Twenty-five hundred years ago, Heraclitus said, "The world bubbles forth." Here's bubbling. What is actual now enables what is next possible, the adjacent possible. The biosphere has been bubbling forth for four billion years, creating new possibilities in the universe in that bubbling. It's critical that physics cannot talk at all about bubbling new bubbles.
Life on Earth started four billion years ago. For the first 2.5 billion years were single-celled organisms co-evolving. Even by existing, organisms create new possibilities. If I'm a bacterium and you're a bacterium and I have a flat surface, I'm a possible highway you can walk over to get food. That's bubbling forth.
So 2.5 billion years after life started, six times multicell organisms emerged. A billion years after that, 3.5 billion years after life started, is the extraordinary Cambrian explosion. 540 million years ago, for 50 million years, there was just this burst of creativity, making all of the phyla that exist now. And now we have this guy. I'm scared of having him in bed, I really am. So I don't know what to call him. It's a vote afterwards. So here's a gentler guy and I'm in love with him. Look at his eyes looking at you, you know. "You're doing what?"
In order to talk about how the biosphere has been creative, I have to talk about the functions of parts of an organ. You all know your heart keeps you alive, but in particular, your heart pumps blood. It's not by making heart sounds. So this means something fundamental. The function of a part is that subset of its causal properties that sustain the whole. Your heart pumping blood and you. But doing that is jury-rigging, finding subsets of causal features of use.
Some years ago, my daughter dropped her purse in a shallow well. I took a wire coat hanger, slid it over a mop handle, and I fished out her purse. Anything can be used for more than one thing. For example, a screwdriver can be used to screw in a screw, but it's great for scraping putty off the wall. An engine block can have eight holes drilled and you make an engine out of it. It's actually a superb paperweight,
(Laughter)
and much research done only by scientists demonstrates that the corners are sharp and can crack open a coconut. I was very proud of that. So. But if you're using an engine block as a paperweight, can you deduce, oh, I can use this thing to crack open coconuts. You can't. It might be a banana peel.
But that means also something fundamental. Finding new uses for things, jury-rigging is not a computation. It's not a deduction. Jury-rigging is not a computation at all. Computers are. The biosphere is forever innovating in this kind of way that's not a deduction.
For example, there are things called Darwinian preadaptations. Dinosaurs had scales that were evolved for thermoregulation that were jury-rigged into flight feathers. Your eyes have clear crystallins that were perfectly normal-colored enzymes. And this, too, means something fundamental.
We cannot deduce what is in the adjacent possible that the evolving biosphere will create, then become. We do not even know what can happen. In fact, we can use no mathematics based on set theory, which is all of mathematics, to deduce what the biosphere is going to become, or the economy. This means we are at a fantastic third-phase transition in science, we're beyond Newton, we're beyond quantum mechanics. We're beyond the exquisite view that Copernicus had 480 years ago, that the world is a clockwork. The biosphere is not a clockwork. The paper that just published, it came out three days ago, and I'm pretty proud of it, it's actually worth reading.
(Laughter)
We can't deduce what is in the biosphere and will become, but we can make a mathematical theory of the statistics of the process. I call it the Theory of the Adjacent Possible or TAP. It's really based on one idea. Things can be combined to make new things.
So there is the equation. Mt is the number of things in the economy at some time now, say 10 things. So how many things will be in the economy in the next period? Well, if the 10 things work, we'll keep them, but we could actually try to jury-rig something new out of any single thing among the 10 or out of pair of things among the 10. The printing press is a recombination between movable type and a wine press or any three things or four things. Watch what happens to the number of things, pairs of things, when the number of things goes up. If there's 10 things, there's 45 pairs of things that we might fiddle with. If there's 100 things, there's 4,500 things we might jury-rig with. And if there's 1,000 things, there's a half a million things we might fiddle with.
Therefore, this process, the TAP process, has the property that for a long time the number of things increases very, very, very slowly, then something stunning happens. There's a hockey-stick explosion and the number of things reaches infinity in a finite time. There's a singularity and a brief burst explosion for 40 million years of the Cambrian explosion.
The same pattern is showing up in our own evolution. Australopithecus flourished -- I'd never know what flourishing means, I guess they had a good lunch -- in Africa, 3.3 million years ago. A million and a half years later, Homo erectus had about 20 crude stone tools. Watch how slowly things change. A mere 30,000 years ago, Cro-Magnon in the south of France had about 100 or 150 of these exquisite pressure flake tools. A mere 28,000 years after that is Mesopotamia with needles and chariots.
There’s something interesting about the fact -- of course, we invented writing, which is a wonderful story -- once you have a clay tablet, it calls forth the tool that's its complement. You need a stylus. So tools make niches for new tools and for new jobs. Scribes earned a living for quite a while. This is us in the late Middle Ages to now, and this is us now. We have billions of tools ranging from knitting needles to the space station. There's always an adjacent possible. Once you've made a bow, a crossbow is in the adjacent possible.
The pattern that we saw in the Cambrian, of a long period nothing happening and then a burst, is here right now. This is the size of human habitats in the last 300,000 years. The horizontal line is time before present, and the vertical line as the logarithm of sizes of settlements. Nothing happened for 290,000 years then it burst upward. Watch this, the same thing is true of GDP. GDP was flat since the time of Christ. In fact, for the last 100,000 years. GDP burst up in the last two centuries. It's going up vertically now. It's wonderful. We're lifting millions from poverty. And the theory explains it. It's the same delay and burst, and there it is. We start making more complex things, selling them, and we make a profit.
There's another feature of all of this that I've lived in my lifetime, I'm 83. I was born in 1939. Just like the Cambrian explosion, watch the number of things that have come into existence in my lifetime. We didn't have any helicopters, we didn't have television. I listened to “The Lone Ranger,” which maybe you know, on radio, six o'clock at night. We didn't have ... computers, we didn't have plastics, which are now all over the planet. We didn't have microwaves, we didn't have lasers. Look at the number of things that came into existence in one lifetime of 83 years. Not much happened 50,000 years ago in 83 years. So what's going on?
The TAP process has the following property. Every time you make something new, the waiting time for the next new thing is cut in half. A thousand years, 500 years, 250, a year, six months, three months, we're going to get a great acceleration. We are. So this is TAP. And watch that thing explode upward. That's it. That explosion is the Cambrian, and it's where we are now.
And the signatures of the Anthropocene are exploding upward, now all over the place. This ends 25 years ago. We need to find a better adjacent possible. We're rampaging over the planet, and the hope is in soils.
So I'm going to talk briefly about compost. There are very fine compost, this is now terribly important. A very good compost is the Johnson-Su compost. Less land use, fewer degradations of ... of our forests, fewer extinction events, fewer pandemics. Well, let's get rid of fertilizer. And the most important point I'm going to take is -- This is really bad news and good news.
Last year we emitted 40.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide. We have to find a way of solving it, and we can. We can take this Johnson-Su compost and get it out across the landscape. But more fundamentally, we can find good fungal bacterial communities and we can coat seeds with it and sell the seeds around the planet, or we can fill biochar and we can use biochar to get her across the planet. Most usefully, we can take a really good fungal bacterial community, put it into biochar or some other matrix, mix it into fertilizer, and get that fertilizer out across the planet. I'm going to just end with the following.
Fungal bacterial communities are precisely something that can create novel adjacent possibles, that can bubble forth with solutions to soil problems. The good news is we can do it now. The planet's on fire. We are of nature, ladies and gentlemen, we're not above nature.
Thank you.
(Applause)