Ariadne Systems

This is a creation story. It's founded in scientific knowledge but it includes elements that are as yet mere speculation from the point of view of convention. I choose believe them but it should be clear that while most parts of the following story are established, scientifically-derived knowledge, some parts are my own idiosyncratic beliefs. I'll do my best to make it clear which is which.

The essence of the divergence from conventional scientific models of the world and the one I'm presenting here is that (I believe, and this is hardly original to me) the biosphere of the Earth became intelligent and sentient very early on, not long after microbes covered the planet. I refer to this being as Gaia (again this is not original, I'm following Lovelock and, of course, the Greeks, among many others.) To me Gaia is not a metaphor or a mystical metaphysical entity (except that all Being is mystical and metaphysical) rather She is just as real and literal as you or I, and in fact our being derives from Hers, in that the cellular biomolecular structures and patterns that enable us to think and be are intensifications of Her cellular biomolecular structures and patterns. We are not separate from Her. But I'm getting ahead of the story.

Empty Space

In the beginning was the Void,
And the Void was without Form.

The sky is very deep and mostly empty except for a strange stuff that is both real and imaginary.

This isn't science-fiction.

You can watch this Royal Institution lecture by David Tong, professor of theoretical physics at Cambridge University for the details, he starts talking about this computer model here at about 21:17.

Reality starts complicated and goes from there. Wild, eh?

Interstellar Medium

The emptiness that isn't empty is punctuated by tiny chunks.

Within our galaxy, by mass, 99% of the ISM [interstellar medium] is gas in any form, and 1% is dust. Of the gas in the ISM, by number 91% of atoms are hydrogen and 8.9% are helium, with 0.1% being atoms of elements heavier than hydrogen or helium

~ Interstellar medium :: Wikipedia

Stellar Nucleosynthesis

The chunks glom together into droplets and puddles. The puddles do something strange and wonderful: they begin to shine. It's unimaginably beautiful, but no one is there to see it. They light up the darkness, their inner heat stewing up more complex forms of matter.

Everything around you was formed long ago in the heart of ancient stars.

The Ash of Starfire forms Worlds

https://www.eso.org/public/images/eso1436a/

These shiny puddles of chunks glomming together develop clouds of ash, both what they shed while alive and the remains of their fellows' cremated bodies. In those clouds some dust bunnies would form. All kinds of dust bunnies.

This went on for a loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong time.

TODO: need an image of a planet here?

Life

On one of the dust bunnies, a tiny droplet of lava, a strange thing happened one day, we don't really know how.

It grew a little chemical critter.

The two major ideas about the origin of life are:

1. God did it.
2. It just happened.

Since these scenarios are totally indistinguishable from our temporal mortal point of view little progress has been made on the question.

It bears emphasis that, so far as we can tell, this dust bunny Earth is the only place in the Universe where life has arisen. Not just in our Solar system, not just in our Milky Way galaxy, we seem to be the only living stuff in the whole Universe. It feels a little lonely.

Mitosis

The primary result of mitosis and cytokinesis is the transfer of a parent cell's genome into two daughter cells.

~ Mitosis :: Wikipedia

This critter split in two, and those two split, and those four split, etc. and so it went, and sometimes some of the critters would die, but mostly they lived and split and grew until they filled all the parts of the surface of their tiny droplet of lava that they could reach. Down into the cold skim of the droplet and up into the gasses that clung to it the critters grew.

This went on for a loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong time.

Roughly 2,500,000,000 years passed.

I want to draw your attention to the process of mitosis and how it differs so radically from the lifecycle of multicellular creatures like ourselves. Take a moment to really look at the eldritch horror that is cell division, and think about it. Cells don't give birth and they don't get old and die. They split in two. Each "daughter" cell is not a daughter or son or any kind of offspring at all, the "parent" cell is not a parent, it is all the same cell. Just now there are two of it.

Any amoeba or paramecium or what have you that is alive today has been alive for over a billion years.

Wild, eh?

Cells Think†

† Remember when I said above that I would do my best to make it clear when I veered off the beaten path of conventional mainstream science and started injecting my own, uh, unconventional beliefs into this narrative? We are almost, but not quite, there. Until quite recently the idea of cognition happening in cells (other than brain cells of course) was pretty outré.

TODO: link to Levin talk.

Now Michael Levin et. al. are serious, legit scientists. I don't want to misrepresent them or their work when I start talking "woo" about communing with nature spirits, okay?

I believe that these critters had, and indeed still have, a group mind, but there wasn't much to do except be soup. Taken together they were and are a bubble-shaped volume a little over 12700km in diameter.

They experimented with different lifestyles.

They built mighty cities with trillions of citizens.

Multicellular Life as Art and Technology of Gaia

All was well, our mother was happy as soup. She dreamed her soupy dreams and basked in the shine of her puddle.

Later in life she took up art. It started simply enough. One day it got cold...

The Sturtian glaciation was a worldwide glaciation during the Cryogenian Period ... thought to have lasted from c. 717 Ma to c. 660 Ma, a time span of approximately 57 million years. ... the longest and most severe known glacial event preserved in the geologic record after the much earlier Huronian glaciation. [approximately 2.5 to 2.2 billion years ago Huronian glaciation]

~ Sturtian Glaciation :: Wikipedia

This is a fascinating period in the Earth's history when we were covered almost entirely in ice.

• "What Turned Earth Into A Giant Snowball 700 Million Years Ago?" :: Astrobiology.com
• ...which is reporting on the paper Duration of Sturtian “Snowball Earth” glaciation linked to exceptionally low mid-ocean ridge outgassing
• And here's a great explainer video "How Volcanoes Froze the Earth (Twice)" :: Youtube by PBS Eons

This wouldn't do, so mom built little solar powered CO2 regulators and set them out on the dry land in the places she, being soup, had no use for.

Evidence of the emergence of embryophyte land plants first occurs in the middle Ordovician (~470 million years ago). By the middle of the Devonian (~390 million years ago), fossil evidence has shown that many of the features recognised in land plants today were present, including roots, leaves. More recently geochemical evidence suggests that around this time that the terrestrial realm had largely been colonized which altered the global terrestrial weathering environment.

~ Evolutionary history of plants :: Wikipedia

These regulators spread out over the land and worked well, but they needed maintenance so mom invented bugs, and that started a phase of artistic expression that continues to this day.

One day in particular she came up with something really special.

She was just in the middle of a really creative and fruitful exploration of giant lizards when she was struck upside the head by a large rock.

For the first time in her life she looked up, like really looked, and what she saw wasn't good: there were rocks up there. Not cool.

She also realized that the puddle was getting brighter, and she realized that in a just a little while longer it would get too bright, and her solar panels would stop working. Not cool.

(See the entry for "500–600 million" and the next two entries after that.)

So she took some small furry things and enlarged their brains and made their paws extra dexterous so they could lift her out of the intersection between lava and vacuum and carry her to safer places.

And that brings us, more or less, to today. I believe our purpose is to carry life to the rest of the barren Universe. Our mother is old, our sun is becoming too bright, it's time to go.

(The story of how we discovered all this is itself a glorious and magnificent story!)