Work in Progress: Bioscience Civilization

Friday 05 August 2022

I have arrived in Scotland and am at present staying in Edinburgh. Considering all the things that could have gone wrong, and all the hurdles there are to contemporary travel, all of my arrangements came off as well as could possibly be expected. My flights out of Portland and Toronto were both delayed a half hour, and looking over the departures at Toronto almost everything was delayed, but the flights left eventually, and nothing in my itinerary was scheduled so tightly that the delays mattered. I had written ahead to my hotel in Edinburgh and asked if I could check in early. I got to my hotel before 11:00 am and the room was ready, so I took a shower and then slept until 7:00 pm.

Some travel details of no real importance: apparently the TSA has upgraded either their scanning equipment or their procedures, as I did not need to take out my computer or my 3–1–1 pack of liquids, though I did have to empty my pockets and take off my shoes. The Toronto airport was slammed, often so crowded that one has to shoulder one’s way through the crowd. Still, it functioned. I spent most of my six hour layover in the Maple Leaf Lounge, which had some of the most substantial food offerings I have seen in an airport lounge.

Once I woke up I took an evening walk in Edinburgh. There is an event going on here most of the month of August, Assembly Festival, and in a park near my hotel they were cleaning up about the West End Fair, so there are summer events going on, as one would expect. I walked up to Edinburgh Castle, which is not far from my hotel, and there were enormous crowds of people in the street, many of them apparently waiting in a long line to enter an event associated with the Assembly Festival.

Still tired the next day, I got a late start, then spent all of Friday afternoon in the Royal Botanical Garden Edinburgh until it closed. The walk from my hotel to the garden was only supposed to take about a half hour, but it took me an hour as I made several wrong turns, though when I eventually found the garden I saw that I had been quite close to it the whole time I was searching for it.

When I first thought about the upcoming NoRCEL conference, I wasn’t sure what to present, since in my previous (online) presentation, “How many branches are there on the tree of life?” I thought I had pretty much said my piece on origins of life. Casting about for another relevant topic, I worked for a while on a presentation with the working title, “Universal Biology, Deprovincialization, and the Origins of Life,” which would have focused on Carl Sagan’s concept of deprovincialization, which is essentially the Copernican principle reformulated in biological terms. I didn’t make much progress at this, so I started to think it over again, and that is when I came up with my current presentation, “Toward Universal Biology: An Observational Scientific Research Program in Origins of Life.” However, in hindsight, I am now surprised that I didn’t remember another project of mine that I worked on now and again, which had its origins in a couple of blog posts, Scaling up Origins of Life Research: Why We Need Big Science to Answer One of the Ultimate Questions and Addendum on Scaling Up Origins of Life Research: The Potential Ambiguities of Exoplanet Atmospheric Spectroscopy. At one time I had started to edit these two posts together into one longer piece, and this longer conjunction of the two could have been the basis of a presentation.

I could have taken this material on scaling up origins of life research and turning it into “big science” and turned it into a presentation. Indeed, in hindsight I can see that the research program I outlined in these blog posts is, in a sense, complementary to that which I outline in my current presentation. The two, taken together, would work in coordination, with exploration and observation balanced by laboratory research, and the theoretical work necessary to create a large experimental design. The two taken together would also be an undertaking so vast, so grand, that it would constitute a particular instantiation of a properly scientific civilization (i.e., a civilization that takes science as its central project) — a civilization that takes origins of life science as its central project, in a sense, a bioscience civilization. Do I think this likely, or even plausible? No. But it is an exciting idea for me nonetheless.

In several places I have taken up the question of whether science must run into inevitable limits. I often cite Nicholas Rescher’s book, Scientific Progress, in this connection. Rescher has also written several essays on this. Recently I noticed that Clément Vidal (whom at met at the SETI/big history conference in Milan in 2019) has taken up this topic in a TED talk: “Is there a limit to technological progress?” Assuming that technological progress is tightly-coupled to scientific progress — and I believe this to be the case — then the questions of scientific progress and technological progress largely overlap, even if they do not exhaustively coincide.

Thinking of the exhaustion of science and technology at the scale of the bioscience civilization sketched above, it seems obvious to be that we cannot exhaust the tasks of science, or, to put it another way, that human resources would be exhausted long before we could exhaust the possibilities for scientific research into the universal at large, even if we limit our inquiries to the biosciences.

Given the way that scientific specializations arise and proliferate, it is easy to see that any planet in the universe — whether or not it has life — could be the focus of specialized study. There are scientists today who devote their careers to the study of other planets in our own solar system. When we have the technological means to study the planets in other planetary systems, each and every one of these planets could be the focus of some specialization. And given that a community of researchers working jointly on common problems is typical for any given specialization, every planet that might be the focus of a new scientific specialization, would entail the multi-generational labors of a scientific research program consisting of a significant number of persons in each generation.

Recent exoplanet discoveries have confirmed that planets and planetary systems are commonplace in our galaxy, and therefore, presumably, also in other galaxies. The number of planets in the universe outstrips the number of human beings many times over, even if we were to extrapolate the human population into a distant future that comprised the typical longevity of a mammal species (about one to two million years). From that point, the research program could be taken up by human descendants, biological or artificial as the case may be. Still, I haven’t attempted to run the numbers (this might be an interesting project), but my guess that any effort at the exploration of the universe must come up seriously short of researchers.

In a series of blog posts on what I call reticulate science, I observed that the large-scale structure of science in history is to proliferate into specializations, and then to re-assemble some of these specializations into interdisciplinary specializations in their turn. The interweaving of specialization and interdisciplinarity means that even science limited to a finite field of study could continue to develop, perhaps without limit (I don’t have a proof of limitless scientific development in a finite world, but certainly this historical extrapolation of reticulate science expands science beyond mere bifurcation into greater specialization). In a universe of billions of planets, each to be studied for their intrinsic interest, and for what they can tell us about universal principles of physics, cosmology, chemistry, and biology — even planets without biospheres can contribute to our knowledge of the astrobiological context of life on Earth — the process of ever-finer specialization combined with ongoing efforts at interdisciplinarity could easily expand into science at a scope that human beings could not exhaust. And that, in turn, means that out science, and the technology that is based on science, will remain, for some time to come, highly selective and representative of anthropocentric concerns, no matter how hard we try to remove ourselves from the equation.

However, it should also be pointed out that, in such a grand scientific research program as would be pursued by a bioscience civilization, that new scientific abstractions would be formulated that would streamline the research and lead to higher level generalizations. If you visit, or examine from a distance by remote sensing, a large number of planets in the galaxy (and, by extension, in the wider universe), you would eventually begin to see patterns emerging. One would formulate a scientific taxonomy of planets, and one would observe a certain sameness of developmental trajectories, so that at some point discovering a previously unobserved planet would mean placing that planet into a familiar taxonomic category, which would have predictive consequences. If one gets a planet right in one’s initial categorization, and one knows that category of planets quite well, one can predict the life history of the planet from whatever stage of development it currently exhibits. (This idea and related ideas are a part of my current NoRCEL presentation.)

It would be expected that, if we are surveying the universe entire, that there would be some surprises out there for us. That is to say, we might initially categorize a planet, but if we kept observing it we might find that we observe something unexpected. Indeed, if it turns out that life is rare in the universe, the exceptions to the rule of sterile planetary chemospheres would be those few that exhibit unambiguous biosignatures. If life is extremely rare in the universe, observing the few exceptions among the billions of planets that constitute the rule of sterile chemospheres would be like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. The odds would be stacked against us ever finding something like this. We would need to eventually develop the technology (and in a bioscience civilization these would be the kind of technologies for which there would be a demand, and thus which would be among those produced, so that scientific demand would drive a certain amount and kind of technological innovation) to rapidly scan planetary chemospheres for biosignatures in the same way that SETI today seeks to scan a large number of radio bandwidths, using computers to process signals more rapidly than human beings could expect to process them, and thus hopefully locating that rare needle in the cosmic haystack.

There would, then, be forces in a bioscience civilization that would expand science beyond the ability of human beings to get even a sketchy overview of what was going on, but there would also be forces in play that would narrow the nearly infinite amount of evidence into a manageable number of exceptions, classifying the great majority of evidence under generic concepts that need to be tallied, but which don’t present especially interesting problems, leaving human beings to deal with the exceptions that interest us — the anthropocentrically interesting exceptions to the apparent cosmic rule of sameness.

A scientific research program aiming at the survey of the universe entire for its significance for life would result in what I have called science at the scale of civilization. This is part of a manuscript that I have worked on now and again that has its origins in several blog posts on scientific civilization (which bioscientific civilization is a particular expression of). I may have previously given an outline of this project, but it has been quite some time since I have mentioned this, so I will reproduce my aspirational table of contents again:

Scientific Civilization

Prolegomena to the Study of Civilization

Part I: The Concept of Scientific Civilization

1. Preface: Science at the Scale of Civilization

2. Introduction: What is a civilization, and, more specifically, what is a scientific civilization?

3. Bertrand Russell and Sigmund Freud

4. Jacob Bronowski and Michael Moravcsik

5. Susanne Langer and Nikolai Danilevskii

6. Edmund Husserl

7. Helmut Schelsky

Part II: Manifest Destiny of Scientific Civilization

1. Preface to Part II: Civilization at the Scale of Science

2. The Infinite Horizon of Science

Appendix: Theses on Civilization and on Scientific Civilization

Annotated Bibliography

As you can see, Part II remains underdeveloped at this time. I have a lot of notes on this, into which I will incorporate the above reflections, but I haven’t yet reduced this material to a schematic form. But I am beginning to tie the loose ends together, and there is a certain satisfaction in this, even if most my projects are destined to remain unfinished. Indeed, on the flights here I made considerable progress in connecting the dots of my various projects and seeing them in relation to each other, and this has given me some new material and some new directions.