While considering Mars it occurred to me that assumptions are made and this is very dangerous when it comes to life in the universe as a whole. A planet is a very large system and one can say that throwing a tin can in the ocean is likely not going to destroy the world. However when you are dealing with an unknown that is as large as the Earth in solid surface, odd things can happen by design or accident. It is abstracting and ignoring the detail in something that has side effects. I can use an and gate in the wrong way so that output is input and I have done it. Space probes have U238 (AFAIK) with thermocouples to generate electricity and consequentially heat as well as specific radiation.
If a person has an active imagination it is not difficult to take the abstraction of a system and replace the unknowns with other abstracted systems which lead to significant consequence. If I were to assume that Jebus made the Earth on a sea of turtles all the way to Valhalla , then it would be reasonable to assume that mucking with Mars would turn out okay as Jebus designed it so the idiot humans couldn't screw it up so bad that they would end themselves in the process.
It is a system of a great number of parts and delivering a catalyst can trigger something that might be overwhelming in effect. Suppose a situation where Mars were unstable for some reason due to fissionable material in the crust. I don't pose this as likely, but as one of a virtual infinity of potential unknowns. By adding a few trigger slow neutrons, it explodes and the solar system is destabilized. I am using this as an analogy to make it less complex in the mechanics of potentials. I seriously doubt that this is realistic. However, poking a black hole or putting nuclear garbage in the sun could have unexpected consequence that reflects the scale of the thing that is being mucked with.
A more realistic consequence is that if a form of life exists to replicate on Mars, it would naturally adapt to what it has present. If life exists it must win against other life possibilities. That is the mechanics of it. Life that exists is by its nature the one which made all the right "choices" when change has happened. If it is sleeping for a billion years and waking when it detects a source of energy then this is what would be. Some are surprised that life exists without oxygen or sunlight and that is not a surprise to me. Recently it was discovered that organisms can live in water that is exposed to what would be lethal radiation for any known life up to that point.
My guess is that unexpected consequence has already begun and simply assuming that everything is going to be okay is what de-selects life. I am considering what that consequence might be. It is very interesting that plants have a way of thinking and when I said "choices", I meant that in a very large scope. A plant that grows sideways is a choice that has been made and a plant that thinks in rock can exist.
It seems that even in a system at some stasis, the mixing of parts can have large consequence. The world is still dealing with the fact that species are being moved about the planet with commerce and are "trying" to find a new stable equilibrium. It creates many problems that are unexpected like overgrowth, supplanting native species, and destabilizing the natural system on which we depend. The universe is likely not composed of trillions of dead rocks and shiny stars for our amusement, what could be is likely a trillion factorial more odd than one might expect with simple consideration.
0 comments:
Post a Comment