Light over time as a variable for life

The everyday person likely sees ‘light’ as an issue of day verses night, or sunshine verses rain, or a hot sultry day versus that one day a year you want to skip work and run free in the alfalfa.

And while the topic may be abstract to most, one thing is for sure; alfalfa wouldn’t be on Earth without light. And this is why light is a paramount interest … because light is essential to our lives, and essential for how we do things, and how we live and communicate, and why we sleep nights and work days, and how we know it’s time to go home for dinner, and why moths flutter around the porch light after dark. Light directly impacts our daily lives, and the lives and behavior of everything on Earth.

When scientists look at light they consider its predictable and repetitive properties. For instance light (in the full electromagnet spectrum) is both wave and particle that travel at a universally constant speed which varies by the medium it is passing through. Light is used to carry information across the globe in fiber-optic cables and throughout the universe as light has brought news of our humble origin in the big bang. Light is also bent by gravity; and too when light strikes metal atoms it causes a transference of energy (heating) and an electric current. Light is used by plants to generate energy, and light striking the human skin produces vitamins in our bodies. These are known and scientifically measured properties, and of course nowhere near encompass the full scientific knowledge of light.

However there are observations about light, not normally mentioned as scientific proposals, which suggest a more diffused physics concerning light: and these observations are the basis of this chapter.

First on the list is the obvious role light has played in the emergence and perpetuation of life on Earth. This is not a known mathematical model nor a fully measured phenomenon, so the discussion could fly far afield since life exists away from the reach of sunlight both deep in the ocean and deep inside the Earth (although it’s true everything is touched by some wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum). But suffice to say that humans could not survive without the sunshine that powers both photosynthesis and cycles of rain, which in essence proves our lives have been caused, at least in contributing part, by light.

Light causes other unusual things: It’s been shown that some people become depressed, or deteriorate mentally without sustained exposure to sunlight. So how does the issue of mental cognition become a property of light?

And also, light plays an oblique role in certain cultural phenomenon such as people responding to ‘the flag’ or ‘images of Mary in the bark of a tree’ or ‘cartoons of Muhammad.’ Obviously these examples are fresh-fruit fodder for behaviorists, but in truth, no reaction would happen without light particles first striking certain rods and cones inside the human eye. Empirically (with slight tongue-in-cheek) we can test this hypothesis by exposing visually-impaired people to the same stimuli and measuring their response. If a similar rise in blood pressure does not occur when blind people are exposed to light waves bouncing off cultural icons, then we can conclude that light indeed plays a role in human behavior.

Human behavior carries on a fascinating relationship with the world as we respond to various external stimuli, and nowhere is that more obvious, yet offbeat, than how light from outer space affects us: Imagine for a moment if our atmosphere was permanently opaque like a cloudy day and obscured everything from space. We would experience day and night but the celestial objects outside the planet would not be visible: no distinguishable moon, sun, planets, stars, meteors, comets or galaxies.

Assuming these conditions were present even at the highest altitudes, how would man know to seek the stars and planets if their existence were unseen?  And how could man or woman devise tools to explore and measure planets they couldn’t see? And even if such tools were invented, how would anyone know where to point them since celestial objects pose such tiny moving targets?

However Earth’s atmosphere is clear. Celestial bodies are visible and man has taken behavioral actions to investigate the phenomenon of light arriving from space. And only because light arrives here from space have we taken specific action to explore what we see.
 
Light from space has caused man to wonder and imagine and make charts and telescopes and present symposiums and send radio waves and launch probes into space. Think abstractly for a moment: Light arriving from space has caused very peculiar reactions on our planet.

Additionally, our industrial lives generate measurable electrical & atomic radiation that would be non-existent if light stopped sustaining our lives. So we can conclude there must be some unusual and unknown properties of light to cause this wide variety of activity and wave/particle emission from our planet.

Let’s look at it a different way and imagine we are scientists on another planet looking at this spinning mud and nickel ball called Earth: imagine seeing odd and rare emissions of particles and radiation beyond mere reflected sunlight. Imagine seeing tiny metal probes leaving Earth and going to Mars and Jupiter, and being totally unaware that light played a role in causing them.

Of course it’s natural for our egocentric voice to say that ‘life’ and not light caused these emissions, but if you hold firm to this argument, does that mean every strange particle emission in the universe is due to some toehold of life interacting in some manner with its environment? We could argue cause-and-effect, but to the scientific mind, all variables have to be considered possible hypothesis, and clearly, light plays a role in causing unique and peculiar emissions from our planet.

Light is an abundant resource on Earth, and if history teaches anything, it’s that life capitalizes on abundances and those that find the best way to manipulate resources live best. Therefore its natural for living things to harvest the abundance and find ‘technologies’ that improve their ability to survive, such as eyesight and photosynthesis … and genetically improved crops and rockets to extend influence beyond the planet … and even hydroelectric power (which would be unavailable without sunlight to evaporate and move water overland where large-scale condensation creates rivers).

It’s amazing the number of ways light can be utilized and manipulated … and that’s just on our tiny planet, and due to the specific and unique characteristics here on Earth.

Since we know that gravity affects light (gravity bends light), then it’s possible that a planet like Mars, which has a different gravity and a different abundance of light, would also be home to totally unique chemical processes, and that light could be manipulated in different ways on Mars than on Earth. Given the endless array of planets and moons, and the inherent uniqueness of each, it becomes an important question for finding life: whether modes for manipulating light are equally unique for each body in space, especially since it’s demonstrable that light plays a key role in how life evolves and behaves here on Earth.

One interesting proposal I heard on a TV science program about exploring Mars suggested that future astronauts could possibly find water and life inside ‘caves’ on Mars. Finding a cave on Mars large enough to walk into would be a good trick, but the real issue is more complex. Here on Earth, caves are the product of organic interaction with ground water that produces the carbonic acid that dissolves the limestone which creates most underground caves. So if we actually found caves on Mars, would that implicitly mean organic processes took place, or would caves on Mars be due to entirely different chemical processes quite alien to our own planet? No matter what the answer, caves on Earth exist in part due to light.
 
I mean it’s getting stranger yet, but the discussion is about the unusual effects that light has on things, which means we are obliged to approach these questions using the scientific method. But this is where the problem begins: we may not be able to scientifically measure these proposals because the effects caused by light may actually be exposure to ‘light-over-time,’ and a good example of this is the relationship between certain skin cancers and long-term exposure to sunlight.

Scientists are investigating the link between skin cancer and exposure to light over time, but how light triggers this chemistry remains a mystery. And this is the problem with experiments about light: because the conditions require multiple exposures over time that are infinitely mixed with other variables and, correspondingly or not, don’t always lead to the same outcome. Not every pale-skinned person with freckles who works in the sun for 30 years will get melanoma, even though all will get wrinkled.

In short, scientists can accurately track results from highly probable events such as electron expulsion when light strikes a metal plate, but there is no experiment in place to measure the effect of the same action taking place over two hundred years … or a thousand years … or a million … or a billion … nor any way to calculate the infinite interrelationships that all other forces exert over this same period of time, for example interaction with variable gravity waves, or intermittent pulses of gamma rays … nor is there any way to separate the long-term results from incidental processes such as rust, which, by the way, is a component of water-condensation and therefore too, a dependency of light.

And this brings us to the most profound questions about light. What about the prolonged effect of certain wavelengths of light bombarding the spinning metal core of our planet? We know when light strikes metal atoms, it causes an electric current; so does this mean Earth is a type of capacitor that re-emits light energy from its dynamic metal core to make such things as petroleum? Does Earth re-emit light energy in a way that causes a slow-burning electrical storm across the surface of the planet that we interpret as life? Is it a coincidence that electrically charged carbon-base reactions happen on the surface of a spinning metal-core planet that has been intensely bathed by a stream of light for billions of years? Does this mean our lives are just the flicker of an electro-magnetic flame, thus implying that stars, like our sun, are actually teaming dynamos of living evolving things? And most interesting of all: If life were extinguished on our planet, would it re-emerge anyway because life is an inherent electro-chemical property of the planet?

How can we study these questions or any possible effect that light has over vast expanses of time?

Scientifically, the study of light-over-time becomes a natural paradox because light is a measure of ‘time,’ yet has properties that make ‘time’ a variable … which connotes a fundamental problem: that ordinary science cannot measure light-over-time simply because light is a measure of time … while also being a variable of mass and a variable of energy, which means we are immersed inside the very experiment we would propose to undertake, thus meaning quite simply, we ourselves are a variable in the outcome of any experiment.

This clearly demonstrates how mankind’s scientific perspective is limited by the brief snapshot allowed our short life-spans: How can a scientist experiment on probabilities posed by a physics that spans tens of thousands or millions of years when the sum of recorded history barely covers 6000 years?

Appendix: Using the human experience as our foremost example; the most enduring strategy for life is telling the next generation about the lessons and technologies that have been passed down through history. In other words, we re-tell our story so the next generation will remember how to grow potatoes and make hammers.

We can apply the importance of ‘story-telling’ also to light. Excluding meteorites and a smattering of collected rocks and particles of dust, all the information we have received from space has arrived here via the electromagnetic spectrum (light). We have used this bombardment of light from space to analyze the history of our universe and to calculate the unfathomable reasoning behind dark matter and black holes … but the entire story of our universe has arrived via light.

Conversely, a steady stream of reflected and radiated light leaves our planet each moment and carries with it the story of our lives. This means the lessons from our lives are preserved and re-told, and are being added to the ever-changing universe to make whatever contribution they might to the future of ‘what happens out there,’ and in doing so, it notches comfortably into human expectation: knowing that (because of light) our lives will endure.

Gene Haynes