Final Regular Season Power Rankings

Now that the bowl season has begun, and all bowl picks on College Pick 'em have already been made, the humble blogger releases his power rankings for the regular season, happy to note that his bowl picks, based on a certain portion of his data, are 4-0 to date. Thus, smugly self-satisfied, the humble blogger presents:


Top 25
1. Florida 144.42
2. Oklahoma 139.74
3. USC 132.02
4. Texas 124.8
5. Boise State 122.73
6. Penn State 118.11
7. TCU 117.22
8. Alabama 114.41
9. Ohio State 109.8
10. Utah 98.82
11. Texas Tech 98.513
12. Missouri 87.987
13. Oregon 86.592
14. Oklahoma State 85.726
15. Pittsburgh 82.86
16. Oregon State 82.799
17. California 81.23
18. Arizona 80.248
19. Cincinnati 79.846
20. North Carolina 76.433
21. Iowa 76.179
22. West Virginia 75.495
23. Georgia Tech 73.004
24. Mississippi 72.515
25. BYU 71.255

Of course, this does not tell the whole story. Look for Ohio State to upset Texas, TCU to upset Boise State, and Alabama had better watch itself against Utah in the Sugar Bowl.

A New Solution To Fermi's Paradox

I have sitting on my computer desk next to my keyboard a copy of The Chilling Stars, a book by Nigel Calder and Henrik Svensmark in which they put forth a new explanation of climate change. Woven into the fabric of the writing is a thread of evolution and how it has been affected by climate change. As a fan of The Rare Earth Hypothesis, your humble blogger could not help but notice how well the former book compliments and supplements the latter. Having mulled over Mssrs. Calder and Svensmark’s work, and having pondered its relation to the fascinating text by Brownlee and Ward, the humble blogger has emerged with a new solution to Fermi’s paradox.

Fermi’s Paradox is a question that Enrico Fermi put forward several decades ago. He asked, if there were indeed intelligent civilizations in our galaxy, why they were not readily apparent. Should they not have made contact, given that some of them must be many millions, or possibly even billions of years older than ours? Or should they not have colonized our planet long before animal life evolved on it? The range of answers goes from a denial that intelligent civilizations exist beyond our solar system, to a suggestion that they exist but destroy themselves before they advance far enough to make contact, to the Zoo Hypothesis, which states that we are being watched over until such a time as we develop enough to be ready for contact. A new hypothesis has suggested itself to the author of this post, one which does not require so bleak a prediction as to declare that we are alone in the universe, nor to anticipate our own self destruction, nor even to place us in the monkey cages.

The good reader will recall a previous post in which the humble blogger gave a brief explanation of The Rare Earth Hypothesis and applied it to the famous Drake Equation. In brief, TREH concludes that conditions in our solar system, in our galaxy, and on our planet were finely balanced for the evolution of intelligent life, and that these conditions are likely to be very uncommon in the universe, possibly even unique. Of the many different conditions which have affected the evolution of life on earth and which, there is some reason to believe, are preconditions necessary for any intelligent species to evolve, one of them seems to have been the pressures put on ecosystems by catastrophes. Evolution, it appears, advances more rapidly in the wake of ecological disasters. But the key is that the disasters not be so great as to extinguish life, merely to eradicate enough of it to open up some niches for new forms to evolve, as well as to put enough pressure on these forms that only the hardiest and best adapted among them go on. It is a bit like lightning striking down a tree which, well established in its position, has prevented younger saplings from growing into even fitter trees if only they could get a foot hold in the area. This is likely to have been what happened when the dinosaurs went extinct: the already extant but dominated mammals were given a chance to fill the void, and ever since intelligence has advanced more rapidly.

There are three periods of interest for the present piece, one occurring approximately 2.3 billion years ago, the second one occurring around 700 million years ago, and the third beginning around 542 million years ago. The first two are called Snowball Earth events, in which the entirety of the globe may have been covered in ice, even in the tropics, and the last is the Cambrian Explosion. The Cambrian Explosion is well established and accepted by science, while Snowball Earth is yet to gain a unanimous backing, though there is much evidence, though not always of the strongest caliber, that the globe did indeed languish in the grip of a super ice age. TREH proposes an explanation for the first, and now The Chilling Stars may be able to explain the latter two.

The first Snowball Earth event occurred 2.3 billion years ago, and seems to coincide with the first known appearance of eukaryotes, a single cell organism far more complex in structure than the previous forms of bacteria. The eukaryote has organelles and a nucleus, and this greater complexity confers upon it certain advantages as well as greater possibility of evolution later on. The second Snowball Earth occurred, perhaps in fits and starts, hundreds of millions of years ago and ended about 650 million years ago. It coincides with the first known appearance of multicellular organisms. Called the Ediacarans, these creatures were a great leap forward in the history of life and may have needed a cataclysm like the globe freezing over to push them into more advanced and complex forms as well as clear some space for their arrival.

Finally, 542 million years ago, the Cambrian Explosion began. The new animal forms suddenly grew in size, and began to evolve shells and skeletons that allowed for even greater complexity and more possibilities. By the time is was over, perhaps 510 million years ago, all of the extant body types on earth today, as well as a few which have since gone extinct, had appeared. TREH points out that the catalyst for this event may have been a sudden tipping over of the earth, when over the course of perhaps fifteen million years the poles became two points on the equator and two points on the equator became the new north and south poles. Called the Inertial Interchange Event, this idea is still controversial, but it would have done two things important for the advancement of life. One, by moving the continents from tropical to polar regions, and from polar to tropical regions, in a relatively short span of time, it would have put the kind of pressure on evolution which seems to push it forward. Two, it may have changed ocean currents, which could have kicked up detritus on the ocean floors and thus accounts for the sudden abundance of phosphorite in the ecosystems of the time. TREH posits that the limiting factor on animal evolution was a lack of material with which to build bones and shells, and that when these materials, such as oxygen and phosphorite, became more abundant, coupled with the pressures of climate change that the continents were going through, animal life took off, never to look back.

It must be conceded that there is no proof that these Snowball events and IIE provoked the evolution of these new forms of life, and many dispute whether they even occurred. All we have is a tantalizing coincidence and some plausible sounding reasoning along the lines of the lightning striking the tree mentioned above. Still, coincidences can be harbingers of a more profound relationship, and the reasoning behind TREH does sound enticing. We do have very sound indications that life was present on the planet 3.8 billion years ago, or almost immediately after the earth cooled down from its formation and heavy bombardment period, and that, in evolutionary terms, it did very little for the next one and a half billion years. Then, suddenly, eukaryotes appeared just when the earth may have turned into a gigantic ball of ice or slush. When the earth warmed up, another billion and a half years of change but little progress ensued, and then suddenly animals appear on the scene, but only when the earth again turns into a big snowball. It is certainly a possibility worth exploring, and we can permit ourselves the luxury of a bit of speculation.

The Chilling Stars enters the conversation with a reason for the Snowball Earth events, something which TREH, written several years earlier, left without explanation. According to TCS, the cosmic rays given off in the aftermath of a large star going supernova contribute to the formation of clouds on earth. This idea is also controversial, but there is very strong evidence for it which the reader may judge for himself by reading the book in question. These clouds, depending on their thickness and altitude, have different effects on the earth’s temperature. The low hanging and thick clouds which are the principle item of interest in TCS seem to be formed when muons, short lived particles formed when cosmic rays hit the atmosphere, tumble to earth and seed cloud formation along the way, and the effect of these clouds is to cool the planet. Thus, when more muons are reaching the lower altitudes, the planet will cool, and when fewer muons come crashing down, the planet will be warmer.

The authors of TCS look at the story of the earth over the last few hundred million years and find that the earth goes between “icehouse” and “hothouse” phases as it passes in and out of the four spiral arms of the Milky Way. These spiral arms are dense areas of star birth and, therefore, star death, and so are filled with cosmic rays which serve to cool the earth, which in turn seems to prime the pump of evolution. Even the evolution of human intelligence seems to have begun in coincidence with a small scale cool period about 2.8 million years ago, which happened to be a time of high cosmic ray intensity on the earth, which also happens to coincide with a supernova explosion in the earth’s vicinity.

Within each hothouse and icehouse phase, the temperature of the earth can fluctuate based on the strength of the solar wind, which is the sun’s way of preventing cosmic rays from reaching the earth. We are currently in the Orion spur, a minor arm of the Milky Way, and therefore are in an icehouse phase. However, the sun’s solar wind is stronger than normal, which means that the icehouse phase is somewhat in abeyance, though there is still ice at the poles. This cycle of icehouse and hothouse, with warm and cold fluctuations within each, has been going on for as long as we can tell, but there are two events, icehouse events, which stand out above the others for intensity of frigidity, and those are the Snowball Earth events mentioned earlier. These events so exceed the typical icehouse phase, that merely passing through a spiral arm of the Milky Way does not explain them. However, it has been noted that, when we look at the ages of the stars around us, there seem to be clusters of star populations dating from 2.3 billion and 700 million years ago. Something happened at these times to rapidly increase the rate of star formation, which would also rapidly increase the rate of star explosion and the amount of cosmic rays in the galaxy. TCS proposes that the Milky Way had a collision with smaller galaxies at these two points in time, an event which would compact interstellar gases in the two galaxies and lead to more star formation. The result would have been an earth made even colder than a pass through a spiral arm could have done… but this would be a galaxy wide event, and now the proposed solution to Fermi’s Paradox can finally be revealed.

If it proves true that the Snowball Earth event is both a real event and a necessary pressure to produce advances in the evolution of life, then it may very well have been that 2.3 billion years ago saw not just the first appearance of eukaryotes on earth, but also the first appearance of eukaryotes in the Milky Way, spurred on by Galactic Deep Freeze I. When the cosmic rays died down, these fledgling creatures were then free to spread across their planets and firmly entrench themselves. Then, 700 million years ago, Galactic Deep Freeze II conceivably may have produced the Milky Way’s first animals. Even if it did not, a Snowball event is likely to wipe out, or nearly wipe out, the animal life of a planet, as it did on earth at the time. There have been great extinction events which killed up to 90% of the species on the planet, and these were less cataclysmic than a Snowball event. Even if a planet had evolved animal life already, it is quite possible that a galactic collision would have killed off these animals and set the planet back to square one, or at least square three or four.

The humble blogger therefore proposes that 700 million years ago, animal life in the galaxy died out or came very close to it, and that all planets suitable for the evolution of life, and which had advanced to a certain point, emerged from the galactic crash more or less at the same stage of evolution. We must now consider how closely our putative IIE followed our second Snowball. If the strictures of TREH are correct, there were not too many suitable planets to begin with. How many of these candidate planets have had an Inertial Interchange Event since the last Snowball? And how many of these had an IIE so soon after Galactic Deep Freeze II?

Fermi’s Paradox is neatly solved if the earth proves to be not the only planet where animal life has advanced, but merely one of the most advanced or possibly the most advanced of these planets, a prospect which, until recently, seemed absurdly improbable. Intelligence, in our galaxy, might just be creeping onto the scene. Perhaps a few other species have attained space flight ahead of us, but are still lost in the great mass of hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy and have not had a chance to thoroughly colonize it, as Fermi predicted. Perhaps there are no others ahead of us at all.

If TREH and TCS are both correct, and we must remember that there is far to go in proving this, then the Snowball events and IIE are great staging points for evolution, and a few predictions can be made. One, life on earthlike planets in our galaxy can probably be divided into distinct generations. Our generation began 650 million years ago with animal life, and our advanced animal life with skeletons and shells may be ahead of most of the rest. There is, in this point of view, likely to be a younger generation of life which reached the level of eukaryotes about 700 to 650 million years ago and is waiting for Galactic Deep Freeze III to evolve into animals. This collision, however, would probably wipe out the animal life in older generations (unless intelligent species had evolved which had developed enough technology to either survive the Snowball or prevent it on their own planet or planets). At this point, the life of the older generation would then merge with the younger generation and restart at the point of the simplest animal forms.

It is also possible that the Snowball of 2.3 billion years ago produced animal forms in a generation older than ours, a generation whose eukaryotic precursors emerged from a Snowball that earth, being only 4.6 billion years old, has not recorded (indeed, it is possible that our sun was born out of just such a collision). If this is true, then these animals may have evolved intelligence long before GDF II, in which case we need another answer to Fermi’s Paradox (The humble blogger would like to suggest that, given A.C. Clarke’s dictum that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, any alien intelligence with a 1.5 billion year head start might well have passed out of the universe altogether, or may exist in it as consciousnesses enclosed in beams of light. It is nearly impossible to even guess at what we should expect out of a species so far advanced).

One final, sobering conclusion can be drawn if TREH and TCS are sound theories. When these alleged collisions occur, they produce a baby boom of stars, so that the star populations in a galaxy are not uniformly distributed in time, but rather cluster around these baby boom periods. It appears that our galaxy, in comparison with the other galaxies around us, has few cluster points for the birth dates of stars, suggesting fewer galactic crashes and therefore fewer Snowball events. While these Snowballs may be essential for the evolution of intelligent life, they are also potentially inimical to animal life already developed. A galaxy which has too many Snowballs may never get an intelligent species, being eternally stuck in a cycle of animal creation and then destruction and reduction, before intelligence can arise, to the beginning of the animal stage. TREH concludes that only spiral galaxies are likely homes to animal life, and it appears that our spiral galaxy the Milky Way has had fewer galactic collisions than the other spiral galaxies in our local group. Given the long time between the Cambrian Explosion and the emergence of intelligence on earth, an increased frequency of Snowballs probably means a concomitant reduction in the likelihood of intelligence evolving.

It could well be that a galaxy suitable for intelligent life is a very lonely thing, separated from like galaxies by many millions of light years, like an oasis in a vast, dry, sterile desert. Perhaps, if we did not already have reason enough, we should reconsider the killing that we visit on one another in the form of wars, purposefully induced famines and other government atrocities. The lives we extinguish here on earth may be the only intelligent lives the universe has ever produced.