DEATH IS AN IMBALANCE OF ENERGY AND INFORMATION

Science, searching for higher levels of energy (global warming, weapons, super-colliders) and information (robotics), is pushing life species including mankind, towards extinction.

1. We humans are a fragile species, very easy to kill.

We are a fragile species. Despite our claim to be the center of the Universe, professed by most religious people that believe in a God ever attentive to man, or by most scientists who think humanity is the only intelligent species of the Universe (even more intelligent than God himself, since most scientists do not consider that ‘hypothesis’) - the position of man relative to the cosmos is similar to that of a bacterium relative to a human body: insignificant and rather expendable. In scientific terms that insignificance implies that we could easily disappear from the Universe, leaving few traces behind and nobody would care that much. This is what happens to us as individuals despite our intense fight against death and our creative attempts to leave behind a trace of our work and genes in our sons. But within a few generations 99.99% of human beings disappear in the memory of those who follow them. When we go through the pictures of our ancestors a century ago, sometimes we cannot even remember who they are. Death erases information, returning all beings to the initial dust of space-time from where we departed. And so it will happen to the species if we do not take seriously, as we do with our individual lives, the protection of that collective social super-organism we might call History – the life of the species from the first ‘cellular human being’ who reproduced and colonized the Earth, to the last group of men that will inhabit it.
Death happens when the networks of energy and information that hold together the quantic elements of any organic system become corrupted and fall apart. As any medical student knows, the foundation of their discipline is physiology that studies the imbalances of those energetic=blood and nervous=informative systems that cause most human sickness. In the case of a nation, both, the informative, legal and political system and the energetic, economic system have to be healthy and balanced. Or else, when those legal and economical systems become corrupted, the nation dies in revolutions and wars, in which an excess of technological energy, delivered by weapons of mass destruction extinguishes its citizens. Since death is an imbalance of any organism, due to a lack or excess of energy and information.

2. Organic causes of death. An excess of energy and information.

Life is a question of balances and equilibriums between the energy and information networks of the system that an excess or lack of energy and information destroys. So when we lack enough energy we can die of hunger; and when we don’t have enough information about the dangers that lurk ahead into the future, we can die of ignorance. The opposite is also truth, an excess of energy or information can easily kill us:
At individual level, the most common cause of death in the first forty years of our life is an excess of energy caused by a car accident or a weapon. The higher energy of the car or the weapon, made of iron, the most energetic atom of the Universe, is transferred to our weak carbon body, destabilizing and breaking apart its organic networks. The same happens when a bomb explodes nearby. Its release of energy is passed into our cells that expand in space, breaking apart and dying. But any living being is composed of a body of energy and a head of information in perpetual balance. ‘Mens sana in corpore sanum’ said the Greeks. So there is also a limit of information that if crossed destabilizes the organism and kills it. It is basically what happens when you get older. Not only your brain acquires more information but also your body becomes in-formed, wrinkled, warped by time till it finally collapses and dies. Thus the main cause of death in the second part of our lives is an excess of information: our body wrinkles; some cells become cancerous and multiply enormously its informative DNA, our brain acquires an excess of information and becomes indifferent to the energetic pleasures of life.

3. The Death of a species. The death of the human kind.

When we study the death of any species, the same concept applies:
A species normally ends his existence on Earth when it confronts a new top predator species with more energy and information in his ecosystem. The new top predator substitutes the lesser species, hunts it down killing it with its predatory, energetic claws and teeth; or merely takes the energy that used to feed the lesser species who dies of hunger. So the arrival of human beings to America extinguished Mammoths, thanks to new, energetic weapons that killed the lesser energetic body of the mammoth. Alternatively it might happen that the Earth changes its energy parameters destroying many species due to an excess or lack of energy. So when a meteorite impacts the Earth, heating the atmosphere or a glaciation period cools the Earth too much, many species die away. Thus mankind will become an endangered species, if the limits of energy and information that our bodies and brains can manage safely are crossed. That is, if we create and release on Earth technologies and machines whose excess of energy and information we cannot control and might provoke our extinction…

4. The ‘Richter’s’ scale of extinction.

How close we are to the happening of those doomsday events? Unfortunately much closer than we think; so close that we have already entered into the ‘extinction zone’ of any endangered species, crossing the energy limits of the human kind. Indeed, in the past 50 years we have suffered the possibility of a Nuclear War and the risk is growing, as the chances of III World War increases. Yet a far more dangerous experiment, the creation of the first black hole by a human-made collider accelerator, has been scheduled for Christmas, 2007… And the risk of extinction, if the black hole becomes stable and swallows the Earth, is 10, absolute extinction with nothing left behind of the human race. The Guardian, a respected British magazine, made a year ago a scientific poll, trying to find those excesses of energy and information that can extinguish us. The newspaper reported the 10 more probable causes of the end of man in this way: ”How all will end? Some say we are likely to go with a bang, others predict a slow lingering end, while the optimists suggest we will overcome our difficulties by evolving into a different species. Kate Ravilious asks 10 scientists to name the biggest danger to Earth and assess the chances of extinction from 10 to 1, in case the event happens in the next 70 years. The results from minimal to maximum extinction risk are as follows:

1. A major terrorist attack:  2 (minimal extinction)
2. A viral pandemic:  3
3. Cosmic ray blast from exploding supernova:  4
4. Meteorite impact -  the Earth being hit by a large asteroid: 5
5. Climate Change: 6
6. Super-volcanoes: 7
7. A human population crash due to telomere erosion: 8
8. A  global nuclear war: 8
9. Super-intelligent Robots taking over: 8
10. Earth being gobbled up by a black hole: 10 (absolute extinction).”

 

If we analyze that list of possible causes of human extinction in this century, we notice first that the 2 most publicized causes for collective death risk - terrorism or pandemic, provoked by some virus run amok (a new mad cow disease, a bird’s flu, a new strain of Aids or a genetically modified lethal virus) - are the less risky, scoring a mere 2 or 3 points in the ‘Richter scale of human extinction’. Then you have an array of natural, accidental causes that humans can’t control: a super-volcano, a meteorite crashing on Earth, the sun becoming a super-nova and burning the Earth or our molecular DNA becoming unstable. Finally, the 3 most dangerous, lethal causes of human extinction, a global nuclear war, super-intelligent robots and the Earth being gobbled up by a black hole created in a particle’s collider, are provoked by the evolution of science, whichis opening up to mankind awesome energies (atomic bombs, production of black holes) and awesome, new forms of informative intelligence (computer nets and intelligent robots).If we ad the other human cause in the poll, rated 5 by scientists - a sudden climatic change due to an excess of industrial energy that is heating the Earth, we have to conclude that science is crossing in the XXI century, the thresholds of energy and information that might cause the death of our species. As the proverb says, ‘Curiosity kills the cat’. Since we live in a Darwinian Universe in which no species is safe when it faces an excess of energy and information that it can’t safely manage. It is the intention of this book, the first of a trilogy, to consider in detail what are the chances of mankind to become extinct by those ‘scientific advancements’.

5. We have to differentiate the bad fruits of the tree of science and forbid them.

The technological and theoretical quest for the energetic and informative limits of the Universe is bringing about a very unwanted process, the likely extinction of humanity during this century due to the excessive, irresponsible curiosity of our species. However we have to differentiate bad and good science. Most scientific disciplines help mankind to survive and improve our quality of life, as biology, medicine or social sciences do. The problem are 2 dogmatic disciplines, which have specialized in the search for energy and information without limits, disregarding the biological balance between those 2 fundamental substances of the Universe, needed to create any healthy individual or social organism:
- High Energy Physics, which seeks today to open the ultimate frontier of energy in the Universe, tearing apart the very fabric of space and time of which we are made, manufacturing a black hole. It is part of a long tradition. Since High energy Physics was born in II W.W. to research and help the creation of atomic weapons and flourished in the cold war, manufacturing them.
- And Robotics, which seeks to create Artificial Intelligence - machines that will surpass the informative capacity of man, and probably will make us an obsolete species, killing us in the battle field and substituting us as workers, in the economic ecosystem…
In both cases we face disciplines that show a complete unbalance and misunderstanding of the equilibriums between energy and information needed to create in this planet a healthy world, made to the image and resemblance of mankind. Even if I will use the terms ‘science’ and ‘scientists’ often, it should be clear to the reader that those 2 disciplines are the 2 bad apples of the Tree of Science that extinguish us and will become the focus of this book, which doesn’t want to dilute responsibility beyond the limits of those who are truly accountable of a probable extinction of man this century. As any politician should distinguish today between fundamentalist and moderate religious attitudes, which do not harm society but are a positive influence through their common messages of love and solidarity; we should distinguish between positive, balanced scientific disciplines and fundamentalist, single-minded science (robotics and high energy Physics) whose search for scales of energy and information beyond human control risk the future of mankind through ‘terrorist acts’ similar to those performed by fundamentalist believers. In that sense we might talk also in biological, ethic terms of eviL=anti-live disciplines of knowledge that deny the energy-information balance of living beings and worship only one of the 2 sides of the Universe. They form a minority of scientists, as it happens with fundamentalist believers. But they are a very active minority that, given the passivity and ignorance of most citizens on those matters, carry about their experiments without any opposition. It has always been like that: a few people, obsessed by religious, scientific or economic dogmas drive mankind towards a cliff of war and extinction while the bewildered herd follow them, like cattle follows the rancher to the slaughter house… ignoring the risks involved.
The purpose of this book is to give the basic information on those risks, so people can react on time to avoid them.
In that sense the book is divided in 3 parts, the first one will concentrate mainly on CERN’s experiment, which can terminate the human species as early as the end of this year, 2007, considering…
- What are the scary facts we know about black holes, thanks to Einstein’s Relativity Theory, which prove beyond any reasonable doubt the danger of those experiments. And why we should trust indeed, Einstein’s work in the subject, after a century of overwhelming proves on the theoretical and experimental truth of General Relativity.
- What are the speculative theories CERN is using to justify the creation of black holes. And why they are a clear smoking gun, to hide the dangers of an event CERN found only at a stage on the construction of the super-collider that made any change of plans a waste of 8 billion $ money difficult to accept ().
- Why the 2 fundamental reasons for those experiments, the creation of quark bombs and the quest for the ultimate truth of the Universe, won’t be achieved even if the experiments at CERN are successful. Since a quark/black hole bomb would destroy the Earth not only our possible enemies and hence it is just a suicidal proposition similar to the MAD strategy of the cold war that sponsored a Mutual Assured Destruction of the entire planet. While High Energy Physics, obsessed by the single arrow of energy, has become irrelevant to the quest for a Unification Theory, the excuse of the experiment, which is today carried about by 2 other disciplines, biology and system sciences, which study together the 2 arrows of the Universe, energy and information, and are making important inroads in that quest for an ultimate theory of reality. Further on super-colliders are not only an enormous risk to life in this planet, but they are ultra-expensive, redundant machines, since we can observe black holes in the Universe, without any danger for Earth. In fact, the first of those colliders was constructed to find a particle called a muon (a heavy electron), but just before it was put to work the muon was founded by cosmologists looking at cosmic rays. In other words, there is a 2nd way to do those experiments called Cosmology, cheaper, far less intrusive with Nature and the fate of mankind.
- And who and what should be done respect to this serious matter, far more important than any other question we will come across during the next decade. Since the probability of creating a stable black hole won’t fade away, even if the Doomsday particle doesn’t appear in the first days of work at the LHC supercollider. As we shall see, making a black hole is not easy. Nuclear physicists are like an amateur billiard player who is trying to make a bull’s eye shot… The inexperienced player will succeed only after a lot of trials, in which mediocre shots – the equivalent to an unstable black hole – will be done and die away (). Once the LHC switches on, every experiment will be a black hole bull’s eye shot. Certainly after years of using the collider to hit ‘atomic balls’ at light speeds, concentrating all that energy into a single point of space and time, trying to achieve the awesome densities required to manufacture those black holes, it will happen. When exactly, we do not know. But the chance of its occurrence has been growing on as theoretical physicists studied the parameters of the LHC machine in detail. And now stands according to some of the most respected physicists working today in this matter (), at a 60% of chances within a decade… That probability will keep growing as the LHC machine keeps mashing super fluid quarks together. While a new generation of even more powerful, cheaper colliding machines, based in plasma confinement techniques, will further increase the probability of producing a black hole with enough critical mass to become stable ().
The second part of the book will be dedicated to study Robotics, the next challenge to our survival if we make it beyond this decade, either because we are lucky with the black hole or we are responsible and the experiment is stopped on time. Though our extinction by robotic weapons or self-reproductive metal-bacteria will become real only as we enter the next decade, it will grow in intensity and it will be more difficult to stop because robots make a lot of money as they generate resources for almost every other machine industry on Earth. Indeed, to make a robot you need 2 cameras, infinite chips, an ultra expensive metal-platform and all kind of sensors, all of them of the maximum quality. So robotics will become soon in this century the engine of industrial growth as it happened after II World War with the electronic and automotive industry or during the XIX century with the train. So to stop an industry that will provide so much economical wealth, we should either forbid it legally or reform the economic ecosystem in which those machines will survive, the ‘free market’, which are goals difficult to achieve, given the ‘fundamentalist’ standing of most governments regarding Economical Theory, which has consecrated the free market as a quasi-religious belief. Robotics is a more complex issue, as people are far more programmed by their desire to make money than by their desire to find dogmatic, quasi-religious truths about the Universe. So it will be unavoidable to make an analysis of the Economic Ecosystem and the evolution of machines, and how they might cross the organic threshold of self-reproduction, the moment in which they will become rivals of man for vital space, energy and information in a planet with limited resources.
6. The 3rd age of science.

But obviously, as long as we exist and are free to take individual and collective decisions, there is an alternative to the suicidal quest for absolute energy and information in which science has embarked itself in the new century, which is to promote the Tree of Life, the respect for the biological laws of existence and balance that allow living organism to survive.
Which means, we should make of Medicine and Biology, the sciences which study the organic balances between energy and information that make a human being and a living ecosystem to survive, the fundamental sciences of mankind. Those sciences should  substitute in that role the 2 dominant sciences that today command for military and economical reasons the highest respect and institutional budgets: the science of Physics, of energy, and the electronic science, the science of information.
Plainly speaking the choice that humanity faces in the XXI century is between extinction, if he follows his subconscious traits, (the search for absolute energy and information motivated by our  arrogance and greed), and survival if he learns his own limits and respects the laws of balance that preserve life.
So in the 3rd part of this book we will explore the nature of those organic laws of balance and how the disciplines of the Tree of Life, Biology, Social and System sciences, could cure the Earth pruning the bad fruits of the Tree of Science and promoting its good fruits, as any gardener would do with the Earth paradise handled to man by the Bio-Logic Laws of God, the mind of the organic Universe and its Laws of Evolution…
If we achieve that balance, then mankind could enter the III Millenium with a sure foot and start a 3rd age of Knowledge, after the first age of verbal, religious and philosophical knowledge and the second age of mathematical, abstract understanding of the physical Universe.