The Copernicus Complex: Our Cosmic Significance in a Universe of Planets and Probabilities

Ordered a hardcover. There was a big ink spot on the side.

Randomness, nonlinear dynamics, chaos theory: these are three of the main ideas that flow through Caleb Scharf's The Copernicus Complex. He writes with clear reasoning and logic ... no turbulence here. Scharf successfully uses them as the foundation of an approach to finding our place in the universe.Scharf introduces and analyzes many other seemingly diverse concepts in pursuit of his objective: to explain how to find our significance in the cosmos ... not in a theistic or religious sense, but in a biological, scientific sense. The concepts he discusses include the Copernican principle of mediocrity, the anthropic principle, Bayesian analysis, chaos theory, biochemistry, evolutionary biology, the fine-tuning of physical constants, some history of science, and philosophy of science. He smoothly integrates these subjects in support of his objective.Scharf's overarching philosophy is a welcome new approach. The reader will find many familiar subjects here, and the author gives each a fresh look and interpretation. The effect of this on his project is to strengthen the reader's understanding and support of his concluding arguments.Although he doesn't offer specific answers to the questions "Is life common in the universe?", and "Are we (in)significant within it?", it is clear to me that he supports the idea that life, simple and complex, inevitably arises at the right time and in the right places. He suggests that those times and places are not as rare as some argue. Life is the most complex construction of ordinary chemistry and physics that the universe produces. It is a natural outcome of those forces. Life is not the incalculably rare winner of some cosmic lottery, nor the product of nonphysical "essences."To that end Scharf demotes the usefulness and importance of both the rare earth and the anthropic principle hypotheses. Whether these are correct or incorrect is not the point. Rather he questions their usefulness. Can they help guide science, astrobiology and SETI in particular, in a search for evidence of life elsewhere? This is the core of his thesis ... good science and, by extension, good scientific and philosophic attitudes in a quest for knowledge requires evidence and diligence in its confirmation.Scharf gives us several hints along the way about how to achieve his objective. Here are a couple:"It's not obvious that life needs anything more than a rough-and-ready environment to originate and survive in. So true cosmological fine-tuning should be more about the particular ease with which life can occur – and for now, at least, no distinction between intelligent life and "simple" life, since there's nothing simple about life in any form." p 35Scharf's exposition of horizontal gene transfer between different species of bacteria suggests that even when the earth was populated only with these single-celled organisms life was not so simple. This hints that the rise of true multi-celled organisms was not that difficult, probably gradual and not explosive, and not because special conditions suddenly arose."… any thinking life-form anywhere in the universe may always perceive "special" characteristics in its own circumstances – specifics that, if different, would derail the chances of complex life occurring. This perceptual bias may be irresistible regardless of whether complex life is rare or as common as muck. Until we either discover life elsewhere or somehow rule it out, any post hoc interpretations of the significance of our circumstances are almost meaningless. …" p 203-204"We are, I think, still unlikely to be central to the universe, either astrophysically or metaphysically. But this does not preclude the possibility that the pathway of emergence that produced us is unusual in its details. We need to get comfortable with that degree of specialness, because it influences our outlook and our scientific strategies for reaching out to the universe." p. 230For reading about chaos, Scharf suggests James Gleick's Chaos: Making a New Science. Another good work on this subject is Stephen H. Kellert's In the Wake of Chaos.The Copernicus Complex by Caleb Scharf is informative over a wide range of subjects, which he cleverly integrates into a single theme about the significance (or not) of humankind and life in general in the cosmos. It should be required reading for students and professionals of astrobiology and SETI. The lay reader who is moderately familiar with these subjects will find it an enjoyable, accessible, and, not least, a thought provoking read. I recommend it and give it five stars.

excellent book, well written, clear and fascinating. Should be a must for biology students. Lay readers, intrested in life andthe cosmos will find it extremely intersting.

Leider gibt es dieses großartige Buch noch nicht auf Deutsch, sonst hätte ich es zu Weihnachten jedem meiner Verwandten und Freunde unter den Weihnachtsbaum gelegt, der / die sich für das große Ganze interessiert, aber des Englischen nicht so mächtig ist. In einem umfassenden Überblick führt uns Caleb Scharf vom Kleinsten zum Größten - und zurück. Das Buch kreist - wie der Titel schon besagt - um die Auseinandersetzung mit dem "Kopernikus-Komplex", also der bahnbrechenden Erkenntnis des Astronomen Nikolaus Kopernikus, dass die Erde nicht im Zentrum des Universums steht, sondern nur ein durchschnittlicher Planet einer durchschnittlichen Sonne in einem abgelegenen Hinterhof des Kosmos ist. Aber stimmt das? Professor Scharf kann viele Argumente dafür anführen, dass die Erde und das Sonnensystem gerade vor dem Hintergrund neuerer Entdeckungen von Exoplaneten doch sehr spezielle Orte sind.

The Copernican Principle is a staple in cosmology, astronomy, and in astrobiology and the search for extraterrestrial life. Usually stated in an informal way, the Copernican Principle holds that we, in our time and place, do not occupy a special or privileged position as observers of the universe.Cosmology and astrobiology are speculative fields. Cosmological theories posit claims about phenomena that are not accessible to direct observation — the beginnings and ultimate fate of the universe, or the nature of distant and unfamiliar objects. The Copernican Principle allows us to speculate within the bounds of known physical laws and assumptions — speculation isn’t completely free and open, but it is enabled by the idea that the rest of the universe isn’t (too) different from the universe we are familiar with. We can use that constraint to bound and enable our speculations — what we observe at great times or distances must accord with what we know about the physics of the familiar universe.Astrobiology and the search for extraterrestrial life is, for our time anyway, inherently speculative. We know of only one instance where life has developed and evolved in the universe, and we have really detailed knowledge of only one planetary system. As Scharf recounts, in the early days of speculation about life beyond the Earth, the Copernican Principle allowed us to presume that ours was not the only planetary system, that ours is not the only one containing a planet friendly to the development of life. In a sense, the Copernican Principle functioned as a placeholder for knowledge about such things — in the absence of knowledge, it was reasonable to assume that our situation is not unique or even special, that what happened here, to produce Earth and life on Earth, could happen and probably has happened elsewhere.After an initial introduction to the Copernican Principle, Scharf catches us up on how knowledge has progressed to displace such straight-forward Copernicanism, and, in his view, given us reason to question a strict adherence to it. He looks at both cosmological research on the origins of the universe, galaxies, stars, and planets, the current state of knowledge about exoplanets, our current understanding of the origin of life, and what we know about the specific evolution of our solar system and the planet we live on.Certainly, in any absolute sense, the Copernican Principle is hard to maintain. There were, and probably will be, huge spans of time during which life in the universe, and in our galaxy, was impossible (at least in any form we could imagine). Planets and stars hadn’t even formed yet. And, as it turns out, when planetary systems did form, as far as we now know, they typically formed violently, with chaotic collisions and gravitational influences training systems into shapes very unlike ours. The Earth itself appears anomalous in size and distance from its star. Our star, the Sun, while common, is not among the most common types of star. Our position in the galaxy is “special” also, in that we are located in a kind of galactic suburb, well away from the intense radiation and gravitational interactions of stars close to the galactic center.Adherents of the “Rare Earth” hypothesis take those, and additional, special characteristics of our situation as reasons to believe that life is extremely rare in the universe, especially intelligent life of the sort we could detect and potentially communicate with. What has happened here was so unusual and dependent on so many special circumstances that we are likely alone in the universe. The likelihood of what happened here happening at all is so low that we can’t expect it to have happened often enough that we are going to find others like us — if they exist at all, they will be so distant, so sparse, both in space and time, as to be effectively undetectable.Scharf’s own doubts about Copernicanism do not go that far. In particular he argues that the Rare Earth thinkers bind the possibility of the development of life (and intelligence) too tightly to the conditions that actually produced it on Earth. The Rare Earth thinkers cite such features of life’s development on Earth as plate tectonics, tides from a relatively large moon, protection from asteroid bombardments by a large gravitational guardian (Jupiter), and so on. Sharf’s argument is that there are many ways life can emerge and evolve, and if one path is closed, another may be followed. And there is evidence of a chemical bias towards life — the primitives of life are basic chemistry, and, once started, may take any of an indefinite set of paths forward. Those special circumstances, including the size of our planet and its source of heat and energy much less such specifics as plate tectonics, tides, and the role of Jupiter, may not be so constraining to life after all.So Scharf argues for a position between the early optimism of broad Copernicanism and the skepticism of the Rare Earth hypothesis. He looks to chaos theory and Bayesian probabilistic thinking as ways to frame the problem of life in the universe. The problem is a “complex” one in the technical sense of an almost overwhelming set of interacting variables producing a very wide array of potential outcomes, without strict, deterministic results. And this complex system is one in which we not only lack knowledge of potential outcomes but have very incomplete knowledge even of the relevant variables and their likely values. As he says, “We’ll have to simulate the conditions produced by a range of cosmic properties, to see how well and how often they generate the complex phenomena out of which life emerges — how many viable trajectories there are. We’ll also have to apply our Bayesian skills to weight the possibilities, to express our honesty about our ignorance of the deeper physics of reality.”In ordinary terms, there are lots of things that can happen in the universe, and many of them may well produce life, even intelligent life. We don’t know how it all works, but we are unduly skeptical if we think that it must happen as it happened in our case and unduly optimistic if we think that what happened in our case must have happened many times and in many places.Where does that leave us? In a lot of uncertainty. But that’s core to Scharf’s point — uncertainty is inherent to the problem, given our poor knowledge of the relevant factors and potential paths to outcomes, and given the complexity of the interactions between those variables and the paths that can be produced. But we do have methods — probabilistic reasoning and chaos theory — to help guide us through the problem. Concrete, non-probabilistic answers — e.g., evidence of life elsewhere or increasing evidence of its scarcity — will inform our thinking, but I suspect Scharf believes that, as a complex problem, we will never have a full theory of how life can happen in the universe and how often it can happen.This is a good book. I hope I’ve conveyed how it both supplies a kind of introduction about how to think about the problem of life in the universe and goes beyond the poles of optimism and pessimism we often meet ithere. Scharf covers the basics as well as you could in a short book (232 pages, not including footnotes, etc.), and he does so in relatively straightforward, non-jargony language. There are succinct introductions to terms and concepts (e.g., Bayesian analysis) where needed.There is one pet peeve of mine that Scharf does not escape, though. Given the critical role that the Copernican Principle plays, both in speculating about life in the universe and in other fields such as cosmology, I’d love to see a definitive statement of what it is — at least in a particular theorist’s thinking. What exactly is the principle? It isn’t stated. And the terms in which it is talked about — very different terms such as our significance or our position as observers — are not reconciled into a single principle.Without some stronger definition, even if provisional, I’m unsure what the principle allows and what it disallows. For example, does the principle enable us to think, all other things equal, that there’s nothing so special about the development of (technological) intelligence in our case that it shouldn’t happen elsewhere as well? Or should we instead think that there’s nothing so special about intelligence itself that we think it should be common? We don’t think that everything about our case should be common — e.g., that in some other parts of the universe surely there are beings like us drinking tea and speaking English. Some features of our case are likely to be common and some are just peculiarities. Which side does intelligence fall on? Is it a non-essential peculiarity, or should we expect to find it commonly where we find life? We think highly of it, as an adaptation, but, as Scharf implies, there should be an indefinite array of adaptive strategies that life can take — intelligence might be much more like drinking tea and speaking English than like multicellular biology.The question of intelligence is just one question I find hard to apply Copernican thinking to, without more definition of the principle. I’m sure I’m not the only one with that problem — I’d love to see a good discussion of what exactly the principle is. I suspect that Scharf might not quarrel too strongly if, In fact, I characterized him as implying that part of the problem of Copernicanism is that we don’t know its bounds — what to expect to be common and what to expect to be peculiar to us. I’d just like to see a head-on discussion of what the Copernican Principle is.

Fascinating read about our (in)signficance in the cosmos. But, some parts of chapters are technically quite difficult without having serious scientific bases.