up to her neck, and still she pretty much acts as if nothing in particular has happened. It's chilling and brilliant.

Ann

[neufer]

A woman is on holiday(?) on a beach/dump/wasteland. The only one with her is her husband, who couldn't care less about her and is perpetually facing away from her, and often is not seen at all (but then, given the woman's talkativeness, I have a bit of sympathy for the man). During the first act, the woman is buried in the sand up to her waist, and this doesn't seem to bother her in the slightest. She isn't commenting on it in any way, even though words are continually streaming out of her mouth. In the second act she is buried up to her neck, and still she pretty much acts as if nothing in particular has happened. It's chilling and brilliant.

• Half a league half a league,
  Half a league onward,
  All in the valley of Death
  Rode the 600:
  'Forward, the Light Brigade!
  Charge for the guns' he said:
  Into the valley of Death
  Rode the 600.
  
  'Forward, the Light Brigade!'
  Was there a man dismay'd ?
  Not tho' the soldier knew
  Some one had blunder'd:
  Theirs not to make reply,
  Theirs not to reason why,
  Theirs but to do & die,
  Into the valley of Death
  Rode the 600.
  
  Cannon to right of them,
  Cannon to left of them,
  Cannon in front of them
  Volley'd & thunder'd;
  Storm'd at with shot and shell,
  Boldly they rode and well,
  Into the jaws of Death,
  Into the mouth of Hell
  Rode the 600.
  
  Flash'd all their sabres bare,
  Flash'd as they turn'd in air
  Sabring the gunners there,
  Charging an army while
  All the world wonder'd:
  Plunged in the battery-smoke
  Right thro' the line they broke;
  Cossack & Russian
  Reel'd from the sabre-stroke,
  Shatter'd & sunder'd.
  Then they rode back, but not
  Not the 600.
  
  Cannon to right of them,
  Cannon to left of them,
  Cannon behind them
  Volley'd and thunder'd;
  Storm'd at with shot and shell,
  While horse & hero fell,
  They that had fought so well
  Came thro' the jaws of Death,
  Back from the mouth of Hell,
  All that was left of them,
  Left of 600.
  
  When can their glory fade?
  O the wild charge they made!
  All the world wonder'd.
  Honour the charge they made!
  Honour the Light Brigade,
  Noble 600!

[Beyond]

Ann, it's no accident that Lucky Luke is faster than his shadow. Lucky Luke is drawing and shooting with his right hand, but his shadow is trying to draw and shoot Lefthanded!! Big disadvantage. Lets reverse the situation and see if his shadow out-draws him

[Ann]

Ann, it's no accident that Lucky Luke is faster than his shadow. Lucky Luke is drawing and shooting with his right hand, but his shadow is trying to draw and shoot Lefthanded!! Big disadvantage. Lets reverse the situation and see if his shadow out-draws him

Thanks, beyond! Finally someone explained Lucky Luke to me. Hey, I agree with you, because I'm so right-handed myself that it is ridiculous. I don't own a gun myself, since you aren't allowed to own guns in Sweden just like that, for no reason (and I don't have a reason), but I'll bet that if I did have a gun and shot at my own shadow, I would hit my shadow, using my right hand, and my shadow, being forced to use her leftie, would miss!

You can call me Lucky Ann!

Ann

[Ann]

Wikipedia says this about The Charge of the Light Brigade:

The Charge of the Light Brigade was a disastrous charge of British cavalry led by Lord Cardigan against Russian forces during the Battle of Balaclava on 25 October 1854 in the Crimean War. It is best remembered as the subject of a famous poem entitled The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, whose lines have made the charge a symbol of warfare at both its most courageous and its most tragic.

Well, that sort of tragic heroism isn't a part of Western warfare any more. Now we prefer pilotless drones.

With unmanned aircraft already being used by NATO forces in Afghanistan for intelligence-gathering but also increasingly in an offensive role, aerospace manufacturers at Farnborough reported brisk sales last year.

No blood is being spilled here, at least not by American or NATO soldiers.

Ann

[Beyond]

...you aren't allowed to own guns in sweden...

Not allowed to own guns in Sweden?? How long has THAT been going on? Last i knew every household had to have at least one rifle and was issued 200 rounds of ammunition which had to be used every year. This was for the defense of the country.

[Chris Peterson]

Not allowed to own guns in Sweden?? How long has THAT been going on? Last i knew every household had to have at least one rifle and was issued 200 rounds of ammunition which had to be used every year. This was for the defense of the country.

I think you are confusing Sweden with Switzerland. What you describe is more or less the way the Swiss Militia is organized.

[Beyond]

Thanks chris, i had forgotten all about Switzerland, probably because it is so small and hidden so well in all those Alps. Plus the fact that Switzerland and Sweden both start with an S, that tends to confuse a lot of us older people who live on the other side of the planet.

Ann, sorry to have bothered you with an illrelevent question.

[Ann]

No need to be sorry, beyond, because now you have broadened my horizons about Switzerland! I didn't know about the mandatory gun-ownership there.

Ann

[Ann]

Art, I was being a bit snide about The Charge of the Light Brigade, but I'll say this: These two lines are definitely among the most moving I know:

Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do & die

Ann

[neufer]

These two lines are definitely among the most moving I know:

Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do & die

<<The majority of gun crimes involving domestic violence [in Switzerland] are perpetrated with army ordnance weapons, while the majority of gun crime outside the domestic sphere involves illegally held firearms. Some 300 deaths per year are due to legally held army ordnance weapons, the large majority of these being suicides.>>

[Ann]

These two lines are definitely among the most moving I know:

Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do & die

<<The majority of gun crimes involving domestic violence [in Switzerland] are perpetrated with army ordnance weapons, while the majority of gun crime outside the domestic sphere involves illegally held firearms. Some 300 deaths per year are due to legally held army ordnance weapons, the large majority of these being suicides.>>

Yes, I guess that is what mandatory gunownership might do to you. Yours not to reason why. Yours but to do (own a gun, or live next to other gunowners) and die.

Anyway, as for the ten lucky breaks for humanity:


I think I've finally figured out what "lucky break" really means!

But can anyone explain to me why you native English-speakers are using the expression "break a leg" as a form of encouragement and well-wishing?



Ann

[Chris Peterson]

But can anyone explain to me why you native English-speakers are using the expression "break a leg" as a form of encouragement and well-wishing?

It isn't really something you hear much outside of theatrical circles. You can see what Wikipedia has to say about it.