Atlantis Dispatch 017:
in which ATLANTIS contemplates multiple worlds…
Images: (1) Figura Mentis (2) Figura Intellectus (3) Figura Amoris (4) Figura Apollinis (5) Figura Minervae (6) Atrium Veneris. Giordano Bruno. Articuli centum et sexaginta adversus huius tempestatis mathematicos atque philosophos. 1588.
April 20, 2022
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If you were with us for our last Dispatch, you’ll recall that, with the help of the miraculous Drake equation, Atlantis began generating a host of counterfactual living planets in our galaxy. Once we got started, we couldn’t stop, and we found ourselves taking a larger survey, not only of possible living planets in the Milky Way, but possible worlds more generally. It just makes the mind feel, well, you know, super free!
At that realization, a dark thought occurred to us: it has not always been this way, reader. While the temptation to spin up multiple worlds goes back centuries, the idea has not always been embraced. In fact, at times, it has been so unwelcome that it has been met with public execution.
What, Atlantis? Of what horrible other-world do you speak?
Well, it turns out that there is a dark, oppressive, violent side to that time-period so adored by Atlantis. If we sail back to the Scientific Revolution, to that time when we met the likes of Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, and even that wacky Tycho Brahe, there is another cloaked figure there who met a terrible fate. Of whom do we speak? Why, of that dark charred cosmologician: Giordano Bruno.
Aside from being into atoms, pantheism, and Copernican astronomy (ideas utterly Anathema to the dogma and holy spirit of the time), Bruno proposed the idea that the universe is infinite, and suggested that, as a result, it contains an infinite number of worlds. For his proto-Drakean genius he was not celebrated for his imagination, however. Instead, he was burned at the stake.
Happily for us, Bruno’s torching was not the end of Bruno’s ideas. Like all burned books, Bruno’s meltdown made his thoughts all the more enticing to many who came after him. So when we gaze on his dark statue in Rome’s Campo de’ Fiori, we find ourselves inspired, inspired to sail forth into the new world of multiple universes and see what has arisen in Bruno’s wake.
What we’ve found is that Bruno’s worlds abound. While there is far more enthusiasm for them today, however, they are still met with some suspicion.
Reader, consider the most salient contemporary prediction about multiple worlds: the multiverse, the idea that there is a group of universes that comprises all that exists. But what exactly is the scientific status of the multiverse? Is it simply an idea? Is it a physical theory? Is it a reality? Mere quackery?
At SFI’s home port, we often host one of our world’s greatest authorities on the multiverse, Fractal Faculty Professor Sean Carroll. As Carroll explains, the multiverse is a controversial idea that some treat as a helpful concept for explaining features of the universe we can observe, while others treat it as “a capitulation to the forces of anti-science” because it invokes things that can never be observed.
So which is it?
For Carroll, it is useful to take a middle ground. He emphasizes that we by no means know that the multiverse reflects empirical reality. “We are very far away,” says Carroll, “from saying that the multiverse makes predictions that fit data we have.” Still, he says, since the goal of science is to seek the truth, the multiverse is worth considering as a way to help us to see difficult possibilities that could illuminate the nature of the universe.
To see how the multiverse might help us, Carroll does something that Atlantis loves: he tells a parable.
Imagine a planet that is always cloudy, he says. The scientists on this planet would not think about the universe in terms of the night sky; therefore, would not think of other stars. Their planet would be the whole universe. If someone came along and said, “there are other planets,” the scientists on this planet would likely say that this idea made no empirical sense — there is no reason to believe it because it cannot be observed.
And yet, the question would still remain: are there other planets? It’s not that the people on Cloud Rock would exactly go out and build tools to look for them. But they could acknowledge the possibility — and think about the kinds of questions they might ask in order to explore that possibility. They might ask, are there other planets like ours? Are there different planets not like ours? Why would the world produce a reality with one structure or the other? And when they begin to think this way, they might start to develop new ways of investigating. In this way, the multiverse hypothesis begins to generate new ideas and trajectories. The recognition that what we see might not be all that exists, is always the first step for advancing physics.
As we began to contemplate the multiverse, we recollected that in these past two pandemic winters, many other SFI scientists have conceived controversial multiplicities that similarly help us reorient our thinking.
Some SFI scientists, for instance, have explored the possibility that there might be multiple origins of life here on Earth. Much like the eye evolved convergently (a process where a trait evolves independently in different, largely unrelated organisms), so too it is conceivable, that life evolved multiple times. By entertaining the possibility that it did, we have a far more fertile theoretical frame for exploring possible life forms here or anywhere else.
Another group of SFI faculty got thinking about whether there are multiple kinds of biological individuals. We typically think of something like a spider or a human or a single celled organism as quintessential biological individuals. But what about an ant colony or a virus or an ecosystem? What if we entertain the idea that the fundamental unit of biology might actually be a multiplicity of individuals, an array, perhaps? For one, it would mean that at any level of analysis, we are re-shifting our perspective in order to do justice to the nature of complex systems. All individuals, we might say, are microcosmic.
In the latest future gambit into the nature of phenomena all too often treated as a single kind of thing, SFI is about to embark on a massive investigation into emergent political economies. Rather than speaking of a singular global economy, we can start to think on the economic forms and structures that crop up to organize our systems of trade and information. Emergent economies can be found in the forms of technological evolution or new systems of immigration, for example. They can be empirically observed or hypothetically imagined. But in general, if we think of multiple possible economies, these can help us gain better frameworks for understanding the economic metabolism — and more virtuous possible economies — latent in our world.
Now, if you’re anything like Starboard and Portside, that is, human, you may find that there are a limited number of possible worlds you can entertain in your lifetime. It’s not for lack of trying, or even an incapacity for the infinite, necessarily. It’s just that there are all of those possible details. But at the moment, reader, we’re tilling the soil. Only once we bring about this new array – of universes, origins, biological individuals, economies — can we begin to point our prow at promising destinations.
Tune in on July 26th, when Sean Carroll presents “The Many Worlds of Quantum Mechanics” as part of our 2022 Community Lecture Series, sponsored by the McKinnon Family Foundation.
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