One Hundred and Eighty Three

I had a Major Amberson moment this morning while reading an article about tholin. 

Tholin is a porridge of carbon-based organic compounds cooked up by cosmic rays.  Although it’s only been synthesized in laboratories, scientists believe it also forms naturally because it apparently exists in abundance on all the planets in our solar system except our own, and Mars.  Ours is the only planet that we know has life, and scientists believe Mars may have also had life in the past, so they think tholin may be the raw material necessary for the chemical processes that give rise to life.

Scientists have succeeded in growing soil bacteria using laboratory-synthesized tholine, but they say it no longer occurs naturally on this planet due to the Great Oxygenation Event.  I wonder if that's true.

Life on this planet consists mostly of bacteria.  Most of them live deep below its surface, so presumably they're anærobic.  If their environment lacks oxygen, why couldn't it contain tholin?

Tholin may be panspermia, giving rise to life wherever it occurs, if conditions are right.  But although life on other planets would probably also be carbon based, it's unlikely to resemble us in other respects because we have yet to find another planet with the same conditions as ours.

Astronomers keep announcing the discovery of exoplanets similar to ours, where life, if it has arisen there, could be, should be, must be similar to us.  Or so they tell us.  But these exoplanets are never really similar to ours.

They’re almost never in the Goldilocks zone, as ours is.  That is usually occupied by gas giants.  Even when they are in the Goldilocks zone, their planetary system may not have a gas giant ‘guardian’ in the right location, or the planetary system itself may not be in the galactic habitable zone.

Not only does our planetary system seem unique, but within that system our planet seems almost unique.  Despite our system’s abundance of tholin, only one of its planets, and possibly one other, has given rise to life.  And even here ærobic multi-celled organisms like us live only in a thin layer on the surface of a world populated mostly by anærobic bacteria.      

Some scientists attribute the apparent paucity of life in the universe to its youth.  It appears that at the center of each galaxy is a black hole, and every black hole should have a corresponding white hole, spewing out material as the black hole sucks it in.  The fact that scientists haven’t yet detected any white holes, but only deduced their existence from black holes, leads them to believe the universe is still too young for its black holes to have given rise to white holes. 

It occurs to me that a black/white hole (they’re obviously not two separate things, but the beginning and end of a process; what we think of as things are often better understood as processes) may be a failed singularity, in the same way that a gas giant is a failed star.  Just as gas giants are too small to suck in enough material to initiate nuclear fusion and become stars, so black holes are too small to suck in enough material to become singularities, so they become white holes instead – or they will eventually.

If our universe is an organism in the same way that Lovelock said our world is an organism, it may be that universal stupidity, which seems to be its defining characteristic, is merely immaturity.