Complexity is Self-Limiting… Evolution Says "So What!" But At What Cost?

Complex systems tend towards greater complexity. That is one way, in fact, of defining evolution. But complexity is also self-limiting in obvious and unavoidable ways. What gives?

How, specifically, does an understanding of complexity's natural limits, recast an assessment of where human society is, where it might be going, and what of this potential do our own limitations in understanding complexity and its limits… well, limit?

We tend to gravitate towards a rather cleaned-up image of the future, all stainless steel and gleaming glass, and sexy robots that can't say "no" (puffy clouds, white wings, and lutes?). To be fair, this sparkly and perfect view of the future is something we reserver for "The Future". Excepting for Sunday mornings, we are refreshingly realistic about the process of getting through all of the calendar-able pedestrian futures to the final "The Future"… sometimes even positing an apocalypse or two along the way. Its as though we understand that things of great complexity and stability must be constructed, and that building is a messy and chaotic process, our self-delusion begins and ends with the absolutely fatal assumption that there is some end to the construction process, after which everything will be grand and glorious and perfect in the sense that no major construction will ever again mar the sublime and pristine quite and elegance we have built.

Right. OK.

In light of the magnitude of our self delusion, it seems down right naive to apply the phrase "drink the Cool-Aid"… in some very real sense, we must, each of us, have Cool-Aid factories right smack in the middle of our brains!

The actual future, the sober future, the one we seem hell-bent on ignoring, is a future of greater and greater and more and more constant change. A future we can never get to. A future that will surely go on one day without us. There were after all, a whole bucket-load of futures before we existed, before we declared ourselves the supreme center of everything, the final future. Ultimately, of course, there is a final and absolute future to any system. If you paid attention during your thermodynamics or information science lectures, you know that there will come an ultimate future which can not support any complexity at all.

For now, we will ignore that final future-of-all-futures (heat death)… there are "miles to go before we sleep".

As complexity marches forward and "upward", evolving systems are increasingly characterized by construction and change. A static system, one that can't react to its own constantly increasing experience, is a system that isn't as complex as one that can learn and adjust itself to accumulated knowledge. The romantic vision of a completed and peacefully static future is as laughable as it is understandable.

Some fantasies drive us towards success and influence, and others towards catastrophe and insignificance.

The difference between these two forms of fantasy are, to my mind, the difference between paying attention to the greater reality that is the whole universe (its physical laws, material properties, and configuration), and paying attention instead only to the reality hacked together within our own emotionally contorted and narrowly self-centered minds. The distance that separates the two is probably a good measure of the speed with which nature will replace us with some other form of complexity generating scheme with a more accurate natural mapping of reality to abstraction of reality.

A self-centered and locally weighted perspective is both expectable and self defeating. What works in the short term often gets in the way of what works in the long run. This is one of two oxymoronic misreading of process clouding our understanding of evolution that increasingly threatens our potential as a species. The other (related) self-obfuscation we don't seem to be able to avoid, and central to the thesis of this essay, is the dream-like way we tend to imagine the future as some silicone-enhanced sexed-up version of some glazed-over and romantic version of a past that never was.

What we know, how we comprehend what is around us, is a function of the iterative process of matching the stream of incoming sensation to what we have stored as experience. What comes to be known is always heavily effected by what was known before. Leaning is a local affair. Systems always end up knowing more about the things closest to them. The closest thing to a system is itself! This is a topologically and causally unavoidable fact, leading to difficult to circumnavigate self-centered understandings of the universe around us. I am convinced that evolution ultimately (in the longest run) favors systems that can overcome this local-centrism…though to to this, a system must literally work against itself in the short term. Success in the long run is dependent on the development and protection of genetic structure that frustrates success in the short run. This big-picture learning must be accomplished through the development of an ever more accurate internal analogue (process-able map) representing the most inclusive and location agnostic understanding of the entire universe. This too is an ever receding target, we can chase but never completely capture. Evolution is this back and forth dance between what matters to a system in the hear and now and the capacity to pay attention to, model, and process that which is salient about the entire universe… context in the largest sense.

I don't want to veer too far away from the thread of this essay, but it is important to keep in mind the counter-indicated admixture defined both by the immediate local needs of any given individual and the larger, decidedly non-individual scope of evolution. A decidedly cooperative mixture that is, none the less, achievable exclusively through the lives of and genetic/cultural information carried forward exactly and only by individuals.

In any given population of individuals at any given locality, there exists a range of differences that enable some individuals to make more efficient use of the resources in their surroundings, and some individuals to be better equipped to contend with and exploit the resources of their children's inherited environment. Those better matched to the current environment will out-compete those with a better match to the environment of the future. Ultimately, of course, what matters is the capacity of the entire mélange to both survive in the present and present morphotypes that meet the demands of the future.  The demands of the present vs. those of the future are often at odds with each-other. A successful evolutionary scheme must "waste" a sizable chunk of its structure and energy on strategies that may have no immediate positive effect on fitness (and might in all actuality hinder success in the moment). Maintaining a long range understanding of evolution itself, and our place in it, is the example of this dangerous opposition that best fits the scope of this essay.

It seems obvious to me that the amount a system must "waste" anticipating changes in the future of its environment is inversely relational to the accuracy of its internal mapping of the universe in total. Systems that know nothing of the universe, must produce a great variety of random solutions. A very expensive prospect that best fits very very very simple individuals produced in absurd numbers. Atoms, molecules, single celled organisms.

Understanding the process, "THE" process, evolution, is probably the most salient predictive mechanism an organism might seek to internalize. We seem to have limited capacity as a species to model and abstract and then effectively navigate an abstraction of this "THE PROCESS". Especially when it comes to understanding the limitations and usefulness to "THE PROCESS" of any one scheme, species or individual.

The spirit of this essay isn't Nietzschein pessimism or a catastrophist's Cassandra; "I told you so!". I am an eternal optimist, so these words are intended instead as a wake-up call, and offered up as a Windex Wipe to the foggy lens through which we view reality… in the hope that we use it, adjust our behavior, and rectify the self-defeating distance between what is and what we want to see.

Nature doesn't stand still. Not at least until the very end. Heat death isn't at all like my fantasy of an endless Mediterranean resort vacation. Any system that bets its future on stasis, no matter how advanced, is betting against its longevity or influence on the real future.

I've compiled a list (below) of some of the most obvious side effects that haunt complexity, that push back against its growth. If we illuminate these barriers we might be better equipped to consider ways to get around them, and we might discover something of how systems get better and better at finding cheats in the march towards greater complexity.

For a system to be complex, it must have structure and difference within that structure. A crystal has structure, but its lack of capacity for internal differentiation means it can never be complex. But differentiated structure isn't enough, it has also to have some way of protecting and maintaining that structure, that shape or behavior over time. Shit happens. A complex system must employ some set of mechanisms in a constant fight against entropy. Without which, a system's complexity will be short lived, and short lived complexity isn't very complex at all.

Which brings up an important and much ignored aspect of an evolving system. We have a tendency to over emphasize the moment, the present situation or system. Nature on the other hand doesn't care about the individual or the moment except as a vehicle for the transmission of structure into the future. What matters isn't how complex a system is today, but the potential of a given configuration to influence the greatest complexity in the longest future across the widest expanse of the material universe. Many aspects or measures of complexity cross over between the here and now and the deepest future… but not all and not always.

Back to our list.

1. One way to maintain structure is to build yourself out of stuff of great material integrity – say titanium, stainless steel, or diamond.

2. Another is to adopt a vigilant and obsessive Mr. Fix-It program of self maintenance. Yet another option is to replace yourself with a pristine copy before you dissolve into an entropic heap.

3. A simple cousin of this replacement scheme is playing the numbers game… make sure there are so freak-n many copies of you in the first place that one or two of you make it into the distant future by virtue of the dumb luck of large number.

4. Or, you can choose to live a life of extreme isolation – limit your interaction with other systems and you limit the deleterious effects the second law dictates.

5. Then there is wall building. Wall building is a self-made form of the isolation scheme… instead of finding a place to hide in a pre-existing landscape, dig yourself a tunnel or build yourself a wall or a mote or a shell or a nest or fast legs or wings with which to run away with.

And then there is the problem of resource acquisition. Anything of value to a complex system tends to be reactive. Reactive things are destructive. Installing your self within a reactive environment means you have more access to energy and materials, but it also means you have to spend more energy and structure just to protect yourself from your environment. As your energy demands increase so too does your need to locate yourself closer and closer to more and more reactive and ever changing environments. A cave full of grain is great at first, but as you eat your way through it, its original attractiveness decreases. Better to install yourself at the mouth of a river, next to a mid-ocean vent, or on the floor of a flood plane. As your complexity increases, so to does your appetite for energy and materials. Access means proximity. Proximity to greater and greater concentrations of energy demands protection. Protection is expensive in terms of the self-protective physical structure and its maintenance.

Worse still is the negative feedback that metabolic waste presents. The more you eat, the more you go. The more you go, the harder it is to find food. As complexity increases, guess what happens to the magnitude of this problem and the need therefore to spend more and more energy on waste removal schemes?

The focus of this essay are the aspects of complexity (and complexity's demand for energy and structure) that put counter-productive limits on strategies that would otherwise allow for greater and greater complexity… and how evolving systems find work-arounds. The fact that we are here at all is proof that evolution finds a way.

What interests me is the way increases in complexity puts increased demand on energy and material resources, and how these processes are self-limiting and at the same time actually define the purpose that drives evolution.

In the particular, real systems manifest great creative variety in the fight for the extension of structure and integrity over time. For instance, once brains appear, trickery and guile become the standard approach to wall building. You don't need to go the long and arduous course of developing poison and some specialized hollow teeth through which to deliver it, if you can just tweak your skin coloration or shape to mimic those who have. Or you can become invisible by adopting a color and texture scheme that mimics your less vulnerable or edible surroundings. In essence, trickery schemes are the same as isolation or wall building except the wall you are hiding behind is within the brain of another creature (either it's already there or you build it in your foe's brain through behavioral conditioning).

But here is the rub. No matter which scheme a system adopts in the maintenance of structure… that scheme hardens their structure, making it more difficult and expensive to adapt to an always changing environment. In a very real way, what makes you stronger in the present makes you vulnerable over time.

Example: When Teflon was developed it was obvious to its creators that its extreme inert-ness, its aversion to chemical interaction, would make it an ideal lining for any reaction container (including frying pans and irons). But this same property made it almost impossible to figure out how to affix Teflon to the surface of a container (it took over 10 years to solve this problem).

On the opposite end of the isolation spectrum is metabolism. When a system seeks a means of extracting and drawing energy or structure from its environment, it needs to maximize its reactive interface to that part of its environment that has the most entropic potential. In earth biology, this usually manifests as an active interface to oxygen and or sunlight – both of which are highly corrosive to structure. In order to both exploit the energy of these highly reactive sources, biology has adopted a myriad of selectively self protective (and expensive) mechanisms. Playing with fire is an attractive AND expensive proposition. Simple systems have no option but to hide from highly reactive environments – to dig themselves into deep cracks in the earth. Only a system of great complexity has the structural and behavioral leeway to adopt the complex and selective mechanism necessary to both use and avoid concentrated reactive resources.

As a system becomes more complex it reacts faster to internal and external change. It evolves faster. This is a circular definition of "complexity"… configurations that facilitate faster development of configurations that facilitate faster development of configurations… ad infinitum. The capacity to do things faster always comes at a cost. To mitigate that cost, the system must learn to be efficient and effective in its environment. This means going with the flow. This means fitting in. This means doing what the environment is already doing. This means not fighting the system. To work with a system (instead of against it) means internalizing and abstracting a model of the environment's most salient structures. If you have some knowledge of what a lion will do when you enter a clearing it is sitting within, you have a better chance of surviving the encounter. If you have legs and eyes, your very structure is an acknowledgment of the physical constraints of your environment.

An accurate assessment of this whole concept becomes increasingly complex as we realize how system and environment blend in a co-evolutionary super-system.

In science fiction, the future is presented in one of two ways. Either the world has devolved into some filthy post-appocolyptic entropic mess, or it is a perfectly complete stainless steal and glass uber-infrastruture with everything in its place and everything perfectly maintained. Both projections are impossible, but the hermetically sterile one is the most problematic as it seems to resonate more completely with human emotional projections.

The problem is this; the more complex a system becomes, the faster is its capacity to change, leading to a system that is constantly in flux, constantly reworking itself, constantly under construction. Try to find a day in a modern city devoid of numerous construction cranes marring its skyline. This situation will only become more intense as human society evolves.

Biological systems have learned to accommodate the constancy of change, deterioration, ware and tear, construction, etc., through complex molecular mechanism of growth and repair played out at the (largely microscopic) cellular level. Furthermore, these anti-entropic mechanisms are largely automatic and do not therefore overly burden the larger and more overarching consciousness and behavioral control mechanisms (our mind).

Though humanity has reached a level of complexity that supersedes the capacity of its infrastructure to effectively carry its own complexity demands, we don't seem, as a species to be able to see this problem as systemic.

[more to come…]

Biology Is Too Slow!

Humans are pumping a lot of energy around. When it comes to energy we don't mess around. We like our energy highly concentrated. We dig it up, refine it, convert it, and pump it through wires or pipes or the air like there is no tomorrow.

Nature is adaptive. Right? Nature finds a way. Right? So where are the animals and plants that suckle upon high power lines, that find their adaptive way into fuel tanks and batteries? Surely they could. Surely the same nature that goes gaga around mid ocean heat vents and can learn to metabolize the worst toxins we can throw into ponds... that good old adaptive nature should find a way to co-evolve with 50 thousand volt transmission lines.

And there are other (new) tits for nature to suckle. I fully expect our air to become less and less transparent to radio transmissions. If we can build devices that can grab radio energy right out of the air.… surely airborne molds and other microorganisms can do so. Are they? Doesn't look like it. What weird life forms would be best suited to radio-metabolism? Plants grab photons in the visible (radiation) band. Photosynthesis (in plants) is a respiratory affair - requiring oxygen and nitrogen for the primary reactions, but they also rely on heavy and rigid structural support to get up into the air where they can maximize their surface interface and solar exposure. Actually, when you think about it, a plant would be more efficient if it spent no energy fighting gravity, and instead laid flat on the surface of the land. Plants must only grow into the air to compete away from shade the shade of other plants and to increase respiration surface area.

Anyway, and this is a bit of an aside, but would there be a way for lighter than air super-colonies of single celled animals to maximize access to radio energy without the need for the heavy structure and vascular transport terrestrial plants employ? Maybe the radio scenario is ludicrous. Surely there is lots of background microwave energy constantly streaming by. Surely radio waves have been around as long as biology has been around. If radio was a good source of energy, nature would have already found a way. Maybe big bang radiation doesn't pack much of a wallop. Is it possible that communication intended radio is more energetic? More localized. Easier to exploit. I can imagine some type of group-dynamic in which individual floating animals or proto-animals learn to orient themselves such that they become a reflective parabola or fresnel lens concentrating radio energy to a focal point where other animals absorb the energy in some sort of symbiotic bio-community. Many other scenarios are conceivable.

Are plants learning to seed near highways to take advantage of air movement and carbon dioxide? There are a million ways in which human activity effects environments in ways that provide energy and stability clines. Surely life is reacting in step.

The pace of culture is so much faster than most organisms can genetically respond. The smallest organisms with the shortest life spans that have the greatest populations spread over the largest geographies are the organisms most likely to take advantage of our frenetic environmental messings.

Are they? Is anyone paying attention?

What is computing?

This is the most important question of our time… yet so rarely asked. Computing technology increasingly shapes every aspect of human behavior, culture, resource use, health, commerce, and governance. A passive stance on the question that effects all other questions is increasingly dangerous to the future of all humans, of life, of evolution itself.

In the 60's we created NASA, an elaborately funded research program to uncover the knowledge and develop the technology to "go to the moon". Yet one would be hard pressed to justify the cost to society of contraptions that do nothing more than take a few people to a near-by rock… almost nothing of the NASA program can be used outside of the narrow focus of getting a few tens of miles off the surface of Earth (at tens of millions of dollars per pound).

Ironically, and inadvertently, the practical mathematics, programming, and computational techniques developed and honed by NASA in the pursuit of its expensive and arguably impractical goals may be the only pertinent contribution to show for the tens of trillions of dollars spend on this ill-concieved and irrational "research" program.

Talk about putting the cart before the horse… akin to building a global library system and book binding before developing a written language.

We are surrounded by lifeless rocks. We didn't need to send a few Air-force test pilots to the moon to figure that out. The practical scope of our chemically propelled rockets hardly avails us to the nearest little frozen or boiling neighbor planets in this corner of this one little Solar System. Ever attempt a phone conversation with 40 min. gaps between utterances?

The interesting stuff in this Universe (at least the small corner we have access to) is right here on our little Earth. It is us… and more than that, it is not so much what we have done, but what we will do and how what we will do effects what other future things will do because we set them into motion. That is our job. In a very real way, we are the first things that understand the job description despite the fact that it has always been there and has always been the same. This understanding should give us a leg up on the process. Should.

There are two kinds of knowledge: the first, historical, the second, developmental. When we go somewhere, we do nothing more than uncover that which already is. Compare this to development, where we create things that never were. In this universe, if there was a force that was prescient in creating one star or planet, that same force must have been prescient in the creation of Earth. We don't have to go to Mars to find the forces that created Earth. And we certainly don't need to send humans over there even if we do want intimate knowledge of a place like Mars.

At any rate, computing is a universal process. Computing is agnostic to domain. You can compute about particle physics and you can compute about knitting. Computing is an abstraction processing medium. Computing is what brains do. Computing is not restricted to the category that is biological minds. Learning how to compute is learning how to discover. The goal becomes the unknown… becomes un-prejudiced developmental discovery. The machinery of pattern matching… of salience… of the perception of essence across domains.

I am obsessed with this biggest "why" of computing. I don't think the computational "why" can be separated from the biggest "why" of existence in general... of evolution… of the march of complexity.

The convergence of thermodynamics (the way action effects energy dissipation) and information science (the relative probabilities of structure and the cost of access, processing and transference) guide my approach to these questions. Least energy laws dictate the evolution of all systems. Computing is evolution. Abstraction systems allow prediction. Prediction grants advantage. Advantage influences the topology of the future. The better a system gets at accurately abstracting it's environment, the more it will influence the future of abstraction systems. Computing is the mechanics of evolution... always has been. Are we designing computing to this understanding of the methodology of complexity handling?

Lets suppose we gave the scientists at NASA a choice. We ask them, "What technology represents a greater potential towards the eventual understanding and even physical exploration of the Universe, rocket engines or computers?", What would be the rational and obvious answer? If we ever hope to get any real distance in this universe it won't be by burning liquid oxygen and kerosene. Most things in this universe are millions of years away even at the speed of light. Rocket engines hardly move at all when compared with even the too-slow speed of light. Getting anywhere in this universe will demand tunneling beneath the restrictions that are space and time… no rocket engine will ever do that for us. I am not an advocate for space exploration, but if I was, I would be pushing computation over rocket propulsion.

It is time to advocate a culture wide push towards the advancement of an ever-expanding understanding of computing. To the extent we succeed, all of the future will be defined by and fueled by our discoveries. If we choose instead to spend our limited and most expensive money towards rockets we had better hope the universe can be understood through the understanding of explosions and destruction and spending long periods of time floating in space. Come on people! Think!

[ more to come… ]

Solar energy conversion… can it hurt the Earth?

Note: before anyone accuses me of being anti-green, let me explain my general motivation and then the specific intent of this post. I don't think there is a more potent problem facing humanity (and all life) than the current man-caused spike in global temperature. If we do not act appropriately and quickly and at unprecedented scale, biology faces near-total destruction. The scale of this problem demands that our solutions be equally large. Large solutions of any kind will have both intended and unintended consequences. We must strip emotion and sentimentality from our assessment and design process. We must dump our pre-conceptions and deal with the physical dynamics as they are (not as we would like them to be).

Global heat delta as solar/wind is converted?

Almost every time solar energy is harnessed by human-built converters (to electricity or work), this energy is transmuted down the thermodynamic ladder faster and more localized than would "naturally" occur.

And its digression towards heat is localized (thermodynamic oxymoron I am aware). At the very least, the global atmospheric energy distribution budget is disturbed. Energy that used to go towards other dynamic dissipative systems (ocean and air currents, the fresh water cycle, etc.) is now siphoned off and downgraded to heat at a faster rate. This is especially true of systems like solar to electricity cells which convert some sunlight that would otherwise have bounced out into space.

Even wind and water current converters (turbines) pull kinetic energy from a large system, and localize (time and location) the thermodynamic degradation in non-natural ways.

In both cases, heat that would have dissipated down stream over a long period of time is removed instantly (much of which is immediately lost to heat in the conversion process) and sent to highly localized dissipative devices (lights, heaters, stoves, computers, washing machines, TVs, and industrial equipment). The placement of these end of the line dissipative devices is determined by human desire and not the simple thermodynamic least-energy topology represented in natural systems.

As we get better and better at exploiting solar energy to our own energy needs, more and more of the solar energy that drives large scale atmospheric phenomena will be removed from the standard atmospheric causality chain. What impact will this have on weather patterns? On ocean currents? On global temperature and temperature distribution? On annual seasons? On precipitation patterns?

Our planet's heat budget is to some extent regulated by the off-planet radiation of heat through infrared (and other) radiated wavelengths. How do our current human uses of electricity effect this radiated/mechanical heat fraction?

As compared to hydro-carbon oxidation?

To be sure, the oxidation of hydro-carbons (burning oil and gas) has a more radical effect on heat balance. But this has more to do with the fact that undisturbed oil and gas are only "potential" energy until we bring them to the surface and burn them. Solar energy conversion is not typically considered in light of thermodynamic process because it is assumed that this is energy that is used naturally anyway. But natural uses of solar energy drive planet wide dissipative engines upon which all life is distributed and timed.

To what extent will drastic increases in solar energy conversion effect these essential processes? Especially as humans continue to use more and more energy?

Is this a tipping point effected system?

I know that current solar conversion is probably such a small slice of the total earth-solar energy budget that these questions must seem daft. However, as we have seen in many natural systems, small changes can catalyze huge and unexpected out-fall effects. Disregarding "tipping point" sensitivity, how will ever increasing capture of solar energy for human use effect Earth-scale dissipative systems that support biology as it is currently represented?

Engineering done well

Here is what I suspect. We put solar conversion panels up where solar real-estate is cheap... on roofs or in deserts where other (agricultural) uses of that energy is not reasonable. These locations are locations where there is reason to have highly reflective surfaces. A well designed solar converter reflects as little energy as possible. Either way, I suspect that solar panels have different reflective behavior than other surfaces. Plants appear green because they absorb red (longer wavelength) light. Plants differentially reflect green and blue light. Solar panels are usually placed where plants aren't. But even if they replaced plants, their reflection/absorption properties would be different than plants. A plant converts solar to chemical energy in a respiratory process that absorbs carbon from carbon dioxide in the air and strips the carbon releasing pure oxygen.

Photovoltaic panels are not respiratory systems. This fact alone changes the environmental atmospheric equation.

But let us instead concentrate on panels that replace only other non-biological surfaces of various reflective and heat storage indices. The whole point of a well designed solar panel is to convert solar photonic energy to heat or electricity (or hydrogen) which can be transported or transmitted to other locations for immediate use (conversion back to heat through a chemical or mechanical process that results in work). This process differs from natural processes in important ways. It is usually faster degradation to heat. It is often localized differently than natural dissipative processes. And (if well designed and engineered) it is more absorptive than natural surfaces. 

Randall

Motivation [anti-] matters...

Recently, I stumbled across a post to a public online science discussion group. But, it wasn't the subject of the post that interested me. The subject was speculation about the existence of anti-matter galaxies "at the fringes of the universe". What makes this person's post worth commenting upon is the almost immeasurable difference between scientific thinking and non-scientific thinking. So… it's worth an short examination.

First what we think we know about anti-matter:

Every empirically derived model of the universe (standard model included) shows almost no remaining antimatter after just a short percentage of its current age. The same models show an almost 50/50 split at the first moment… and then a quick period of mater-antimatter annihilation resulting in the current matter domination (with a whole mess of residual dark matter and dark energy). Remember, antimatter isn't nether-worldly, it's just matter that is in some fundamental way, symmetrically inverted. An antimatter electron would, for instance, have a positive charge. Thats all. No magic, no otherworldliness, anti-matter is still matter… is every bit "material".

Now the question of rhetoric:

What fascinates me when discussions like this erupt is the "why" that drives the original post. Contrarianism is a cornerstone of Scientific thought. But when the motives driving contrarian ideas are not scientific, you can expect scientists to assign the standard "crackpot" label. Every time I investigate such a claim, every time I ask and get an answer to the question "What drives your interest in making this contrarian claim?", I get an anti-scientific answer. I get an answer that reveals a spiritual world view that necessitates some fundamental strangeness at the base of a "theoretical" framework or "cosmology". The strangeness is necessary to support a "physical" explanation for the meta-physical emotional experiences and needs the contrarian finds personally satisfying. It is endlessly fascinating to me that anti-scientific thinkers seek constantly to justify their emotional-experiential world view atop some sort of awkward and illogical re-imagining of science derived knowledge. In contrast, you will never see a scientist go to spirituality in support of his theory or experimentally derived data set. No scientist has ever or will ever work a verse from the Bible, or a witticism attributed to Buddha, Mohammad, Krishna, Confucius, or L. Ron Hubbard into a proof or theory. The anti-symmetry of these two behaviors is worth a well intentioned pause for thought.

The inward apologetic focus of spirituality is the opposite the outward focus and motivations of science. Science (scientists) are motivated by a desire to understand the universe… as it is… for what it is. A scientist tries all day long to disregard what it feels like to think or want or need, expects that their own personal emotional gestalt is forever slanted by evolutionary selection towards culture, gender, species, and bio-centric mechanisms that are physically embedded and unavoidable. A scientist is motivated to see beyond personal experience to the fabric from which it is derived and of which, perspective is just a tailing, a side effect. It is important here to specify the scientific classification of the self and self-experience. Science is frequently accused of being anti-self. This is the farthest from the truth. To science, the self and subjective experience is every bit as existent as any thing else in this universe. But in the same way that Copernicus re-figured the ontology of the Solar system, placing the Sun in the center and demoting Earth to the less central and less exclusive role of Planet, science views the self and experience as non-special, as one of, as a physical manifestation of order and causality specific to place and time and circumstance. The self, to a scientist is effect. It is weather, not atmosphere. It is concerto not violin. It is road trip, not station wagon.

A scientist says "My mind is flawed. My mind tells me things that it wants to hear. How can I construct methods and means to see the difference between what is and what I experience?" A scientist doesn't seek physical justification for flawed thinking. A scientist just plain expects it, deals with it, looks beyond it. A scientist posits causality at base. Builds an inverted pyramid of causality. At the lowest point in this pyramid, this hierarchy of influence, are the most basic of physical processes. We humans and our thoughts appear high up at the top of this ever expanding pyramid of influence and causality… meaning, what we do and think is much more effect than cause. Scientists expect and accept this. We don't seek means of rearranging the structure that built us to fit our emotional experiential needs. We just look for what is.

So, I have asked the author of the originating post; "What motivates your interest in the existence of anti-matter galaxies?"

Note: A whole slew of fringe (mathematically consistent?) theoretical models have been introduced by legitimate scientists that allow for the existence of contemporary pockets of anti-matter in a matter dominated universe such as ours.  These alternative models (and far crazier ones as well) are introduced to test the validity of more dominant models, as a means of falsifying. But this process of constantly looking for error is motivated by an interest in discovery of the truth about what is. Again, this search for "What Is" is fundamentally different than a search for an explanation or justification for "What I Feel".

Randall

Some background information:

The early universe was opaque to light (for about 300 thousand years). The energies released (that still exist) were generally of a much higher frequency then visible light… gamma radiation. Plus, the universe was too hot and dense (millions of times hotter and denser than the first moment of an atomic bomb detonation) for atoms to form, so photons wouldn't stream past atoms as they do today, and instead interacted with the dense soup of nuclei and electrons. When the universe had expanded and cooled to the point necessary for atoms to form, photons (of all energies) were free to fly unimpeded as they do today… the universe was finally transparent. Then it was another 500 million years before stars were formed and ignited before the first location-specific photons began to flood out into the universe (the stuff we can see with our eyes, telescopes, and directional sensors).

Because of the expansion of the Universe the big bang (matter anti-matter) created gamma rays are now huge radio waves (many meters in wavelength). This is the cosmic background radiation… the hiss on your analog radio and TV.

Now, what an event horizon is, and what one can see, are two very different things. 

It is important to remind our selves that seeing isn't an active process. Seeing is a passive act. Sure, the photons that hit our retina are active, but the only thing active about our eyes is that they react to photons that hit them. We don't "look" out into the cosmos. We passively receive stray photons that were created or reflected off of stuff at some distance (which always translates to some time in the past)… and only photons, which happen to be streaming along exactly in a path that intersects one of our eyes. Our eyes don't suck information in, they just sit and wait for what ever comes their way. The best we can do is point them in a particular direction.

The event horizon is the theoretical spherical limit to how far anything can go within a given period of time from when it was released. Typically when we are talking about an event horizon we are talking about a boundary dictated by the fastest anything can travel in space-time, which is the speed that light travels in a vacuum. Given the fact that this universe began as a singularity (as one point of zero spacial diameter), we are (as is everything) always at the center of that first primordial point. That is the really great, if somewhat confusing, thing about an expanding universe… where ever you are, if you are within this universe, you are at the the exact epicenter of the big bang that started it all.

This rule is true no matter how fast you are going or when you started going that fast. Distance itself is an attribute of space-time and space-time was created by the big bang. There is nothing remotely detectible, like distance (or time for that matter), that is or ever will be, outside of space-time.

Even stranger, if Einstein was correct (and everything we have ever measured seems to say that he was), energy and matter are directly tied to and dependent upon space and time. Add or subtract from any of these four and you directly effect the quantity of at least one of the other three.

The photons that bring us information about things far away (long ago) left a universe that was less and less like the one we live in today the longer ago they were made. The limits to what we will ever be able to "see" no matter how good our telescopes get, are dictated by when the universe became transparent to light. This is when light became directional. There is radiation all around us that isn't directional… or rather it was created before the universe allowed radiation to stream unimpeded in a strait line. This radiation is considered "noise" as it is incoherent (each photon is unrelated to each other photon). In this sense, it is like temperature, you can know things about the average of all of the photons (average wave length and amplitude) but anything you can measure about any one photon is missing any information that would tell us anything about source location.

That is the bugaboo about knowing anything about the very earliest universe. There was a very long period of time right after creation (scientific semantics) that we can never know much about. We can derive quantities as averages, but we can not know anything about specific spacial events or trends. The moment the universe went transparent is a boundary, before which we can only guess at location-specific layout of the universe. For all practical purposes, in this universe, the moment of transparency (the moment the universe got cool enough to allow the formation of atoms) is the only "event horizon" of any interest. This photon transparency horizon (300 thousand years after the big bang) has nothing at all to do with the theorized matter anti-matter annihilation epoch which occurred between about 10^-32 and 10^-12 seconds after the big bang.

Note: It is calculated that the observable matter dominated universe (photons, neutrons, protons and electrons) is the result of a 1 part in 1 billion majority of matter to anti-matter. The statement made earlier to the effect that "electrons are supposed to be positively charged" is complete hooey. Anti-matter is created everywhere in the universe that energies are high enough for fusion (in stars, supernova, and at black hole horizons). Such newly created anti-matter is annihilated the moment it contacts matter and this produces photons in the x-ray spectrum.