We Have No Future

I was recently re-reading Leonard Mlodinow’s book, The Drunkard’s Walk, and once again came upon an account of some weather research done years ago that yielded unexpected results. I’d read about Edward Lorenz’ computer simulations before, but the implications of his failed attempts to build long-range weather prediction models hit me for the first time.

In the 1960’s, Lorenz fed data about some hypothetical initial atmospheric conditions into his early computer. He let the program run, watching how the computer’s projected weather patterns would evolve based on this data input. After a while, he recorded the results and shut down the program. A few days later, he decided he wanted to see how weather patterns would have developed if he’d let the program run longer. Rather than typing all that starting point data into the computer again, he just used the printout information from his previous session. He expected the projection to develop exactly the same way it had up to the point he’d discontinued the experiment, and then to proceed into a more distant future.

But Lorenz got a shock. When the computer simulation reached the point where he’d previously left off, it wasn’t reporting the same weather conditions at all. Its predictions up to that point varied wildly from what the computer had originally projected. How could this be? The computer had started with the same data input each time.

But wait a minute. Lorenz saw that the starting data fed into the computer hadn’t been exactly the same in each of his computer sessions. When he had fed in the data by hand for the first session, he had carried out each data point to six decimal places. So for example, he might have entered a number as 0.293416. But when he had just looped back the computer’s print-out numbers, each data point had only been carried out to three decimal places. The computer had abbreviated what Lorenz had entered when it produced its final report. So Lorenz’ first number had been entered only as 0.293 for the second session. And that had made all the difference.

This discovery played a big part in the development of chaos theory with its famous “butterfly effect.” As everyone started to hear about chaos theory in the 60’s and 70’s, we were learning that the tiniest alteration at the start can veer the trajectory of events off into a different direction. A butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil could create a breeze that would invalidate all predictions, all projections that hadn’t taken that butterfly’s action into account. After a relatively short period of time, such a small difference in “initial conditions” could cause the trajectory of realty to diverge immensely from the predicted trajectory.

Being reminded of this statistical fact made me think again about current projections of climate change. I certainly don’t mean to be a “denier.” However, the ideas advanced by chaos theory, which had been such a popular subject of study some decades ago, seem to be largely ignored now. Many individuals are speaking with great certitude about how global warming will progress and accelerate in this century. Well, we are certainly causing massive damage and depletions with our run-away consumerism. However, we can’t be sure that the result will be global warming for our generation and for the next few generations to come. The climate is a complex system, subject to diverge from prediction with the slightest change in initial conditions. It’s like two children of absolutely equal weight poised level, motionless on a teeter-totter. Let one child put a ribbon in her hair, and the balance will be tipped. She’ll go down. Or that darned butterfly in Brazil might decide to flap its wings on a whim – invalidating all our computer projections.

Seriously though, there are potentially so many more substantial causes that could result in unforeseen results when it comes to future weather conditions, or future anything. Sticking with the example of weather prediction for the moment – we might consider the effect of sunspots. These are flare-ups caused in part by magnetic fluxing on the sun. The presence of a lot of sunspots seems to have a small warming effect on the earth. We currently seem to be going into the trough of a weak cycle of this activity. There’s disagreement about whether we can expect a surge of sunspot activity in the coming decade, or if activity will remain at unusually low levels. If the latter, earth might experience a slight mitigation of any warming trend.

Then there’s precession of the equinoxes. The earth can be pictured as a big spinning top, with its spindle running from pole to pole through its center. When a spinning top slows a bit, it’s easy to see the way the top wobbles. If the tip of its spindle could be made to leave a trail of luminescence, a viewer would see a glowing, irregular circle traced in the air. That’s the kind of circle-path the earth’s axis is tracing in the universal skies. Depending on how the tip of the axis wobbles, depending on how it’s oriented relative to the sun - the earth (particularly its more northerly and southerly latitudes) could experience periods of either sweltering heat or bone-chilling cold.

Many scientists believe we are entering another ice age now, in large part because of the orientation of the earth’s axis. They believe it’s only our burning of fossil fuels that’s staving off the kind of mini-ice age that England experienced in the early 1800’s when the Thames River froze over and when people were literally skating on thin ice wherever they went. Despite all this burning we’re doing, many still think an ice age is coming. Or not.

Then there’s that question of pollution itself. The smog that’s being generated more heavily now in developing countries could paradoxically prove to be a boon by working to block the sun’s rays, resulting in a cooling effect. Some say we didn’t do ourselves any favor in the long-run by reducing smog in Los Angeles, in London, in other big cities in the West. This environmentally good deed has let the sun beat down on us.

Our pollution may have acted like a milder, more temperate form of the meteor that apparently hit the Yucatan Peninsula sixty-five million years ago. The impact of that meteor likely raised so much particulate matter into the air that the sun’s rays were blocked, precipitating a deep ice age, killing the dinosaurs and 75 percent of all other species.

The eruption of volcanoes and the California wildfires could similarly act as a sunscreen and lead to cooling. Whether or not there could be such a detectable effect from these more limited catastrophes might actually turn on the color of ash that they float into the air. Brown ash would intensify the greenhouse effect and heat up the earth. But white ash would reflect the sun’s rays out and away from the earth and lead to cooling. Or not.

Quite a number of respected scientists in the 1950’s and 1960’s thought the pollution we were generating might veer us toward a dangerous cooling. In fact, if any kind of specter of disaster was being raised in those years, it was the specter of an ice age resulting from industrial pollution and, more pointedly, from the nuclear fallout that would result from failure of our Cold War negotiations. “Nuclear winter” was the alarm of that period. However, the scientists were then admittedly working with primitive computer simulations and they almost always conceded that things could go either way. Or not.

Then there’s the looming possibility of “geomagnetic reversal.” Every half-million years or so, our earth flips polarities, with the North Pole becoming the South Pole and vice versa. Or put another way, the positive end of our bar-magnet earth would become negative, and the negative would become positive. Many believe that the word “flip” carries a connotation of too much suddenness. The earth’s entire iron magnetic core doesn’t flip all at once. In the course of its molten fluxing, a section here will flip, then a section there, until finally the balance shifts and the poles can be decisively said to have reversed.

There’s a lot of evidence pointing to the fact that we might be near such a decisive reversal right now. Instruments that detect the strength of magnetic fields have found the earth’s field is clearly weakening, particularly in the Southern Hemisphere. This is likely already the cause of the increasingly frequent failure of satellite communications that has been noted especially in southern latitudes. A weak magnetic field allows the sun’s ionizing elements to penetrate our atmosphere and to wreak havoc. It’s not clear what effects geomagnetic reversal might have on our climate overall. It could greatly accelerate global warming. Or not.

There are a thousand other factors that could play into invalidating any predictions we might make about climate change. But the point of this essay is not to argue either for or against the reality of global warming. I was only using our climate as an example of how unpredictable any complex system of interacting parts is.

The larger point of this essay is first to issue a general reminder about the lessons taught by chaos theory about attempts to project into a presumed future. If we think we will ever be able to predict the weather, or political outcomes, or social trends, or life, or the fate of the universe, for any appreciable length of time – we should “fogedda aboud it,” to quote the Sopranos. The lessons of chaos theory and of Edward Lorenz’ serendipitous discovery should dissuade us from that kind of hubris. We have to remember the power of that Brazilian butterfly to thwart even our best laid plans and to contradict even our most careful predictions.

But then I wanted to go on to make an even larger point about the nature of reality that my re-reading of the account of Lorenz’ experiments suggested to me. This time, I stopped to consider the results of further extensions of Lorenz’ simulations. What if he had extended all his data points about humidity, barometric pressure, cloud cover, etc., etc., out to one-hundred decimal points for an initial computer run, and then increased the accuracy of his measurements to a hundred-and-one decimal points for a second run?

Chaos theory and logic tell us that once again, the two predictions would eventually diverge. Perhaps they would generally match for a longer time, although even that isn’t certain. But they would eventually diverge. Well, then what if Lorenz was able to achieve an accuracy in his measurements of a million and a million-and-one decimal points respectively? But the result would be the same. Significant divergence might be postponed for a longer period of time, but the two projections would still be destined to diverge. It would be the same if Lorenz registered his measurements to a trillion decimal points, a quadrillion, a quintillion… In order to get absolutely congruent results between the two computer runs, Lorenz would have had to carry out his measurements to an infinite number of decimal places.

But then to extrapolate a little further, in order to get a prediction to be congruent with what would really unfold in life farther ahead - a programmer would similarly have to make an infinite number of measurements, carried out to an infinite number of decimal places. The programmer would have to consider an infinite number of variables because everything affects everything else. That South American butterfly’s wing flapping, the leaking of your neighbor’s garden hose, the degree of perturbation of an asteroid in our Solar System’s Asteroid Belt (or any solar system’s asteroid belt), the splash created by a diving puffin off the Hebridean Island of Stornaway, the barking of a dog in the Melbourne suburb of  Yarra, a supernova explosion in the galaxy Messier 81 - and EVERYTHING – would all have to be quantified to the nth degree and fed as input to the computer.

However, the question of scale would have to be considered. All the above events come about because of the actions of individual atoms. So the real operatives that would have to be measured would be individual atoms and sub-atomic parts. The actual barking dog wouldn’t count, only the minute particles of chemical/electrical activity in its brain. You’d have to consider their starting point and the starting points of all the universe’s minute particles.

What’s more, this infinite number of measurements would all have to be made simultaneously and fed into the computer at the same split second. If you measured atomic events in the vicinity of the barking dog at 10:00 and then waited until 10:01 to measure the atomic events impinging on the Earth from Messier 81’s explosion – you would have already invalidated your results. That’s because the conditions that resulted in the first reading could very well have significantly affected the nature of that second thing you measured. Then while you had dilly-dallied recording that second set of numbers, the first causative agent would have changed, going on to radiate a completely different sort of influence out into the universe.

You’d be like the man with a clock in the bedroom and a clock in the kitchen, rushing back and forth between the two trying to use the time showing on one to set the time on the other. Let’s say the man heard a peal from the church tower and he immediately set his bedroom clock accordingly. Then he’d remember that setting and rush to the kitchen to set that clock to the same time. He’d calculate that it took him thirty seconds to rush from one end of his house to the other, so he’d allow for that when setting the kitchen clock. But when he got back into the bedroom, he might find he had overestimated how long the journey took him. He had set his kitchen clock to read 3:15:15, but the bedroom clock only reads 3:14:45. So if the man is a stickler for accuracy, he’ll feel bound to make another mad dash between rooms, and then another, etc. He might eventually enlist the aid of a friend. Standing in the bedroom, the man would yell out the time he’s setting his bedroom clock to and expect his friend, standing ready on the mark in the kitchen, to set the kitchen clock accordingly. But then they’d have to take into account the fact that sound waves take time to travel.

Well, you get the idea. There’s an old proverb that states “The man with one watch knows what time it is. The man with two watches never knows the time.”

Going deeper into the physics of the problem of taking a simultaneous measurement of all elements – you’d run into other problems. Your hired phalanx of universal measurers would immediately realize first-hand the truth of that part of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity that found the concept of simultaneity to be one of those relative things. Two events that look simultaneous to one man will appear to be separated in time to another man. It all depends on where the men are standing, and on how fast they are moving relative to each other.

But then also Heisenberg’s famous Uncertainty Principle would have to be considered. That principle says that you can never simultaneously know both the position and speed of an object. Some popularizers of this concept have explained it by saying the measurer himself will alter the position of an object in the act of measuring its speed, and vice versa. So no one can pinpoint both values simultaneously. The actual explanation of Heisenberg is a little more technically mathematical and has to do with the dual nature of everything as both particle and wave. However, it can be useful to think of the intrusive measurer as a metaphor for the impossibility of simultaneously knowing both the speed and the position of anything.

One summary of all this physics and logic is that it’s truly impossible to measure all relevant influences sufficiently to make detailed predictions very far into the future. Scientists and philosophers have long debated the issue, particularly from the Renaissance onward. Many were committed to the idea of a “clockwork” universe, one in which all the gears that they saw as making up the God-given universe would ratchet forward in predictable lockstep to a series of inevitable positions in the future. If you knew the positions of all the gears at the start, you could predict their positions at any given future time.

Most of the philosophers taking this view acknowledged the practical impossibility of knowing all the starting positions of the gears and calculating the successive movements they’d make from there. However, they believed that such knowledge of the universe was available in theory. It was only the limited reach of the human mind that would forever prevent us from such omniscience. But they believed the gears were grinding away to a preordained terminus.

However, I think the lesson of Lorenz and all the complications cited here lead to a more radically disabling conclusion. I believe they demonstrate not only that the future can’t be calculated – but that the future does NOT exist!

Despite Einstein’s and Hawking’s extrapolations into how “the future” might conceivably be reached by burrowing through wormholes and the like, there actually is no “there.” Something that would require a simultaneous measurement to an infinite number of decimal points of an infinite number of entities – is something that goes beyond being practically impossible. It’s something that is also theoretically impossible. The future is a fiction, a metaphor that derails clear thought.

For an episode of his “Genius” documentary series, Hawking divided his student explorers into two teams. One team stayed with a clock close to the ground, while the other team carried an initially synchronized clock up to the top of a high mountain. There was an ecstatic exclamation of having ventured “into the future” when it was found that, after a while, the ground team’s clock registered a miniscule lag behind the mountain clock, due to gravity’s effects. But calling that a glimpse into the future seems to be a misnomer. The somewhat more obscure, but more valid term of “time dilation” fits better. However, “time dilation” soon morphs in the public imagination into the possibility of literal access to a future place, given the right technology. Given a souped up DeLorean, the “future” becomes a definite, preexistent place you can visit.

It’s a sliding of meaning that even scientists themselves fall prey to and promote. Going in the other direction, it’s like saying that when you make your way down into the Grand Canyon on the less high-tech conveyance of a mule, you are going “into the past.” Well, yes, that’s true in a sort of metaphorical sense. You are witnessing the successive effects of past geological events as you pass the different layers of rock and sediment. But you are not literally going into a place where your great grandparents might be seen, wafting through in their top hats and crinoline skirts.

There’s another aspect of Heisenberg’s Principle and of quantum physics in general that might be considered to confirm this nihilistic view that there is no literal future. Quantum physics teaches us that the future actions of individual sub-atomic particles cannot be predicted. Like the manager of a lottery, a quantum physicist can only inform you of the odds. She can tell you your chances of winning, but she can’t tell if you or any other specific individual will in fact win. Quantum physics is about statistics. It can tell you on average how many atoms in a clump of Uranium-238 will emit an alpha particle, causing those atoms to decay into Thorium-234 each year. But it can’t tell which atoms will be responsible for that radioactivity.

Without meaning to anthropomorphize the atoms, it could be said that even the atoms themselves don’t seem to know the moment they’ll make the transition. There seems to be no discernible precedent for any individual atom’s radioactive expulsion. So it becomes evident that the non-existence of future states starts with the lack of definite starting points at the lowest levels of matter and energy.

When Lorenz’s repeat computer simulation showed that you’d simultaneously have to make an infinite number of measurements to an infinite number of decimal points – they not only showed the towering impossibility of making highly detailed, long-range predictions, they also showed that there is no preexisting state down the road that could be predicted. There is no room of the future lowering ahead of us, no altered arrangement of the furniture of reality that we might dimly glimpse through the haze of time. Just as some members of Columbus’ crew feared a void in the space they were sailing into, so there is truly a void when it comes to the future. There is no tangible certainty. There is only a vanishing into what is an imminent (and immanent) nothingness. The concrete reality of existence only comes into being each successive moment.

(In a future essay, I’ll examine the impossibility of there being a preexistent future from another angle – from the angle of the nature of time. Wait for it…)