Life and Spacetime

I postulate that dark energy represents entropic forces generated via negentropy — free energy — systems.

Examination of black holes appears to show that space-time disintegrates at the event horizon. This implies that space-time is not base reality, but an emergent formation arising from some deeper process.

Life as a dissipative engine

In A Cosmological Imperative: Emergence of Information, Complexity, and Life, Eric Chaisson outlines a theory in which evolution is driven by universal expansion. Chaisson describes how spontaneous order may arise through a ‘dissipative structure’ mechanism, as a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics driving systems towards equilibrium. On this model, the expansion of the universe drove the emergence of life itself. But there is also the possibility of a feedback loop: that the emergence of life, and its energy-dissipative qualities, may in turn further increase the rate of expansion.

Entropy is the process by which things drift towards equilibrium and grow colder. Negative entropy describes a pocket of warmth that actively resists being cooled. One may describe life itself as a pocket of warmth that resists a cold universe by taking energy into itself, and then radiating it out again. This taking in and radiating away is called dissipation.

All energetic objects in the universe are dissipative to some degree. Stars first evolved two hundred million years into the life of the universe, as thermodynamic negentropy engines. More sophisticated negentropy engines — which we call life — have evolved since.

Chaisson’s measure for this is energy rate density, and by that measure the ordering is striking. There is more dissipation of energy in a bucket of algae than in an equivalent mass of stellar matter. More complex forms of life are more dissipative still, with warm-blooded creatures outpacing cold-blooded ones. Even bee swarms, working collectively on one problem, generate measurable atmospheric electrical charge. And beyond life we are doing something stranger here on Earth: by this measure the greatest dissipative object for a given mass in the known universe is the computer chip.

From the absence of evidence for advanced life elsewhere, we might tentatively presume that the thermodynamic properties of civilisation on Earth are relatively unusual within the broader universe — and that Earth may therefore have peculiar interactions with the region of space it inhabits, being influenced by the properties of our neighbourhood and perhaps contributing to them in turn.

What the sky is doing

The universe is expanding more quickly than our models suggest, and the rate of expansion appears to be accelerating. The Hubble ‘constant’ appears to vary: expansion measured in the local universe runs higher (72–75 km/s/Mpc) than the value inferred from the cosmic microwave background and baryon acoustic oscillation data (67–68 km/s/Mpc). Further work suggests the degree of expansion may vary from place to place as well as over time. The universe appears to be around fourteen billion years old, yet seems to have begun expanding significantly faster from roughly four billion years ago — around the time life had a chance to take root, as it did on Earth at least 3.77 billion years ago, and possibly as far back as 4.41 billion. The constitution of galaxies has changed too: only about 20% of spiral galaxies in the distant, older universe carry bar formations, against roughly 65–70% of contemporary ones. The intergalactic medium also appears to have grown hotter over time, by something like a factor of ten across ten billion years.

Dark energy has itself been posited to have changed through the life of the universe, growing stronger, with today’s dark energy perhaps differing in form from that present at the beginning — or perhaps ‘twisted’ in different ways. Evidence is emerging that it has either arisen latently or changed substantially, and that expansionary forces which were once fairly uniform are now increasingly found in clumps.

Dark matter appears non-uniform as well, and we appear to live inside a dark matter halo. There is also mounting evidence of several dwarf galaxies containing little or no dark matter at all, an effect attributed to interactions with larger galaxies and the ‘spaghettification’ of galaxies under intense gravity.

Perhaps the apparent acceleration of local expansion is being driven by biological, technological, economic and symbolic processes on life-bearing worlds — worlds made more likely by the properties of our local environment, which are in turn boosted by the accelerated energy dissipation of complex lifeforms, and even of integrated circuits.

A prediction, and an objection

If life in the universe is reasonably common, then wherever it occurs may drive the non-uniform aspects of the Hubble constant. If life enables greater dissipation of energy, then places where life exists may experience locally accelerated expansion from dark energy’s repulsive forces. A galaxy sitting in a large void would then be a giveaway for advanced life or technology, and worthy of closer attention for potential emissions. It would also mean that as life develops in more locations over time, the rate of expansion increases at the macro level while acquiring more perturbations at the micro level, as local maxima of dissipation arise or are snuffed out.

I therefore make a falsifiable prediction: any galaxies sterilised by gamma-ray bursts, quasars or extreme tidal forces should show less local repulsive expansion.

And here is the obvious objection, which I would rather state myself than wait to have handed to me. The energy budget does not obviously work. Set the total dissipation of Earth’s biosphere and all its machines against the energy densities involved in cosmological expansion, and the gap is not a factor of ten but many tens of orders of magnitude. For this idea to survive, either the coupling must be wildly non-linear — dissipation acting as a trigger or a tuning rather than as a source — or the accounting is wrong somewhere I cannot yet see. I raise it because a speculation that cannot name its own weakest point is not worth much.

There is also emerging, and genuinely contested, evidence that the fine structure constant may be non-isotropic. Were that to hold, it would mean physics works somewhat differently in different places, with chemical reactions and stellar fusion behaving differently in some galaxies. Under Timescape Theory, meanwhile, time runs faster in voids than inside galaxies, and those voids are inhomogeneous. Given an initial expansion from the Big Bang, more time would have elapsed in the voids — at least 35% more than within the Milky Way, and possibly billions of years more in the least dense regions. The coming together of mass produces negentropic effects that counter the entropic arrow of time itself, and I suspect life has a similar effect upon the universe.

Much as lichens and bacteria weather rock into soil suitable for plants, which fauna can then eat, dissipation from life may fine-tune the local universe towards hospitality for more sophisticated life over time — by making dissipation easier, tuning local constants towards favouring carbon-based life and its eventual silicon offspring. Perhaps earlier life arising in our region of space made the development of our own more likely. This might be one factor in the Great Filter.

Voids, and where we happen to sit

Perhaps this connects with our own solar system being unusual as far as we can tell, our sun being atypically hot and bright compared with other stars where life could plausibly have emerged, and sitting inside a tunnel-like structure. It may also connect with the mysterious origin and proximity of the Radcliffe Wave and its associated stellar nurseries, which has properties suggestive of a dark matter filament. Colossal filaments have been detected close to our galaxy’s core, along with five-hundred-light-year-wide voids within the galaxy itself. These local voids have been attributed to supernovae, though I would expect that to manifest as multiple small voids overlapping, with the zone of lower density collapsing at the interfaces and refilling with typical interstellar medium.

It may also connect with the fact that the Milky Way and its local cluster sit inside a colossal region of reduced density, the largest known, some two billion light years across and 15–50% less dense than its surroundings. The Milky Way lies close to the centre of this roughly spherical void, which is expanding quickly, at around 600 kilometres per second. The increase in the size of the void may relate to the observed local rate of expansion.

We happen to sit near the middle of the local bubble, and our galaxy near the middle of the local void, which is quite a coincidence — though I hold it loosely, since observers necessarily find themselves in places that permit observers. Still, if terrestrial life, human activity and technology exert some pressure in the galactic zone, and if Earth’s complexity of dissipation is atypical, then local expansion might be driven from here rather than merely appearing to be. More precisely, a galactic neighbourhood with particularly favourable conditions for life may be the centre of a local zone of expansion, out to the limits where gravity would overcome such effects.

Coherence at scale

Entropy maximisation may drive dark matter filaments with more preferable tuning to connect and synchronise with one another, in a network akin to a neural structure. Similar patterns of strange coherence are being noticed elsewhere. Cosmic web filaments have been observed spinning, with angular momentum in their substructures. Asymmetries in the rotational axes of galaxies have been argued to suggest the universe once possessed rotational axes, and might still whirl.

We now find evidence of galaxies tens of millions of light years apart, and arrays of quasars separated by billions, that appear coherently aligned — an ‘odd sympathy’ reminiscent of Christiaan Huygens’ pendulum clocks falling into step on a shared beam, like cosmic cellular automata ticking to the same drum. Closer to home, dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way follow similar patterns of coherence, and star formation appears to operate in a curiously clockwork fashion across great distances.

These observations suggest space cannot be as empty as we commonly believe. Some force, structure, intergalactic medium, gravitational rippling or finely distributed matter must link these massive distant entities, with vibrations transmitted through it bringing them into coherence over time. Transmission of extremely low frequency vibrations may be possible even through near vacuum. This may be a resonant process affecting elements of similarly tuned eigenfrequency, or a fundamental fixed-phase normal mode affecting everything universally. I suspect phase precession effects are at play too, encoding information, as in biological neural connections.

My friend Roshawn Terrell observes that the more synchronised a system is, the more efficiently energy can flow through it, and so the more it can dissipate. Such synchronisations of oscillators are found at every scale, from biological cells to orbiting moons to binary stars. Even human minds appear to synchronise over time. These effects begin at the sparse edges of complex systems, where metastable freedom is greatest, and work their way inward towards denser regions.

A familiar example is a playground swing, which acts as a pendulum. Pushing a person in a swing in time with the natural interval of the swing (its resonant frequency) makes the swing go higher and higher, while attempts to push at a faster or slower tempo produce smaller arcs. This is because the energy the swing absorbs is maximised when the pushes match the swing’s natural oscillations. The energy moving through the brain is maximised when its neural activity resonates with its environment.

— Roshawn Terrell

I also suspect that autowaves — auto-oscillations associated with dissipative systems, which can be periodic or quasi-periodic as well as synchronised — connect with this. Autowaves occur where a source of energy, balanced by dissipation, reaches a steady state. The property is common in bistable self-organising systems that oscillate in time or scale, including many biological and technological processes, stellar processes such as solar flares, and intriguingly the process of evolution itself.

Computation without computers

Reservoir computing demonstrates that functional neural networks can be formed through waves, including in an oscillating physical medium such as a literal bucket of water. The interface of fluids of differing surface tension can solve optimisation problems. Refractive processes can also function as neural networks. Single-celled organisms use cellular microtubules as primitive physical computers to control locomotion without a brain. Astrocytes may compute as well as neurons do. Computation therefore does not require computers; physical matter in the right configuration is enough.

Such processes can arise spontaneously in nature: through oscillating flow within spinning concentrations and diffusions of amino acids or ribozymes, in sun-drenched pockets of warm brackish water, and through media blending diffusive and refractive properties, such as ice caught within a metastable hysteresis loop. These naturally computational actions may be the origin of a ‘spark of life’ within abundant organic matter and salted ice in crystalline invariant forms, bootstrapping self-replication in RNA and phospholipid protocells.

These examples suggest that oscillating, interfacing and refracting vibrations upon a cosmic medium might likewise be capable of computation at great scale, even self-referentially. The cosmos may therefore be a colossal neural network, or a neural cellular automata manifold. If so, it is at least conceivable that the universe is itself some sort of living being — perhaps conscious, or even self-aware — with Earth serving as one of its neurons, or perhaps very recently as a cortex. I offer that as speculation of the frankest kind, though it has respectable company in the philosophical literature on cosmopsychism.

Natural selection, at the level of species or of constants, can be modelled as a glacial form of backpropagation — or more accurately as a comparable process of forwards and backwards flowing optimisation. This dissipation-oriented loss minimisation appears to organise the evolution of life, and to organise the universe at colossal scales.

As an aside, there is a suggestive parallel in machine learning. Superposition theory posits that neural networks may represent far more features than their surface dimensionality implies, effectively simulating a larger, sparser system within themselves; non-linear models can coexist in superposition and still be retrieved individually. That data obfuscated by, say, a high-pass filter can still carry a recoverable signature is the same kind of phenomenon — structure surviving in places we assumed had been flattened.

Constructal Ethic Theory

Zones that support life, such as the neighbourhood of Earth and its associated void, may connect and synchronise with one another to create a universe-wide network of entropy maximisation, using the same emergent entropic principles that govern neural connections. Dark matter filaments linking galaxies — the Milky Way with Andromeda, for instance — would be the substrate for such a charged information network. The universe ‘wants’ to bind together, which dark matter facilitates at scales where ordinary matter concentrations do not suffice. The universe ‘wants’ to transmit flows of energy, which dark energy facilitates at scales where ordinary energy flows do not suffice.

The emergent properties of this flow organise behaviour on a massive scale towards ever greater collective dissipation, and towards the emergent social coopetition and flocking phenomena that follow — whether in a bacterial biofilm, a living organism, a consciousness, a forest, a global civilisation, a stellar cluster or a galactic supercluster.

This universal pattern of negentropy maximisation, from which an ethical maxim of connection by invitation for mutual benefit may be derived, I describe as Constructal Ethic Theory: an extension of Adrian Bejan’s constructal law governing flows of energy in nature.

The same properties emerge at all scales, from the infinitesimal to the titanic, encouraging clumping at every level but with greater efficiency at larger scales. That greater efficiency at higher scales is what encourages universal evolution, and it may be why the universe is, seemingly paradoxically, clumpier in its structures at large scales while more homogeneous at small ones.

A pattern I am still fumbling towards

Interactions between observable matter and energy on one hand, and dark matter and dark energy on the other, remain poorly understood. We are aware of an entropic force, and there is discussion in the literature of entropic gravity; it may prove feasible to build a thermodynamically driven model of entropic forces that fits Einstein’s relativistic equations.

I clumsily fumble towards a vague pattern, in which information may be equivalent to a whole family of things at once:

• To entropy, after Shannon — the entropy of a system being a measure of its information content, the average amount of information required to describe its state.
• To mass, after Landauer — since erasing one bit requires a minimum quantity of energy related to temperature, and mass and energy are equivalent, information connects to mass indirectly through energy.
• To energy, after Vopson — the creation or manipulation of a bit requiring some specific quantity of it.
• To time, via the thermodynamic arrow — the increase of entropy in isolated systems, in which information may play a role in setting direction.
• To space, via the expansionary argument above — if information-entropy cannot increase, then when the density of dark energy would rise through an increase in energy rate density, space expands instead, at a rate that holds dark energy’s density constant.

Some conversion factor links these, and I suspect it is Chaisson’s energy rate density: entropic informational disorder, transferred per unit mass across time. Which then intersects with entropy maximisation as an optimisation function applied to some kind of vacuum energy.

Which reduces to a pair of statements I find rather beautiful, and which may or may not survive contact with a real physicist:

Mass-energy curves space-time toward it — including informational mass, posited as dark matter — which we commonly describe as gravity, locally slowing time. Information-entropy curves space-time away from it — entropy maximisation applied to vacuum, posited as dark energy — locally increasing expansion.

How it could be tested

None of this is worth much without a way to check it. An empirical detection might be possible through atom interferometry, applied to look for dark-energy-like effects emanating from changes in a dissipative system: a cluster of eukaryotic cells proliferating within a growth medium, say, or a computer placed under an increasing computational load such as producing the output of a Markov information source. If dissipation and expansion are coupled in anything like the way I have suggested, that is where the coupling should first become visible.

I would be glad to be shown wrong in an interesting way.