A shower thought after my PT ride today was: Let’s assume biology is the ultimate final technology to master after a complete scientific understanding of biology, chemistry, and physics is achieved in a very distant future, (full elemental cycles balance becomes possible and ultimate energy efficiency).
So my thought was, could it be possible to create a biological thing by influencing the forces that could create the desired outcome in deep time? Is it possible to define an ecosystem in such a way that one can predict how it will evolve in stages? Like the ecosystems of the dinosaurs are thought to have been far less complex than the world of today. If one were to predict the path of increasing complexity, could one predict an outcome or at least a spectrum of possible outcomes?
What kind of culture would it take to plan on this kind of scale? Like, if you appreciate the technology of today, it was the product of designs someone started several centimillennia ago, so we take pride in the future creations we make possible centimillennia from now. I’m thinking the primary application would be to assess the spectrum of a distant world to then tailor a payload that would terraform a world, but other note niche applications may be possible
Probably another dumb question to ask here, but whatever. It is the kind of marble that gets lost in my brain. I just had this idea of nature as a really bad technologist that only exists on geologic time scales. What if we figured out how to do the same job but better.
Just a hunch from my side, Entropy and Survival of the Fittest strike me as the underpinning principles behind life in general. Since we know empirically that the universe prefers increasing entropy, I like to treat it as a “push” towards increasing the number of possible states (like a search space of sorts). Survival of the Fittest then acts as another “push” towards choosing the right configurations to thrive in any given environment.
With that description, I’d consider such forward planning to be inherently chaotic. Everything on earth (and the universe in general, though sparser) will end up affecting each other via common systems to some extent, so I say just let it loose and observe what happens.
We let loose our carbon and our methane to predictable results. Planets are mostly closed systems at the scale of life. So from generation to generation the variables are constrained. If low probability events are ignored, it seems quite ordered to me like a complex statistics problem.
Is it possible to define an ecosystem in such a way that one can predict how it will evolve in stages?
Intuitively, I think this would be a chaotic system, much like the weather. Chaotic systems cannot be predicted over long time scales.
Very few things are truly chaotic. E.g. the weather. It has chaotic elements, that make long range, hyper accurate predictions hard. We can still make larger scale predictions, like India’s monsoons.
The same applies to ecosystems. We can make broad observations and predictions, without knowing the finer details. E.g. You will have a hierarchy of predators/prey. A lot of organisms on the bottom, with less as you move up. The other classic is colonisation of volcanic islands. Mosses etc come first, with progressively larger and more complex plants following, as soil develops. Animals follow the tiers of plants.
Natural selection. No, it’s unpredictable.
Vibes.
