The Fifth Level of Evolution

The theory of evolution is well established by scientific evidence, but is far from explaining everything. Some puzzles remain pending whose resolution does not seem to be immediate:

• The origin of life. We do not know how, when and where it happened. There are many theories, but none has been proven and are very difficult to prove, because the origin of life, rather than a scientific fact, is a historical fact. It is not enough if we were able to reproduce it in the laboratory, it’s necessary to find documentary evidence that this is how it happened, not otherwise. It’s very likely that these tests cannot be found, because the paleontological traces of the origin of life have surely been lost.
• The mystery of the change in level. Throughout the history of life on Earth, living things have gone through several successive levels:

Fires, bonfires and arson

Plastic contamination in the sea
(Source: Science News)

In the BBVA magazine of January 2020 there is an article entitled Top Ten, which lists 10 measures we can all apply to curb climate change, the first of which is this:

Committed waste treatment: ...in the next 30 years, 12 million tons of plastic waste will accumulate in the environment. When you go shopping, take a folded cloth bag...

It is true that, with our excessive use of plastics, we are turning the world into a dump, even the oceans. It is true that we must do something to avoid this. But since when contamination with plastics is a cause of climate change? We should learn to make distinctions, and correctly apply names to those phenomena we must face.

Thematic threads in PopulScience

Just now, without counting this one, the blog PopulScience contains 267 posts. Some time ago, one of my readers pointed out a problem that can be paraphrased with the following words:

This blog contains many posts, published without following a plot line, so they form a chronological string where it’s difficult to get one's bearings. Therefore, I suggest you should prepare a set of basic threads that would allow the reader to classify the posts and follow them in a more orderly way than is now possible.

I found this an excellent idea. Of course, preparing those thematic threads that make it possible to follow posts associated with a topic from the beginning of the thread to the end, is a lot of work, since it was necessary to modify every post previously published in the blog, by adding at the end information about the thread or threads to which the post belongs, with links to the previous and the next posts in the threads.

The three laws of Robotics

Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov was a prolific science fiction and popular science writer who published in the 40s a series of stories about robots, later compiled in the I, Robot collection. In these stories he invented a word that has become a part of the technological vocabulary, as the name of a discipline: Robotics. He also formulated the three famous laws of Robotics, which in his opinion should be implemented in every robot to make secure our interactions with these machines that, when Asimov formulated the laws, were simple future forecasts.

The three laws of Robotics are the following:

First Law: A robot may not harm a human being, or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm.

Second Law: A robot must obey any order given by a human being, except those that conflict with the first law.

Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the first two laws.

The theological multiverse

In other posts in this blog (see one of the thematic threads at the end of this post) I have talked about various theories of multiverses and asserted that none of them is scientific, as it is impossible to prove that they are false. In fact, I doubt if they can even be considered philosophical. I consider them imaginative fantasies: science fiction, rather than science.

The funny thing is that the idea of the multiverse is not new. I’ve mentioned before that its first appearance in science fiction was in a novel by Clifford Simak (Cosmic Engineers, 1950) that develops a short story published in 1939 by the same author.

But Simak’s novel also has precedents; quite old, by the way. Chapter 21, verse 1 of Revelation, a book written towards the end of the first century, says this:

And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth are passed away; and the sea is no more. 

A new heaven and a new earth. What is this talking about? Obviously about another universe, where we are supposed to go, after our death. It seems, therefore, that in the Christian vision of the cosmos, God has made at least two universes: ours, and another one for the next life. This would be the theological multiverse, a name I’ve just invented.

When physicists talk about other universes, they often give free rein to their imagination. I’ll do the same.

The second universe would have its own time, independent of ours. If we want them to be related somehow, I’d say that the two axes of time are orthogonal (perpendicular to each other). Christ (God incarnated as a man), in his death, leaves our time and passes through to the other time. On his way, he captures all the human beings that have ever existed or will exist, and drags them to the other universe. We all reach the other universe at the initial moment of its own time. We all arrive at the same time. No one must wait for anyone in the next life.

I will add two additional considerations:

• Some atheist cosmologists cling to the various theories of the multiverse to safeguard their atheism. They seem to believe that, if the multiverse were proven to exist, this would show that God does not exist. I can’t see why. If God has created a universe, what can prevent him from creating two, one hundred or one hundred thousand? The discovery of a multiverse would do nothing but expand our field of vision, pointing out that there are more levels in the universe than are dreamt of in our philosophy, paraphrasing what Hamlet told Horatio. But this has happened before: Until the beginning of the 20th century, it was believed that the universe consisted just in the nearby stars. Later it was discovered that these stars make a galaxy, and that there are billions of galaxies, separated by huge empty spaces. This enormous increase in the size of the universe posed no problem for the faith of believers. If it were discovered that there is a multiverse (in other words: that the universe is even larger and more complex than we thought) it won’t be a problem either.
• I’d never dare to present my theory, described in this article, as if it were science. As things stand just now, none of the theories of the multiverse is science. There are several, most of them incompatible with the others. If an unexpected scientific advance were ever to take place, proving that one of them were true, that theory would become science. Just now there are no signs that such thing can happen. As for my theory, I am afraid we won't know whether it is true until after our death.

The same post in Spanish 

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