Adam Frank
speaker
594 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Adam Frank’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And they have not yet, they're not going to, enough of them to exert any kind of these Gaian feedback. So we call that an immature biosphere. But then as time goes on, as life becomes more robust and it begins to exert these feedbacks, keeping the planet in the place where it needs to be for life, we call that a mature biosphere, right?
And the important thing, and we're going to, I'm sure later on we're going to talk about definitions of life and such. There's this great term called autopoiesis. That Francisco Varela, the neurobiologist Francisco Varela came up with. And he said, you know, one of the defining things about life is this property of autopoiesis, which means self-creating and self-maintaining.
Life does not create the conditions which will destroy itself, right? It's always trying to keep itself in a place where it can stay alive. So the biosphere, from this guy in perspective, has been autopoietic for billions of years. Now, we just invented this technosphere in the last couple of hundred years. And what we were arguing in that paper is that it's an immature technosphere, right?
Because right now, with climate change and all the other things we're doing, the technosphere right now is sort of destroying the conditions under which it needs to maintain itself. So the real job for us, if we're going to last over... you know, geologic timescales.
If we want a technosphere that's going to last tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of years, then we've got to become mature, which means to not undermine the conditions, to not subvert the conditions that you need to stay alive. So as of right now, I'd say we're not autopoietic.
From the pond, yeah, right. Get sick a few times.
Well, you know, it's interesting with the technosphere, we can talk about this more, but like, you know, we're just emerging as a technosphere in terms of as a interplanetary technosphere, right?
That's really the next step for us is to, David Grinspoon talks about, I love this idea of anti-accretion, like this amazing thing that for the first time, you know, over the entire history of the planet, stuff is coming off the planet. It used to be everything just fell down, all the meteorites fell down, but now we're starting to push stuff out.
The idea of planetary defense or such, we are actually going to start exerting perturbations on the solar system as a whole. We're going to start engineering if we make it. I always like to say that if we can get through climate change, the prize at the end is the solar system. So we will be changed, literally engineering the solar system.
But what you can think of right now with what's happening with the Anthropocene, the great acceleration that is the technosphere, is the creation of it, that is a giant perturbation on the biosphere, right? And what you can't do is, the technosphere sits on top of the biosphere. And if the technosphere undermines the biosphere for its own conditions of habitability, then you're in trouble, right?
I mean, the biosphere is not going away. There's nothing we could do. The idea that we have to save the Earth is a little ridiculous. The Earth is not a furry little bunny that we need to protect. But it's the conditions for us, right? Humanity emerged out of the Holocene, the last 10,000 years interglacial period. We can't tolerate very different kinds of Earths.
So that's what I mean about a perturbation.
Right. And so this was the idea. So what Carter said was, you know, using anthropic reasoning, he said there must be a few very hard steps for evolution to get through to make it to intelligence, right? So there's some steps are going to be easy. So every generation, you know, you roll the dice and yeah, it won't take long for you to get that step, but there must be a few of them.
And he said you could even calculate what, how many there were, five, six, In order to get to intelligence. And so this paper here, this plot, is all these different people who've written all these papers. And this is the point, actually. You can see all these papers that were written on the hard steps. Each one proposing a different set of what those steps should be.
And there's this other idea from biology of the major transitions in evolution, MTEs, that those were the hard steps. But what we actually found was... that none of those are actually hard. The whole idea of hard steps, that there are hard steps, is actually suspect. So what's amazing about this model is it shows how important it is to actually work with people who are in the field, right?
So Brandon Carter was a brilliant physicist, the guy who came up with this. And then lots of physicists and astrophysicists like me have used this But the people who actually study evolution and the planet were never involved, right? And if you went and talked to an evolutionary biologist or a biogeophysicist, they'd look at you when you explained this to them and they'd be like, what?
Like, what are you guys doing? Turns out none of the details or none of the conceptual structure of this matches with evolution. what the people actually study the planet and its evolution.
Well, there's two things. The first most important one was that the planet and the biosphere have evolved together. That's something that every, you know, most biogeophysicists completely accept. And it was the first thing that Carter kind of rejected. He said, like, no, that's probably not possible.
And yet, you know, like if he'd only sort of had more discussions with this other community would have seemed like, no, there are actually windows that open up. And then the next thing is this idea of whether a step is hard or not.
Because for a hard, what you mean by a hard step is that, like I said, every time there's a generation, every time there's the next generation born, you're rolling the dice on whether this mutation will happen. And the idea of something being a hard step, there's two ways in which something might even appear as a hard step and not be, or actually not be a hard step at all.
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