DoctorMo's Blog

This image from George Smoot’s tedTalk back in 2008 is something which inspired me to think about the way people think about what is possible. This blog post may seem a little airy for some, but that’s because it’s going to be hard to explain what I mean when I try and compare the model for dark matter distribution in the universe (above) with the realm of possibly in an abstract way.

Normally the way individuals see possibilities is that they assess the data, the facts of the world and their model of the world and come to a set of conclusions which predict the likelihood of a given outcome. When you have the data of several examples this becomes easier to do. This isn’t a good way to think about it for large questions.

Now a harder problem, evolution, why do species evolve the way they do and why do we have the patterns we do. Well imagine evolution is playing a gambling game where in each move it’s got a chance to move somewhere on that colourful diagram above, the lighter the coloured area the more possible it is to survive in with that pattern, the pattern can be said to be more stable.

When we reflect upon the journey evolution has taken, it certainly seems to have a direction for a lot of adaptations, the species could be said to be complete at any stage (because it managed to survive in it’s environment) but still time marches on and the journey isn’t done and the next million years go by and now we have bigger teeth and better running.

This is how I visualise such a process on a global scale, trying to not think of single journeys, but what could have been and could not have possibly worked in that given environment and the pattern it all makes in a sort of “stability pattern matrix”. It’s this visual idea that allows me to speculate that say if we were to meet aliens then there are likely to be two kinds: those that are very much like us and those that as so different from us it’ll be hard for us to recognise them at all.

Anyway, enough fairy cake for today.