DaisyWorld - why we may not have much warning before the Cimate Catastrophe

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These are some simulations I did for fun, as a small extention of the zero dimentional Daisyworld Paper of Watson and Lovelock in '83. The upper graph has temperature on the y axis, and x axis has the poles on the edges and the equator in the centre. The lower graph has population on the y axis while the x axis is the same as above. Green line is the black dasies and blue is the white daisies.

The basic premise is this - there is a planet whose sun's luminosity is increasing linearly. The planet has white daisies that reflect sunlight (and thus reduce local temperature) and black daisies (that absorb sunlight and thus increase local temperatue) both of which grow at some common optimum temperature 300k, with growth rates reducing rapidly away from this temperature. (fairly sharp gaussian in my simulation).

The surprising result is that the black and white daisie populations at every point are such that the optimal temperature is maintained for as long as possible. When finally the daisies cannot regulate temperature any more, we do not see a gradual degredation of populations, we see a catastrophic collapse.

The earth's temperature and chemical regulatory systems are much, much more complex. But this kind of catastrophic transition is fairly common in complex dynamical systems. It is a possibility that has a non neglible probability.

Music Credit - People Are Strange by the Doors. I do not own the rights etc, I just thought it would make a nice sound track for the graphs. Fair Use maybe ? since its not a commercial movie etc etc ? I dont really know.

Typos - in the initial rolling text, it should be first white daisies and then black, instead of black and black. Also excuse the thin lines on the graph. There are around a 1000 graphs making up that video, I cant be bothered to wait the few hours it takes to generate them. Also, the code is a couple of years old, it'd take me ages to make sense of it ! Now on, I will write clean readable code with documentation and comments !

Books I've recently bought and cant wait to read ! :-)

1. Ever Since Darwin by Stephen Jay Gould
2. The View From Serendip by Arthur C. Clarke
3. The Last Spaceship from Earth by John Boyd
4. The Pollinators of Eden by John Boyd
5. Report on Planet Three by Arthur C. Clarke
6. Beyond This Horizon by Robert Heinlein
   
7. The Essence of Chaos by Edward Lorenz
8. Astounding Days by Arthur C. Clarke
9. The Trouble with Physics by Lee Smolin
10. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (again ?)
    

As you can see, that's all sci-fi and science. I keep thinking I have read all of Clarke worth reading and then I pop into a second hand bookstore and am pleasantly surprised by some book of his I had not seen before, it happens all the time. John Boyd I havent read yet, but he looks promising. This Lorenz is the original Lorenz (of the Lorenz attractor) so it should be interesting to read his take on chaos now that Ive had the chance to study the math behind it somewhat. Lee Smolin happens to be my current research supervisor, and that paper is due in soon, so I probably ought to be working ! :-)

Our Place in the Cosmos by David Deutsch

A TED talk by David Deutsch - brilliant and inspiring. It sort of reinforces and enlarges the point I tried to make in the post below. The guy is obviously a genius.

http://theclarkeorbit.blogspot.com/

The Opportunity for a New Rennaissance

Image Source BBC

A Soyuz rocket leaves the Bainkour Cosmodrome to take a new crew to the ISS, representing the greatest achievement of our species and all that is good in it. It is symptomatic of a remnant of the pioneering spirit that has led us to the domination of our biosphere and made us the most successful species (in terms of complexity and versatility) that our planet has ever seen. It is no mean achievement, and many times in our past we might have become extinct had it not been for some fortuitous circumstances coupled with our own ingenuity. What has distinguished us from all other species goes beyond what we label "intelligence". It is not merely the capacity to process information and manipulate the environment with our opposable-thumb-equipped appendages, but the desire and the drive to learn and explore and stick our neck out, that has set us apart.

In the past the great expansions of our species and the great migrations (including recent ones like the American conquest of the wild west and the Russian conquest of Siberia and the far east) have been driven by economic factors - a thirst for resources and food, driven by the people at the bottom of the pyramid, who had the least to lose and most to gain from taking risk and braving the dangers of the unknown. The rich might finance the discoveries and administer the empires, but it is always the poor who actually make the land their own and make it productive, and provide the expendable numbers who die and reproduce to push ever further the boundaries of the domain of mankind.

We already dominate the land masses of our planet, and we are fast stripping them bare and the unsustainable nature of our civilization is making itself obvious to even the most obtuse among us. Millions of our fellow men go hungry because we just cant be bothered about feeding them, our civilization has insulated most of us from human suffering and has insidiously sucked us into a vortex of shallow entertainment to the point where we are perpetually bored. This is a result of the complete lack of opportunity for worthy exploration and meaningful risk in our societies today. The only risks we take - in mountains and rivers and jungles - are for our entertainment and pleasure. Perhaps today, even when so many of us have so much leisure and vast resources and knowledge bases at our command, the number of explorers and pioneers as a percentage of the population is at an all time low. And so our kids do drugs and play video games and preach jihad when they should be picking up the skills that will stand by them on some worthy task.

The reasons for this web of interrelated problems lie in the fact that our species is at a crucial point in its history, we are at the base of a great leap, one that we cannot break up into manageable hops and cannot hope to take in the natural course of events - because, the next phase in the expansion of our species must play out in the vastness of space and the depths of the ocean. It is not possible for individuals or small groups to participate in this,without heavy investment from the defining institutions - nation states - of our era. The very nature of the challenges we face is such that they require us to act together as a species rather than as a collection of random individuals, and so far, we have shown ourselves to be quite incapable of doing anything of the sort. We have been vacillating for decades if not centuries, bickering and butchering, we have become soft and feeble minded. The lives of men - and any meaning that might be found in them - are determined by the quality of the ideals and utopias they choose to pursue, and we have spent too much of recent history in the bloody and perfidious pursuit of narrow, contradictory and stunted ideas. Men need worthy challenges and dangers to bring out what is best in them, men need impossible odds and mighty causes to bind them together and it is up to our leaders, who are in the privileged position of being able to allocate the truly vast resources brought together by our civilization to give mankind the chance to galvanize itself, to sally forth into the unknown and conquer and toil and set up new worlds.

The conquest of the oceans and of the solar system will provide inspiration to a disillusioned race, it will revitalize the population, it will provide chances for the risk takers to seek fortune and the the frustrated to redeem themselves, it will be the most splendid stage men will have ever had to cover themselves with glory. It will distract the devout among us from the rantings of priests and save the skeptical from the blatherings of politicians, it will force the greedy to be brave and the offer the bored a chance to be audacious, Men will see vistas and wonders hitherto unimaginable, and that is why we live is it not - to go further, venture deeper, learn more than ever before ! What can be more pointless than stagnation and the pursuit of money and riches without tying it into exploration and knowledge ? what can be more boring than living exactly like our forefathers, seeing only what they have seen (now polluted, and on a computer screen), what can be more sad than young men looking for adventure in computer generated illusions !

It is time mankind dared to live and dream again. It is time we realized, as our faraway ancestors did, that our species and the pursuit of knowledge and the exploration of the unknown are things glorious and magnificent enough to die for. The physical and psychological challenges of space and the deep ocean await us, we must accept them, we must live again !

I Sea.

The Giant Squid (genus Architeuthis) has been photographed alive in the wild only once (2004) and taken on video alive only once (2006), on both occasions by a Japanese expedition. Giant Squid are the stuff of countless maritime legends, but their existence has been scientifically confirmed only for a couple of centuries (in 1888 to be precise), and attempts to study them have been severely limited by their propensity to die as soon as they are captured. Most of the specimen studied are those that wash up on beaches and are thus in very bad shape. It was once thought that giant squid were primarily delicate drifters which just ate whatever happened to pass by. However, the photographs taken by the Japanese team (with the help of a baited hook) show much more robust and belligerent predatory behaviour.

To me, this raises some interesting issues. In any ecosystem predators tend to be more intelligent and capable of adaption than other animals. Surely, the fact that the Giant Squid is a predator (of a fairly aggressive sort too) means it might have a brain capacity greater than once thought. My speculation is of course, fueled by the fact that they have large and (even in death) disconcertingly conscious looking eyes, and their bodies look very much like the elongated shapes of super intelligent aliens one so often sees in charming sci-fi magazines (which seem to primarily come out of America. A population that has supported science fiction for 70 years cant be all bad !) and thus the whole effect begs the question, what sort of intelligence do Giant Squid possess ?

And it turns out that the brain of the squid is very large and complex and it has a very highly developed nervous system. But what really intrigues me, is that they might posses that faculty to which might be attributed all of human progress - curiosity. Again and again through history sailors have reported squid checking their ships out, even attacking them, far outside their zone of comfort which is deep cold waters. In fact, coming to the surface leaves them very vulnerable to attack by sperm whales (who the squid can only beat by preventing them from coming to the surface to breathe). But squid, more than any other deep sea creature (save the sharks perhaps, who will attack anything that moves) seem to have a fascination for human craft. The encounters of giant squid and human vessels have been well documented in recent years, and even if one discounts the legends (though they were right about the existence of the giant squid after all) there is surely a case to investigate further the cognitive capabilities of the giant squid. Furthermore, if we can be offended by the killing of whales (and everyone here in europe seems to be absolutely outraged by japan killing whales) then surely surely, we ought to extend the same concern to a creature who is certainly a worthy adversary to the whale, and might be just as intelligent. I would love to know the results of any tests that might be conducted on Giant squid in the wild in the future, and their response to various stimuli.

Something in their eyes tells me they're smarter than we think :-) Wikipedia, Youtube and Google yeild some interesting results on them Squid. and the Giant Squid is not the end..apparently there is something called "Colossal Squid" ! :-) I love the deep seas almost as much as space and they are so much more accessible and plausible too !

Surely one of the most fascinating things to explore in the deep sea are the extremophilic lifeforms that live there (and they have been caught on film in a visually stunning but otherwise mediocre documentary. What a waste ! the possibilities for that documentary were immense), under incredible pressures and near hydrothermal vents with superboiled water that cant evaporate due to the pressure. They prove that complex life forms can arise even in areas devoid of sunlight, drawing their energy from deep sea vents that spew sulphur and other compounds that are harvested by sulphur eating bacteria (which are also fairly common near volcanic vents) as well as other larger lifeforms and they fuel a food chain based on sulphur instead of oxygen. A whole new biology which has evolved independently of the rest of the world. And the volcanic vents are many times widely seperated making biological exchange between them impossible, so there might be (and probably are) many independently evolving ecosystems (planets for all practical purposes) under the sea ! When a vent shuts down (as must happen every once in a while) so does one entire ecosystem around it. The sea floor must be littered with them. Arthur C. Clarke envisioned this kind of life on Europa (I dont know if he was the first one) and speculated as to the evolution of intelligence in such circumstances. Why not ? It is a challenging and constantly evolving environment. But of course, any given vent might not last long enough for intelligence to evolve (but then again, who is to give Nature a time limit ?) and it has been speculated that Sulphur based metabolism is not efficient enough to sustain intelligent brains (but maybe our brains are energy inefficient, spoilt by the abundance of oxygen). It is certainly possible.

One does not even need to go deep into the sea to find extremophiles and species evolving seperately from our ecosystem. They can be found in caves, and the way troglobites have evolved, very obviously from terrestrial creatures that went into the caves and stayed there, and how different they now are, is surely a brilliant and dramatically clear illustration of evolution at work ! and america has some of the most remarkable caves. Take the evangelicals to the caves I say, and maybe they will see the light. And their world view is as backward as cavemen anyway. (okay okay, sorry, but I could not resist that) In the deep caves too one sees sulphur eating bacteria and a food chain that has them at its base, though its not as dramatic as the sea based ones. Here too, one sees different species in every cave ! thats evolution.

All this of course, goes some way to reassuring us of the tenacity of the phenomenon we call life, and increases our hopes of finding it somewhere nearby. And if some signs of tool making and intelligence - however rudimentary - were to be found somewhere deep in the sea, it would change the way we look at ourselves, and remind us of our transience. We will be lucky if someone finds the shells of what we once considered our achievements and wonders if they are signs of intelligence.

Let there be Light

I dont know how else to put it - I have been taken over by science. Physics and mathematics are all I seem to be able to talk about, my thoughts revolve around questions as arcane and arbit to most other people as they are delightful to me - questions about everyday life, and the world around us.....a common one, "How is a rainbow made ?" the answer to that is surprisingly intricate and pretty and hides some nice complexities in a particularly beautiful phenomenon. (wikipedia is quite good on this check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow) Another one, seen as almost trivial by many people is "why is the sky blue ?" that deals with rayleigh scattering, which is the simplest type of scattering and if you want to look deeper into scattering you quickly get into Raman scattering and Brillouin scattering and nonlinear optics (which is my bane this semester).....and then there is the small (and some would say pressing) matter of increasing the efficiency of solar cells and that question takes you to quantum dots, Excitons, and a maze of quantum mechanical equations and greek letters one will despair of ever figuring out (if you have the heart to read them at all).....if you study the subject of light (as I happen to do), you will come across many wonderful phenomena, photonic crystals, mirrors that dont invert left to right, amplifiers that are based on light diffracting off a diffraction grating made by light ! or sound !!!

It is an interesting thing, to stay in "middle europe" - a prosperous and gray city, a class filled to the brim with geniuses as well as arbit characters, a foreign land with a different language and to study light. There is something about light. Not only to man and his mind which pines for it but also in nature. It has been the key to EVERY major theory advanced in the last two hundred years, from maxwell's electromagnetism (which first gave us a clue as to what light "actually was" (if there is such a thing as "actually being") ) through relativity (the postulate about the speed of light being constant along with the postulate of relativity of motion yeilds the whole theory ! ) (and I have always wondered, "why light ? whats so special about the speed of light ? why that number ? does it follow from somewhere else ? why cant gravitational waves, (which (at least so far, as far as I know) are not connected to light) have a speed greater or less than the speed of light ?" and the refinements in understanding make it even less comprehensible, apparently, phase fronts can and very commonly do travel faster than light, but 'information' or 'wave groups' cant ! why ? what is information exactly ? what is the relationship between information and "order" (because surely they are related, I have studied information theory at college and dealt with the concept of 'entropy' but I do not know enough thermodynamics to relate the information theoretical concept of entropy with the thermodynamic one) and what has any of that to do with fundamental limits to speed ? questions questions questions ! but they convince me that light is central to our understanding of the universe and will continue to be so for some time.) and then of course there is quantum mechanics and its connection to light is so well documented that I wont put it down. As a matter of fact, it is convoluted and complicated and dare I say it, "messy" and at the same time is wildly accurate. The universe is strange and and beautiful and unfathomable. It constantly challenges our limited brains (to be fair to them, they evolved to maximize procreation and food intake in a world where everything that mattered was macroscopic and moved slowly so its a little unfair to expect them to be naturals at relativistic and quantum mechanical phenomena, as it is, they dont do too bad - after years of frustration and training :D ) and fills our pitiful imaginations and puny hearts with awe.

Reality is the most wonderful thing we have, and we are given a staggeringly short time to contemplate it, and it pains me to think that the majority of people waste this time being scared of it and forcing themselves and their children to believe crude, simplistic, stupid and harmful stories written by the worst kind of people living in sick societies thousands of years ago. They are arrogant enough to claim that they can explain not just the origin and the present state of the universe, but also its 'purpose'. I am so stunned by the sheer arrogance of it, that I cannot think of a good enough repartee. Anyone who has studied science knows.

I am still a lazy man, and dont study as much as I should, but then there is the universe to think about ! and I miss India and its teeming millions. Europe is a very beautiful place to be lonely in. Very gray in winter, and somewhat similar to that Island mountain in another dimension in "Grimus" by Rushdie.....you can only survive if you are passionate or obsessed about something. Unfortunately in my case, being passionate about something does not imply I work terribly hard for it :D