The final anthropic principle and the antiChrist

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

In their popular science book, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, published in 1986, cosmologists John Barrow and Frank Tipler define three different anthropic principles:

1.      The weak anthropic principle or WAP (this was offered by Brandon Carter in 1973): the simple verification that the fact that we are here imposes certain restrictions on the universe, such as having lasted long enough for intelligent life to appear.

2.      The strong anthropic principle or SAP: the claim that making possible the emergence of intelligent life was a necessary requirement for the universe.

3.      The final anthropic principle or FAP: The claim that, once intelligent life has appeared in the universe, it cannot disappear.

Are we alone in the galaxy?

Enrico Fermi

In their famous book of hard scientific popularization, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, published in 1986, the cosmologists John Barrow and Frank Tipler offer a proof that we are alone in the galaxy by means of a variant of the Fermi paradox (if there are any extraterrestrial intelligences in the Galaxy, why aren’t they here?) which can be summarized as follows:

1.      In 100 years we will have succeeded in creating life in the laboratory. Not just life, we will also be able to build a complete human being from its chemical components and information about the human genome, which can be stored in a digital memory.

2.      In 100 years we will have managed to build artificial intelligences as intelligent as human beings, able to replace us in any place and circumstance.

3.      Our current space technology allows us to reach a speed of 0.0003 c (where c is the speed of light). At that speed, a spaceship would take about 50,000 years to reach the nearest stars.

How eukaryotic cells arose

Examples of eukaryotes

The discovery that there are two main types of living cells (prokaryotes and eukaryotes) gave rise to a revolution in the way of classifying living things. Although (as usual) biologists do not agree on a single classification, the following one seems very reasonable:

1.      Empire prokaryote (bacteria). DNA free in the protoplasm.

a.       Kingdom eubacteria (true bacteria). They use acyl ester lipids.

b.      Kingdom archaea. They use isoprenoidal-ether lipids. They include sulphobacteria, methanobacteria and halobacteria.

2.      Empire eukaryote (cells with nuclei). DNA inside the nucleus. They have a cytoskeleton.

c.       Kingdom archaezoa (primitive eukaryotes). They have no organelles.

d.      Kingdom protozoa (advanced unicellular eukaryotes) with symbiotic organelles.

e.       Kingdom Fungi.

f.       Kingdom metaphyta (plants).

g.      Kingdom of metazoa (animals).

Why science can’t explain everything

The difficulty of explaining everything is not due to our mental weakness, but to the very structure of the universe. In recent centuries we have discovered that the fabric of the cosmos can be considered on several different levels. While the next level has not been discovered, what happens in the previous one cannot be explained, it can just be described. Consequently, for the last known level we can never have explanations, we can only have descriptions.

Let's look at a little history:

1. Eighteenth-century chemists discovered many new substances. Not knowing what they were, all they could do was describe them in catalogs of properties, but they had no explanation of those properties.

The v>c world

Albert Einstein

In 1967, Gerald Feinberg game the name tachyon (from the Greek tacus, fast) to hypothetical particles whose possible existence had been proposed five years before by other researchers. Tachyons would have a unique property: they always move at speeds greater than the speed of light. Their mathematical behavior would not infringe the limitations of the special theory of relativity, which prohibits bodies with mass reaching the speed of light. Unfortunately this would cause other problems.

The idea of ​​the possible existence of tachyons was embraced with joy by science fiction writers, for they seemed to make interstellar travel possible in a reasonable time. For this, the following procedure would be effective:

Sex and species, two related concepts

Taxonomic categories

The species is the basic taxonomic category used by biologists to classify living things. The other categories (genus, family, order, class and phylum) are considered artificial and arbitrary. On the other hand, we tend to regard the species as natural, obvious, similar to a concept when the represented objects are living beings. But we will not enter here into the famous problem of universals, nor wonder on whether concepts (and species) really exist or are mere constructs of the human mind.

The classic definition of a species is: a set of living beings that share common characteristics and can interbreed, giving rise to fertile offspring. Notice that the use of the word interbreed implies that the living things in question use sexual reproduction. This leads us to ask whether the concept of a species should be restricted to living beings with this type of reproduction, or it can be extended to those that reproduce otherwise, such as prokaryotes and some eukaryotes. This question can be answered in several ways:

The origin of sexual reproduction

Cromosomas X e Y

Sexual reproduction is the most common form of reproduction among eukaryotes, including multi-cellular living beings. After billions of years of asexual reproduction among prokaryotes, who share genetic information by exchanging plasmids (small DNA fragments), a new type of reproduction suddenly appeared. As it was successful, we must assume that it must have provided some advantage over the alternative procedure.

Sexual reproduction can be defined as the alternation between two life cycles for the same type of organism:

• Haploid cycle: each cell has a single copy of every chromosome.
• Diploid cycle: each cell has two copies of every chromosome.

In eukaryotes, the haploid cycle is always unicellular; the diploid cycle may be unicellular (in unicellular eukaryotes) or multi-cellular (in multi-cellular eukaryotes). The individuals in the haploid cycle are called gametes.

How was this alternation established? It could have been caused by an alternation between two different environments. Haploid and diploid cells do not have the same properties. For example, diploid cells are more voluminous, having many duplicate organelles, so that the ratio of surface to volume is usually larger than in haploid cells (about 1.25 times). As the absorption of nutrients by the cells depends on their surface, haploids tend to grow faster than diploids.