Was Alvy Right? Does the Universe’s Fate Affect Purpose?

 

By Keith Tidman

In the 1977 movie “Annie Hall,” Woody Allen played the role of a fictional protagonist Alvy Singer, who iconically portrayed a nebbish character: timid, anxious, insecure. All in all, vintage Woody Allen. But equally, these less-than-stellar traits were apparent in Alvy as a young boy. Which is why, when Alvy and his mother went to the doctor’s, she reported that her son was depressed and refusing to do his homework. She thought that Alvy’s unease stemmed from “something he read.”

 

In response to the doctor’s inquiries, Alvy gingerly elaborated on the whys and wherefores of his disquiet: “The universe is expanding…. Well, the universe is everything, and if it’s expanding, someday it will break apart, and that would be the end of everything.” At which point, Alvy’s mother interjects, “Why is that your business? What has the universe got to do with it? You’re here in Brooklyn! Brooklyn is not expanding!” To which Alvy, perhaps channeling Albert Camus’s absurdism, concludes dejectedly, “What is the point?”

 

The way in which this dialog unfolds has been dubbed “Alvy’s error”. That is to say, Alvy — along with the philosophers and scientists who similarly argue over the meaninglessness of life in a universe seemingly on track to die leading to the extinction of our species and civilization — have been accused of “assessing purpose at the wrong level of analysis”.

 

As the ‘errors’ reasoning goes, instead of focusing on a timescale involving billions, or even trillions, of years, we should keep the temporal context within the frame of our own lifespans, spanning days to years to decades. That being said, one might reasonably ask why timescales, cosmic or otherwise, should matter at all in calculating the purpose of human life; the two are untethered.

 

On balance, I suggest Alvy actually got it right, and his mom got it wrong. It’s a conclusion, however, that requires context — the kind provided by the astrophysicists who reported on a recent study’s stunning new insights into the universe’s life cycle. At the center of the issue is what’s called “dark energy,” a mysterious substance that astrophysicists believe exists based on its cosmological effects. It’s a repulsive force that pushes apart the lumpy bits of the universe — the galaxies, stars, and planets — incidentally setting off Alvy’s bout of handwringing by causing the universe to expand ever faster.

 

To be clear, dark energy is no trifle. It is estimated to compose seventy percent of the universe. (In addition, equally unseen dark matter composes another twenty-five percent of the universe. By comparison, what we experience around us everyday as observable matter — when we agonizingly stub our toe on the table or gaze excitedly upon vast cosmic swaths, star nurseries, and black holes — composes just a tiny five-percent sliver of cosmic reality.)

 

That our species is able to persistently ponder alternative models of cosmology, adjusting as new evidence comes in, is remarkable. That our species can apply methods to rigorously confirm, revise, or refute alternative models is similarly remarkable. The paradox is that three of the four models now in play by astrophysicists will lead to humankind’s extinction, along with that of all other sophisticated intelligent species and their civilizations ever to inhabit the universe. How can this be so?

 

For starters, the universe’s expansion has consequences. That said, recent observations and research has added a new twist to what we understand regarding issues of cosmology — from how the universe’s initial spark happened 13.8 billion years ago, and especially how things might end sometime in the future. Alvy was gripped by angst over one such consequence: he contemplated that the increasing acceleration might continue until the universe experiences a so-called Big Rip. Which is when everything, from galaxy clusters to atomic nuclei, fatally “breaks apart,” to borrow Alvy’s words, leading to a grand-scale extinction.

 

But, according to the most recent studies of the standard cosmological model, and of the increasingly understood role of dark energy, there’s a paradox as to a possible cosmic end state other than a Big Rip. Because there is an alternative outcome of accelerating expansion, in which the distance between stars and galaxies greatly increases, such that the universe eventually goes cold and dark. This is sometimes called the thermodynamic death of the universe, moved along by the destructive role of entropy, which increases the universe’s (net) state of disorder. No less fearful, surely, from the standpoint of an already-timorous Alvy.

 

The third possibility that dark energy creates is that its pushing (repulsive) effects on the cosmic lumps start to weaken, in turn causing the universe’s expansion to slow down and reverse, eventually leading to contraction and a so-called Big Crunch. Whether the crunch segues to another Big Bang is hypothesized, but the recent cosmological and dark-energy research doesn’t yet speak to this point about a cosmic bounce. Either way, extinction of our species and of all other intelligent life forms and civilizations remains inevitable as our full cosmic history plays out.

 

The fourth and last option is less existentially nihilistic than the preceding three possibilities — and is one that might be expected to have had a calming effect on Alvy, if he only knew. In this less-likely cosmological model, dark energy’s effect on cosmic expansion might slow but stabilize rather than implode. In averting the fate of a Big Rip, or a heat death, or a Big Crunch, there would be no extinction event occurring. Rather, circumstances would lead to a universe existing stably into infinity.

 

No matter how one dices reality, the existentialism and nihilism espoused by, for example, Schopenhauer, Sartre, and Nagel, as well as ideas about will-to-power advanced by Nietzsche, hang over the inconvenient realities of a universe fated to reach an all-encompassing expiry date, depending on the longer-term influences of dark energy.

 

From a theist’s standpoint, striving to live Aquinas’s “beatific vision,” one might wonder why a god would create a highly intelligent, conscious species like ours — along with innumerable cosmic neighbors (extraterrestrials) of unimaginably greater intelligence and sophistication because of earlier starts — when every species is assured to go poof. There will be no exceptions; the scale of annihilation will be cosmic. 

So, what’s the meaning and intent, if any, of such teasing capriciousness? "What's the point?," as Alvy muttered with deep resignation. And how realistic can a transcendental force be, purportedly serving as a prime first cause of us and of our cosmic co-inhabitants subject to such conditions? Besides, contrary to some assumptions, even the existence of a god does not vouchsafe purpose for our species; nor does it vouchsafe purpose for the universe itself. 

 

On the other hand, from a secular, naturalistic viewpoint, life might be imagined as meaningful in the sense of “purpose in life.” That is, where we make decisions and perform deeds as moral, empathic individuals and community members — not on the scale of an entire species. By definition, these secular events occur in the absence of a divine plan, such that we emerge from the physical laws of nature, to go on to create personal value, purpose, and social norms. As to purpose in life, where meaning is defined on the scale of a single personal, the prospect of “the end of everything” might be seen as less vexing, as meaning is acquired on the level of a single person.

 

In the sense, however, that’s conveyed by the slightly altered phrase “purpose of life” — where the one-word change shifts the focus from the individual and to the species — cosmic extinction looms more consequentially in terms of the lack of purpose and meaning. Given the prospect of such cosmic annihilation, Alvy might be excused his existential musings.

 

The Rules of Capitalism

by Allister J. Marran

The philosophical theologian Paul Tillich once wrote, ‘The fundamental virtues in the ethics of a capitalist society are economic efficiency, developed to the utmost degree of ruthless activity.’

The rules of capitalism put profit over everything else. Everything else. Nothing is sacred or taboo.

It is a complex man-made set of rules, it does not exist in nature, and requires its servants to ignore common sense and its obvious dangers and pitfalls.

It is a giant pyramid scheme of investors and producers at the top, and consumers down below, that requires the base to constantly grow, which is why we now have eight billion plus people on a planet that has very limited resources. It demands infinite growth cycles when raw materials are in short and finite supply.

To ensure its ongoing sustainability, we have constantly to create hype about new products that nobody wanted or asked for in order to make another sale, with built in obsolescence so that we can sell a new model again tomorrow.

Marketing costs for products and services often far exceed R&D and cost-of-production budgets, in order to convince you to fill your house to a large degree with, call it ‘trinkets’, ‘junk’.

The over-mining, over-fishing, over-production, and mass pollution is not sustainable. That's simply a fact.

While every scientist on earth is predicting doom and gloom for future generations, the economist disagrees, and tells us to put out heads in the sand, and ignore the signs. Keep calm and keep spending.

There is another thing. In its appetite to compete, capitalist economics has now become the science of scarcity.  In order to compete, we need to optimize—and optimize everything we possibly can. We strive for less wastage, smaller margins of error, faster turnover.

This means that we sail ever closer to the wind. Let one thing go wrong—a computer hack, a bacterial contamination, a military invasion in a faraway place—and millions of people’s livelihoods and even lives may be imperilled.

As capitalism multiplies the dangers, so it multiplies our vulnerability.

This generation, our generation, the ones who were told by the scientists and experts to just look around and heed the obvious warnings, will be known as the idiots who could have stopped it but chose greed over life, profit over common sense.

We have no water where I live, because the rains haven't come for nearly 10 years. The world is cooling where it's hot, and heating up where it's cold. Smog sits over the cities, and poison infects our water sources. Landfills are full, and growing fuller every day. Our oceans are being fished to extinction, and good farming land is being paved over and cleared for urban development and new roads and highways.

Having stuff, and being able to read and write, and exploit a man-made system, does not make a person smart. If people can't see beyond their basic, immediate, satiating needs and zoom out to see the bigger picture of an exhausted ecosystem with resources heading to zero, and the only world we will ever have struggling to cope, then perhaps we were never that smart or evolved in the first place.

We do not have a divine right to rule this planet. We are just the next animal to over-evolve and get to the top of the food chain. It's an awesome responsibility which sees us on a perilous perch which can be toppled if we do not proceed with caution and humility.

Just ask the previous mantle holders, those fearsome and magnificent dinosaurs, how tenuous that grip on the top dog spot is.

We can’t ask them, of course. They are extinct.

And the Universe Shrugged

Posted by Keith Tidman

It’s not a question of whether humankind will become extinct, but when.

To be clear, I’m not talking about a devastatingly runaway climate; the predations of human beings on ecosystems; an asteroid slamming into Earth; a super-volcano erupting; a thermonuclear conflagration; a global contagion; rogue artificial intelligence; an eventual red-giant sun engulfing us; the pending collision of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies. Nor am I talking about the record of short-lived survival of our forerunners, like the Neanderthals, Denisovans, and Homo erectus, all of whom slid into extinction after unimpressive spans.

Rather, I’m speaking of cosmic death!

Cosmic death will occur according to standard physics, including cosmology. Because of the accelerating expansion of the universe and the irrepressibility of entropy — the headlong plunge toward evermore disorder and chaos — eventually no new stars will form, and existing stars will burn out. The universe will become uninhabitable long before its actual demise. Eventually a near vacuum will result. Particles that remain will be so unimaginably distanced from one another that they’ll seldom, if ever, interact. This is the ultimate end of the universe, when entropy reaches its maximum or so-called thermodynamic equilibrium, more descriptively dubbed ‘heat death’. There’s no place to duck; spacefaring won’t make a difference. Nowhere in the universe is immune.

Assuredly, heat death will take trillions of years to happen. However, might anyone imagine that the timeframe veils the true metaphysical significance of universal extinction, including the extinction of humans and all other conscious, intelligent life? And does it really make a difference if it’s tens of years or tens of trillions of years? Don’t the same ontological questions about being still searingly pertain, irrespective of timescale? Furthermore, does it really make a difference if this would be the so-called ‘sixth extinction’, or the thousandth, or the millionth, or the billionth? Again, don’t the same questions still pertain? There remains, amidst all this, the reality of finality. The consequences — the upshot of why this actuality matters to us existentially — stay the same, immune to time.

So, to ask ‘what is the meaning of life?’ — that old chestnut from inquiring minds through the millennia — likely becomes moot and even unanswerable, in the face of surefire universal extinction. As we contemplate the wafer-thin slice of time that makes up our eighty-or-so-year lifespans, the question seems to make a bit of sense. That select, very manageable timeframe puts us into our comfort zone; we can assure ourselves of meaning, to a degree. But the cosmological context of cosmic heat death contemptuously renders the question about life’s purpose without an answer; all bets are off. And, in face of cosmic thermodynamic death, it’s easy to shift to another chestnut: why, in light of all this, is there something rather than nothing? All this while we may justifiably stay in awe of the universe’s size and majesty, yet know the timing and inevitability of our own extinction rests deterministically in its hands.

A more suitable question might be whether we were given, evolutionarily, consciousness and higher-order intelligence for a reason, making it possible for us to reflect on and try to make sense of the universe. And where that ‘reason’ for our being might originate: an ethereal source, something intrinsic to the cosmos itself, or other. It’s possible that the answer is simply that humankind is incidental, consigning issues like beginnings to unimportance or even nonsense. After all, if the universe dies, and is itself therefore arguably incidental, we may be incidental, too. Again, the fact that the timeframe is huge is immaterial to these inquiries. Also immaterial is whether there might, hypothetically, be another, follow-on Big Bang. Whereby the cosmological process restarts, to include a set of natural physical laws, the possible evolution of intelligent life, and, let’s not overlook it, entropy all over again.

We compartmentalise our lives, to make sense of the bits and pieces that competitively and sometimes contradictorily impact us daily. And in the case of cosmic death and the extinction of life — ours and everyone else’s possibly dotting the universe — that event’s speck-like remoteness in distant time and the vastness of space understandably mollifies. This, despite the event’s unavoidability and hard-to-fathom, hard-to-internalise conclusiveness, existential warts and all. To include, one might suppose, the end of history, the end of physics, and the end of metaphysics! This end of everything might challenge claims to any singular specialness of our and other species, all jointly riding our home planets to this peculiar end. 

Perhaps we have no choice, in the meantime, to conduct ourselves in ways that reflect our belief systems and acknowledge the institutional tools (sociological, political, spiritual) used to referee those beliefs. As an everyday priority, we’ll surely continue to convert those beliefs into norms, to improve society and the quality of life in concrete, actionable ways. Those norms and institutions enable us to live an orderly existence — one that our minds can plumb and make rational sense of. Even though that may largely be a salve, it may be our best (realistically, only) default behaviour in contending with daily realities, ranging from the humdrum to the spectacular. We tend to practice what’s called ‘manic defence’, whereby people distract themselves by focusing on things other than what causes their anxiety and discomfort.

The alternative — to capitulate, falling back upon self-indulgent nihilism — is untenable, insupportable, and unsustainable. We are, after all, quite a resilient species. And we live every day with comparatively attainable horizons. There remains, moreover, a richness to our existence, when our existence is considered outside of extraordinary universal timeframes. Accordingly, we go on with our lives with optimism, not dwelling on the fact that something existential will eventually happen — our collective whistling past the graveyard, one might say. We seldom, if ever, factor this universal expiry date into our thinking — understandably so. There would be little to gain, on any practical level, in doing otherwise. Cosmic thermodynamic death, after all, doesn’t concern considerations of morality. Cosmic death is an amoral event, devoid of concerns about its rightness or wrongness. It will happen matter of factly.

Meanwhile, might the only response to cosmic extinction — and with it, our extinction — be for the universe and humanity to shrug?

Extinction Crisis? The solution may be privatisation

Endangered species can often be protected with comparatively tiny amounts 

of resources. Pictured, the critically endangered Black-flanked rock wallaby whose 
protection needs are measured in thousands of dollars - Image via WWF Australia

Posted by Martin Cohen

Looking around the world, there are so many problems that seem so intractable and the solutions so far off, that it can seem as if it is better to, well not look around the world. 'Climate change', for example, where it has been estimated by Danish statistician and reformed ‘skeptic’, Bjorn Lomborg, that the cost of reducing the world's temperature by the end of the century by a ‘grand total of three tenths of one degree’ is ... $100 trillion. That's not small beans. In terms of charitable donations, you'd need to find 100 million people ready to chip in a million each..

For any number of reasons, that cash ain't gonna be raised and those abatement measures - however worthy - are not going to be made.

Yet in fact there are a whole range of environmental problems which do have relatively straightforwards solutions - and require only tiny investments. These small but vital programmes are often starved of resources.

Take extinctions in Australia, for example, a topic I asked Friends of the Earth (UK) to campaign on back in the 1990s  mainly to highlight UK business links to forest clearance. To run a campaign might have costs a few thousand pounds but after discussions with the then Head of FoE and meeting the senior staff including the Biodiversities campaigner for a roundtable on the issues, I was told there were no resources for it. They offered to run a Press Release campaign if I wrote it instead. And then reneged on that too.

The point is not that I don't like Friends of the Earth much, in fact I think they do a lot of good work, (they helped me lead a campaign that saved the Yorkshire Moors from a four-lane motorway, probably the only time the organisation actually reversed a road scheme that had been formally approved) but that relying on environmentalists to save the world is a mistake. The economics points at a problem and a paradox: environmental pressure groups exist and make money out of environmental horror stories - they have no financial interest in saving anything. A campaign like Climate Change in which a bottomless pit of money must be raised suits certain people very well, even though it can never achieve its ends.

Meanwhile time is running out! Talk about an ‘extinction crisis’ ... It is there all right. But the solutions don't require grandiose schemes to control the world’s climate - they require small concrete actions to preserve habitat.

Half of all the species lost in modern time have been in Australia. In the last 150 years, one in eight of Australia's mammal species - which live(d) nowhere else on earth, have been driven out of existence, as the Australians literally bulldozed their forests into desert, in pursuit of grazing for sheep and cows. At the same time, the land value stolen from the defenceless animals and plundered form Australia's native people is actually tiny.

The Bramble Cay Melomys that lived only on a tiny island in the Torres Strait could have been saved if the island had but been bought and made into a sanctuary. Instead the fate of the little rodent was determined by red tape and political indifference.

Land clearing, invasive farming, extermination programs, lack of monitoring - all these are essentially money-driven failings with economic responses possible. To save the Spotted Tailed Quoll, for example, needs only to preserve a chunk of land from the insatiable thirst of Australia's farmers for land clearance. Likewise, the Black-flanked Rock-wallaby needs a small reserve declaring to cover it's now much diminished range. Such things essentially can be investments - yet the world's billionaire philanthropists - I'm looking at you Mr Gates, Mr Buffett! - have so far directed their wealthy and otherwise worthy Foundations only to talk about human needs - medicine, education, governance even. yet biodiversity and species preservation is surely just as much a vital part of our shred human shared inheritance as any other aspect of human life.

At the moment, attention is rightly focussed on the land clearance in the Amazon rainforest, land clearance often financed directly or indirectly by Western banks and institutions. Yet here's an idea for those with resources: buy up sections of the Amazon and hold them on behalf of their indigenous peoples as ecological parks, scientific resources and sustainably farmed forests. Such privately owned 'ecofarms' would be able to resist predation by those set on both genocide and ecocide. They only need investors!

It has already been done successfully for example in the conservation-driven Kruger Private Reserves in Africa. There, the connecting of habitats alone serves to improve the survival chances of many species in the region.

Picture Post #45: Undesired and Eliminated

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Tessa den Uyl

Paris - France 2018

The more imagination you put into the display of products for a shop window, the more people will remember it. Here the dead rats are eye catching indeed, aside from the large golden letters announcing: Disinfestation of Harmful Animals.

We remove the unwanted, to justify our own characteristics? 

No animal knows about our bounds, nor do we know about theirs. Living along together, this very often human being simply cannot. Though all those unwanted creatures need an earth to live on. 

Perhaps when these undesired beings are there, we might have something they need? And we need them, whether we like to see them or not. It’s a fair contract, made by nature.

The problem does not originate in nature, but it is a problem how nature will survive with us, and this is one of the most outstanding contradictions in the nature of humankind.