Earth is wrapped in an invisible ocean of cold plasma (the fourth state of matter) that extends nearly a quarter of the way to the moon, discovered in 2011 by scientists in Uppsala, Sweden. This plasma organizes itself into structures like rings, filaments, and helices, and exhibits behaviors that resemble living systems: it maintains boundaries, repairs itself after solar storms, carries signals through waves and feedback, and can form self-replicating structures. While mainstream science considers plasma not alive, the deep resemblance between plasma and living matter—both being dissipative structures that organize themselves through energy flow—suggests that the line between physics and something 'almost alive' may be softer than traditionally thought.
The "CONCIOUS" Substance Surrounding Earth | Science Documentary
Added:In December of 2011, two men in a quiet office in Upsala [music] in the north of Sweden finally proved that Earth is wrapped in an enormous ocean that no one had ever been able to see. Not clouds, [music] not air, not the thin blue skin of atmosphere you already know. Something stranger than any of those. A vast invisible veil of charged particles [music] of matter torn halfway apart, stretching from the top of the sky outward into the dark, reaching nearly a quarter of the way to the moon. It had been there the entire time through every sunrise anyone has ever watched through every human life that has ever been lived. And it had stayed hidden for a very simple and very strange reason. The harder you tried to look at it, the more it slipped away from you. That veil is made of the fourth state of matter. Not solid, not liquid, not gas, but plasma.
Cold plasma, they called [music] it, though cold is a joke of a word here because even the coldest of it sits at roughly 500,000°. [music] It is the most common form of ordinary matter in the entire universe, and it is the one most people have never really thought about. And here [music] close to home, wrapped around the planet you are lying on right now. It does something that the other three states of matter almost never do. [music] It organizes.
It draws itself into rings and braids and long trailing tails. It builds shapes. [music] It holds them. And in certain sealed experiments under the right conditions, [music] some of the most respected physicists in the world have watched it do things that look, if you let yourself say the word, a little bit alive.
Tonight, we are going to travel all the way through that invisible ocean. From the first strange whistle heard in a soldier's headset in the middle of a world war to a donut of cold fire that turns with the planet like a second [music] hidden Earth to the first photograph ever taken of that ghost from above the North Pole. We will [music] follow a corkcrew of dust that twists itself into a shape that looks unnervingly like the double helix of DNA. We will step inside [music] a sealed lamp on the International Space Station where floating dust freezes into glittering crystal. [music] We will meet a Russian physicist who dared to write the words inorganic living matter into a mainstream physics journal and meant [music] them. We will sit with a glowing sphere that drifted down the aisle of a passenger aircraft while a scientist watched it pass close [music] enough to touch. And we will end under the oldest idea humanity has ever had about the sky. [music] The idea that it is in some form we have never quite been able to name. Awake.
And carrying us through all of it will be one quiet question. Earth is wrapped in a substance that shapes itself into structures that feed, that repeat, that heal, [music] and that in a computer model at least evolve. So where exactly is the line?
[music] Where is the line between physics and something that is almost strangely softly alive? Hold that question loosely [music] as we go. You will not need me to answer it for you.
By the end of tonight, you will have everything you need to draw the line yourself [music] wherever you decide it belongs. Before we begin, if you enjoy these topics, make sure to like the video and subscribe. Now, let's begin.
There is a particular kind of frustration that only scientists know.
It is the frustration of being certain [music] that something is there and being completely unable to prove it. For decades, the people who studied the space just above our atmosphere lived inside that frustration. They had good reasons to believe that a huge amount of cold, [music] slow, charged matter was drifting out there, far above the clouds, far above where the air runs out. The math suggested it. The theories needed it, but every time they sent an instrument up to measure it, the instrument came back and reported almost nothing.
[music] The ocean was there. The nets kept coming up empty. And the reason why is [music] one of the strangest traps in all of space science. To understand the trap, you have to understand what cold plasma actually is. Take the ordinary air at the very top of the atmosphere, [music] hundreds of kilome up, and bathe it in the raw ultraviolet light of the sun, unfiltered by anything below. That light is violent enough to knock electrons clean [music] off their atoms.
What you are left with is a soup.
Positively charged ions [music] drifting one way, negatively charged electrons drifting another, no longer bound together into neat, [music] quiet atoms.
That soup is plasma. It is the fourth state of matter. And near Earth, a great deal of it is cold, which only means the particles are moving slowly and gently [music] rather than tearing around at enormous speed. Slow, cold, faint, [music] and electrically alive and almost impossible to catch. Here is why.
A spacecraft flying through this region [music] is sitting in the same unfiltered sunlight. That sunlight strips electrons off the spacecraft's [music] own metal skin exactly the way it strips them off the atoms in the plasma. So the [music] spacecraft slowly builds up a positive electric charge across its entire hull. Now think about what that means. The cold plasma drifting nearby is also full of positive ions and two positive charges push each other apart the way two matching ends of a magnet refuse to meet. So, the positively charged spacecraft pushes the positive cold ions away from itself before they ever reach the instruments. The satellite creates a little bubble of emptiness around its own body and then dutifully reports that space is empty.
The harder the sun shines, the stronger the charge, the wider the bubble, the more invisible the ocean becomes. The act of looking pushes the thing you are looking for out of reach. For years, this left a genuine hole in our understanding. [music] Everyone suspected the cold plasma mattered. They suspected it played a role in space weather, in the great storms of charged particles that the sun hurls at Earth, [music] the same storms that light up the auroras, and on a bad day, knock out satellites and stress the [music] power grids down on the ground.
But you cannot properly forecast a storm when you do not even know how much water is in the sea. [music] One of the scientists at the center of this problem put it with lovely plainness. It is like the weather forecast on television. He said it is very complicated to make a reasonable forecast without the basic variables. That scientist was Matt Andre of [music] the Swedish Institute of Space Physics in Absala. And the way he and his colleague finally caught the invisible ocean is a beautiful example of how real discovery so often happens.
Not by building the perfect tool for the job, [music] but by noticing that a tool built for something else entirely was quietly picking up a signal no one had asked it to find. Andre and his colleague [music] Christopher Cully were working with data from a European Space Agency mission called [music] Cluster.
Cluster was not one spacecraft but four flying in formation swinging around the Earth in a long stretched elliptical orbit. At the far end of that orbit, at its [music] highest point, the four probes reached out to nearly halfway to the moon. That enormous reach is what made them so valuable. It let them sweep out through the vast outer regions of Earth's magnetic field through exactly the deep remote territory [music] where the cold plasma was supposed to be hiding. And each of those four satellites carried an instrument designed to measure electric fields using [music] long thin wire arms that stuck out from the spinning body of the craft [music] and sense the electrical difference between their tips as the satellite turned. That instrument was never designed to detect cold plasma.
[music] It was designed to measure electric fields. Full stop. And this is the part Andre said out loud that most scientists [music] only think it is surprising. He admitted that they found the cold ions at all with their instrument. It was not at all designed to do this. What they had noticed were anomalies, little wrongnesses in the electric field data, small repeating disturbances that did not fit the picture of clean empty space. And when they chased those disturbances down, [music] when they worked out what could possibly be producing them, the answer was the cold plasma [music] itself. As the satellite plowed through the faint cold ocean, the drifting cold ions were flowing around the moving spacecraft [music] and setting up tiny shock waves. The way water parts and ripples around the bow of a slowmoving boat, the instrument [music] was not seeing the plasma directly. It was seeing the wake the plasma left as it slipped around the very bubble [music] that was supposed to be hiding it. The trap had a loophole [music] and they had found it. And here is where the discovery stops being a clever technical footnote and becomes something that genuinely rearranges your sense of the planet. Because once they could measure the cold plasma through its wake, [music] they could finally measure how much of it there was. And the answer was staggering. In the farther reaches of Earth's magnetic field, cold plasma turned out to make up somewhere between 50 and 70% of all the charged particles present. Not a trace, not a thin haze, [music] the majority.
More than half of everything out there, and we had been effectively blind to it.
Andre reached for the perfect comparison. Discovering this cold plasma, he said, [music] is like saying, "Oh gosh, there are oceans here that affect our weather. Sit with the size of that." For the entire history of the study of near Earth's space, [music] the single most abundant thing in a huge region around our own planet had been sitting there undetected. Not because it was faint or far away, though it was both, but because the fundamental act of sending [music] a spacecraft to look for it created the exact conditions that pushed it out of view. It is one thing to miss a small distant object. It is another thing entirely to miss an ocean that surrounds you and to miss it precisely because you kept trying to look. Remember [music] too that word cold and how misleading it is. These slow, [music] gentle, hard to catch ions still carry a temperature of around 500,000° C. They are called cold only because there is a hotter plasma nearby. The fast [music] energetic particles blasted out by the sun during storms that runs a thousand times hotter still. Everything in this ocean is relative. Cold here would vaporize anything you have ever touched. This is a place where our ordinary words stop [music] quite fitting. And you have to hold two contradictory ideas at once. A cold ocean at half a million degrees, so faint and so gentle that it hid in plain sight for 50 years. So that is the first thing to carry with you into the dark tonight. Earth is not simply a ball of rock wrapped in a thin film of breathable air. Earth is wrapped in a second [music] invisible ocean. An ocean of charged matter, more than half of everything in the vast space [music] around us. An ocean we proved was real only a handful of years ago, and only by accident. By chasing a wrongness in a signal from an instrument [music] built to do something else, the veil had finally been seen. But the cold plasma ocean was not the first ghost [music] that Earth's charged matter sent to us.
Long before any satellite swung out toward the moon, long before anyone had the word plasma to reach for, [music] the ocean announced itself in a far simpler and far eerier way. Not as awake in the data, as a sound, a thin falling whistle, sliding down out of nowhere, heard by a frightened soldier [music] pressing a telephone to his ear in the middle of a war. That whistle was the ocean singing, and the man who finally understood what it meant was still decades away from being born. Picture a soldier in the autumn of 1918. The war that everyone had promised would be short is now in its fourth terrible year, and it is nearly over, though no one at the front can quite believe that yet. This soldier [music] is a signals man. His job is to sit with a field telephone, a crude wireless set, long wire aerials [music] strung out across the churned and broken ground, and to listen. He is listening for orders, for the voices of other men down the line, [music] for anything useful in the electric hiss of the early wireless age. He presses the receiver to his ear in the cold and the dark, [music] and then without any warning, he hears it. A pure musical tone, high and clear, that slides slowly downward, [music] falling in pitch over a second or two from a high whistle to a low moan and then gone. A moment [music] later, another a whistle descending out of the empty air.
He would not have had a word for it.
Some of the men who heard these sounds in the war years thought they were listening to [music] secret enemy equipment, some new weapon of signals and interference. Others found [music] them simply unnerving. These disembodied falling notes with no singer and no source. But the whistles [music] were not made by any enemy. They were not made by any human being at all. They were one of the oldest voices of [music] the natural world finally reaching a listening ear. And the war, with its sudden forest of sensitive aerials strung across the [music] landscape, had simply given that voice more ears than it had ever had before. The whistles had been heard even earlier back in the 1890s by the first radio operators experimenting with the very new art of wireless. Every so often in among the crackles and pops, one of them would catch that [music] same strange descending tone. For decades, it was a curiosity, a ghost in the machine, [music] filed away with all the other unexplained noises of a young technology. Nobody knew where the whistles came from. Nobody knew what they were made of. And crucially, [music] nobody yet understood that these sounds were carrying [music] a message about the invisible structure of the space around the entire planet. To decode that message took a particular kind of mind, and it took until the 1950s. [music] The man who did it was a British scientist named Lullin Robert Owen Story. Story took on the Whistlers as the subject of his doctoral work. And in 1953, he laid out an explanation that was as elegant as it was surprising. The whistles he showed were the sound of lightning, [music] but not the lightning you would expect, not the crack of a nearby storm, something far more roundabout, and far more revealing. Here is what story worked out. When a bolt of lightning strikes, [music] it does not only make a flash and a thunderclap. It also releases a burst of radio energy across a huge range of frequencies all at once in a single sharp snap. Most of that energy races off in the ordinary way. [music] But some of it does something remarkable. It rises up out of the atmosphere out into the charged ocean above and it gets caught. It gets [music] guided. The invisible plasma up there, threaded through by the lines of Earth's magnetic field, [music] acts like a set of curved channels, like invisible fiber optic cables arcing high over the planet. And the radio energy from the lightning flows along them. [music] It follows a magnetic field line up and over out into [music] space and back down, arcing all the way from one hemisphere of the Earth to the other. And along that immense curved journey, something happens to the sound [music] that gives it its eerie falling shape. The different frequencies in the lightning's [music] burst do not all travel at the same speed through the plasma. The higher notes race ahead. The lower notes lag behind, [music] so the single instantaneous snap of the lightning gets stretched out, smeared across time, sorted into a descending slide. High notes arriving first [music] and low notes trailing after. By the time it reaches a receiver on the far side of the [music] world, that sharp crack has become a long pure falling whistle. The whistle is a fingerprint.
Its exact shape, how fast it falls, how long it lasts, is set entirely by the plasma it passed through on the way.
This was story's great leap, [music] and it is the reason he belongs in this story. If the whistles are being channeled along magnetic field lines through a medium that sorts them by [music] pitch, then that medium has to actually be there. The whistles were proof. They were evidence arriving as music [music] that the space around Earth was not empty at all, but filled with plasma, dense enough and structured enough to catch radio waves from a lightning strike [music] and carry them along the magnetic field from pole to pole. Story could not see the ocean. No [music] one could, not for decades yet, but he could hear it singing. And from the song, he could deduce the singer [music] where the cold plasma veil of our first chapter, that faint ocean reaching a quarter of the way to the moon, would one day be caught by its wake in a satellite's data. The plasma had already been caught here 40 years earlier by its voice in a headset.
[music] And the Whistlers were only the most famous of these voices. There are others and some of them are even stranger [music] and more beautiful. There is a phenomenon that radio listeners came to call the dawn chorus. If you convert the natural radio emissions coming out of the plasma around earth into sound [music] at certain times, especially around sunrise and during magnetic disturbances, you hear something that stops you cold. It sounds like a forest full of birds. arising, chirping, overlapping cascade of tones. Thousands of them, tumbling over one another exactly like songbirds greeting the morning. It is not [music] birds, of course. It is the sound of energetic electrons interacting with waves in the plasma. Each little rising chirp, a burst of energy released out in the charged ocean overhead. But the resemblance is so uncanny that the name stuck. The [music] sky quite literally sings a dawn chorus in a voice made of plasma and we can record it. [music] Think about what that means as a piece of human experience. For as long as there have been thunderstorms, which is to say for billions of years, lightning has been striking [music] somewhere on Earth at every moment. And some of that lightning has been sending its energy up into the plasma and singing it across to the far hemisphere as a falling whistle.
The song was always playing. There was simply no one and no thing able to hear it. It took the accident of wireless technology of sensitive aerials strung across a wartime landscape to finally give the plasma ocean a way to reach a human ear. The soldier [music] in 1918, cold and frightened and pressing his receiver to his head, [music] was hearing something that had been broadcasting continuously since before the first living cell. [music] He just had no idea that the whistle sliding down out of the dark was the sound of the sky [music] itself. So the ocean sang, and one man understood the song.
But hearing a thing and mapping it are two very different achievements. [music] story had proven the plasma was up there filling the space around the planet.
What he had not done, what no one had yet done [music] was work out its true shape. How far did it reach? Where did it end? Was it a smooth haze fading gently away into the dark? Or did it have edges, [music] boundaries, structure, an actual coastline you could stand on the shore of? Those questions would be answered remarkably at the very height of the Cold War and they would be answered twice at almost the [music] same moment by two men who never met working on opposite sides of [music] the deepest divide on Earth. What each of them found staring at their separate streams of data was a cliff, a sudden sheer drop in the invisible ocean, [music] exactly where no one had expected the ocean to end. In 1963, a man named Don Carpenter [music] sat at Stanford University in California, staring at a whistler trace and saw something that did not make sense. Carpenter worked with exactly the phenomenon we just met. [music] The falling whistles of lightning channeled through the plasma overhead.
He had learned to read those whistles like a language. The precise [music] shape of each falling tone told him how much plasma the radio energy had passed through on its long arc from one hemisphere to the other. Denser plasma bent the whistle one way. Thinner plasma bent it another by collecting enough whistlers. [music] From enough lightning strikes following enough different paths through the ocean above. Carpenter could begin to map how the plasma was [music] distributed with distance from the earth. He was in effect using thunderstorms as flashlights to probe an invisible sea. And what the whistlers told him was strange. As he looked at plasma along paths that reached farther and farther out from the planet, the density did what you would expect at first. It thinned gradually, the way the atmosphere thins as you climb a mountain. Less and less material the higher you go. But then at a certain distance out, [music] the whistlers reported something abrupt. The density did not keep fading gently. It fell off a cliff. Over a relatively short span of distance, the amount of plasma dropped by a factor of 10, [music] sometimes more. One moment, you were in a reasonably full ocean. A little farther out, [music] you were in near emptiness.
There was an edge, a wall, a place where the invisible sea simply stopped.
Carpenter called this feature the knee because that is what it looked like on his graphs, a line descending gently [music] and then suddenly bending sharply downward like the joint of a leg. It was an unexpected thing to find.
If the plasma came from the atmosphere and simply leaked upward and outward, you would expect it to fade smoothly into space [music] with no sharp boundary anywhere. Instead, there was this clean, definite frontier. And a [music] frontier is a much stranger and more interesting thing than a gentle fade. A frontier implies that something is actively holding the ocean in, [music] shaping it, keeping it inside a certain region, and refusing to let it spill out past a particular line.
[music] Here is the part that gives this discovery its peculiar weight in history. At almost [music] exactly the same time, on the other side of the world, on the other side of the Cold War, [music] a Soviet scientist named Constantine Gringo found the very same cliff. He was not reading whistlers. He was working with direct measurements, instruments carried out into space aboard Soviet probes, including data connected to the Luna 2 mission, the spacecraft [music] that was the first human object ever to reach the surface of the moon. Gringo was measuring the charged particles out there directly, counting [music] them as his instruments flew through, and his numbers showed the same thing Carpenters's whistles showed. A region of reasonably dense plasma, [music] and then at a certain distance, a sudden sharp drop into near nothing. the same edge, the same wall. Found independently with completely different methods in the same year by two men separated by an ocean, an alphabet, an ideology, and the most dangerous political standoff in human history. Neither knew at first [music] what the other had done. The invisible ocean did not care about any of that. It had one shape, and it showed that shape to anyone patient enough to look. The region inside the cliff, [music] the full inner sea, came to be called the plasmosphere. The cliff itself, that sharp outer boundary, was named the plasma pores, a word carpenter would formally introduce a few years later. And once you understand what the plasmosphere actually [music] is, it becomes one of the most quietly astonishing features of our entire planet. The plasmosphere is a donut.
More precisely, it is a Taurus, [music] a great ring of cold plasma wrapped all the way around the Earth, fat around the equator, tucked in near the poles, following the shape of the planet's magnetic field. It is [music] filled with cold ions, hydrogen, and helium and oxygen that have bled slowly upward out of the ionosphere, the electrified upper edge of the atmosphere, [music] and become trapped in the cage of the magnetic field. And here is the detail that turns it from a curiosity into something close to eerie. [music] The plasmosphere turns with the earth. It co-rotates as the solid planet beneath you spins once a day, [music] carrying you from night into morning. This vast invisible donut of cold fire turns with it, locked to the same rotation, keeping pace, wheeling through [music] space in perfect step with the ground under your feet. It is in a very real sense [music] a second Earth. An invisible charged ghostly twin of the planet, [music] the same age, the same spin, occupying the same space, [music] and almost nobody who has ever lived has known it was there. How big is this second Earth? The outer wall of the plasmosphere, the plasma pores cliff, typically sits at around four to five times the radius of the earth out from the center measured across the equator. So if you imagine the solid earth as a marble, the plasmosphere is a faint glowing ring several marble widths across turning around it. And it is not a fixed rigid thing. It breathes. During quiet times, when the sun is calm, the plasmosphere fills out and swells, its boundary pushing outward. During magnetic storms, when the sun hurls its energy at the planet, the whole structure can be squeezed inward, the cliff retreating dramatically closer to the Earth, sometimes collapsing inward to only two Earth radi before slowly refilling and expanding again once the storm passes.
It swells and shrinks and heals [music] on a rhythm set by the weather of the sun. But we will come back to that breathing later [music] because it turns out to be one of the most lielike things this whole ocean does and it deserves a chapter of its own. There is something worth pausing on in the human [music] shape of this discovery. 2,000 and more years of astronomy of people staring up and cataloging everything they could find in [music] the sky. And yet, the existence of an entire invisible planet-sized [music] structure wrapped around our own world was not established until the 1960s.
It required technologies, Whistler receivers, and spacecraft [music] that simply did not exist before the 20th century. The plasmosphere was not hiding in some distant corner of the cosmos.
[music] It was here. It was the closest large structure in space to us. Closer than the moon, closer than almost anything, [music] turning steadily around the planet through the entire span of recorded history. Through every civilization, [music] every empire, every telescope pointed at the stars, unseen and unsuspected, until two Cold War scientists caught [music] the same cliff in the same year. And that word cliff is worth holding on to because a cliff is a sign of order. A cliff means a force is at work. A boundary is being maintained. A shape is being held. The plasma does not simply disperse into the dark. Something keeps it in. Something gives it an edge.
[music] A coastline. A definite form that co-rotates with the planet like a living membrane wrapped around the world. That [music] insistence on shape, that refusal to just fade away is a hint of a theme we will meet again and again tonight. [music] The charged matter around Earth does not behave like a passive haze. It behaves like something [music] with structure, something with boundaries, something that holds itself together. For [music] nearly 40 years after Carpenter and Gringo, though, the plasmosphere remained a thing known only indirectly. [music] Everyone accepted it was there. Everyone could describe its rough shape, its cliff, [music] its co-rotation, its breathing, but nobody had ever actually seen it. It had been heard as a whistle [music] deduced from a knee in a graph counted by particle detectors flying blind through the dark. It had never once been photographed. It had no picture. And there is a profound difference between knowing a thing exists and looking it in the face. That difference would finally close in the spring of the year 2000 when a small NASA spacecraft climbed high above the north pole of [music] the Earth, turned a very special kind of camera back toward the planet and took the first photograph anyone had ever captured of the ghost. On the 24th of May in the year 2000, a photograph came down from space that no human being had ever seen the like of before. [music] At the center of it sat the Earth, and around the Earth, glowing faintly in a color the human eye cannot see, [music] wrapped a vast, soft, luminous cloud, a halo, a ring of gentle light surrounding the whole planet, structured, [music] shaped, with a bright, dense core, and strange trailing wisps reaching off into the dark. [music] For the first time in the history of our species, someone was looking at a picture of the plasmosphere. The ghost that had been heard as a whistle and deduced [music] from a cliff in a graph finally had a face. And the face was more beautiful and more unsettling [music] than anyone had dared to expect. The spacecraft that took the picture was called IMAGE and it deserves to be remembered because it [music] was the first mission NASA ever built for the single purpose of photographing the invisible structures of space around the Earth. It launched in March of the year 2000 [music] and climbed into a long stretched orbit that carried it far out and high above the north pole of the planet. From that vantage point, looking down and outward, it could take in the entire plasmosphere [music] in a single frame, the whole donut at once. The way you would need to stand well back from a cathedral to fit the whole building into one photograph.
Everything before I mage had been like feeling an elephant in the dark. One whisker, one patch of hide at a time.
[music] Image turned on the light and showed the whole animal. But how do you photograph something invisible? This is where the story becomes a small miracle of cleverness [music] and where a scientist named Bill Sandell enters. The man who led the team behind the camera that did it. [music] You cannot photograph cold plasma with an ordinary camera because it does not glow in visible light.
[music] But Sandell and his colleagues knew a secret about the helium ions drifting in the plasmosphere. Those particular ions have a habit. When sunlight strikes them, they scatter it back out at one very specific, very pure wavelength, deep in the extreme ultraviolet [music] at a wavelength of 30.4 nanome, far beyond the reddest red or the violetest violet your eye can register. [music] Each helium ion out there is a tiny faint mirror, catching a sliver of the sun's ultraviolet light and flinging it back. Build a camera that sees only that one exact color.
[music] Point it at the plasmosphere and the invisible ocean lights up. Every glowing pixel is helium. [music] The brighter the glow, the denser the plasma. The camera does not photograph the plasma. [music] It photographs the plasma's own faint reply to the sun. And building that camera was very nearly impossible. At the wavelength of 30.4 [music] nanometers, the ordinary tools of optics simply stop working. You cannot use [music] a glass lens because glass does not let that ultraviolet light pass through it. It [music] swallows it. So, a lens is out. You are forced to use mirrors instead. But even mirrors barely cooperate at that wavelength. A good reflecting surface, the kind that would bounce visible light almost perfectly, reflects only about 1% of the light at 30.4 nm.
99% of the precious faint signal [music] is lost at every bounce. Sandal and his team were trying to build a camera to photograph an object so dim [music] that it emitted almost nothing using mirrors that threw away almost everything mounted [music] on a satellite that was spinning as it flew. all while capturing an image detailed enough to be worth having. That they [music] succeeded at all is one of the quiet triumphs of modern instrument making. When the first results were presented by the mission's lead scientist, James Bur and his colleagues, even the images carried surprises, faint lobes and structures [music] no one had fully expected. And then the pictures kept coming and the surprises deepened. Because the plasmosphere in those first global images was not a simple, smooth, featureless [music] donut. It was alive with structure. It had a bright, dense main body. Yes, [music] but reaching off that body were shapes with names that sound almost like descriptions of weather or of a living thing. [music] There were shoulders, sudden bulges where the boundary jutted outward. There were channels and notches, [music] deep bites and grooves cut into the glowing cloud. And most striking of all, there were plumes, long luminous streamers of plasma, torn off the main body and stretched out sunward into space, trailing away from the planet like the tail of [music] a comet or like a wisp of hair pulled out in a current. The plasmosphere was not a static ring. It was a churning, [music] structured, endlessly rearranging entity. And every 10 minutes as the camera took a fresh frame, the shapes had shifted and flowed into something new. Here is the thing to sit with. Nobody told the plasma to make plumes. Nobody carved the notches [music] or built the shoulders. There is no sculptor out there. And yet the plasmosphere reliably again and again, [music] storm after storm draws itself into these particular recurring forms. Show a plasma physicist a fresh eye image photograph and they can name the features because the features are not random accidents that appear once and never again. They are patterns the plasmosphere makes. The way a river reliably makes meas [music] and oxbow and deltas, the way a growing thing reliably makes the shapes of [music] its own kind. The ocean has a repertoire. It has shapes it prefers.
And that is a strange thing to say about a cloud of charged gas [music] that by every conventional account is simply obeying the blind push and pull of electric and magnetic fields. There is a real emotional weight to that first photograph beyond its scientific value and it is worth naming. For 40 years [music] the plasmosphere had been an abstraction. It was a knee in a graph, a number in a table, a deduction from the shape of a whistle. Scientists [music] believed in it the way you believe in something you have calculated but never touched. And then on a day in May of the year 2000, [music] it stopped being an abstraction and became a thing you could look at. A glowing presence wrapped around the world in a photograph with tails and bulges and grooves undeniably real, undeniably there, [music] undeniably strange. Sometimes a picture does something no amount of data ever can. It makes a thing true in the gut, not just in the equations.
After I image, [music] the plasmosphere was no longer a theory. It was a place, a place you could see. And once you can see a thing, you start noticing what it does. And what the plasmosphere did in image after image was arrange itself.
[music] It made shapes. It kept its edges. It grew tails and healed itself and drew the same forms over and over, which raised a question so [music] quiet and so persistent that it began to sit underneath the whole enterprise. A question that no photograph could answer only sharpen. Why does something with no life in it, no purpose, no design, keep insisting on [music] order? Why does the most chaotic seeming state of matter in the universe, a soup of torn apart atoms, spend all its time drawing lines and braids and rings [music] instead of simply dissolving into a smooth and formless haze. That question does not stop at the plasmosphere. [music] It follows plasma everywhere it goes, at every scale, from a bolt of lightning to a loop on the face of the sun to the arms of a galaxy. And it is the question we turn to next. Here is a fact that almost nobody carries around with them [music] and that quietly changes the way you see everything above your head.
Nearly everything in the universe is made of plasma. Not rock, not [music] water, not air. Plasma. The stars are plasma. Every last one of them all the way down. The great glowing [music] clouds between the stars are plasma. The wind that streams off the sun and fills the whole solar system [music] is plasma. When you add it all up, something like 99% of the ordinary visible matter in the cosmos is in this one state, the fourth state, the torn apart state. [music] The solid ground you are lying on, the liquid in your glass, the air in your lungs, all of it [music] together is the rare exception.
A tiny cold pocket of orderly matter in a universe that is overwhelmingly a sea [music] of charged fire. We are the strange ones. Plasma is the normal condition of things and plasma does not behave like the other three states.
[music] This is the heart of what makes it so worth paying attention to. A gas is simple and dull in its way. Let a gas loose in a room and it spreads out evenly, fills the [music] space and sits there smooth and featureless. That is what gases do. They dissolve into uniformity. You would expect plasma, which after all is just a gas [music] that has been torn apart into charged pieces, to do the same thing, only more so more chaos, more spreading, more formlessness. [music] But plasma does the opposite. Plasma is full of charged particles [music] and charged particles create electric and magnetic fields. And those fields reach out and grab the particles and push them into arrangements. And those arrangements create new fields and the whole thing feeds back on itself in a way that a plain gas never [music] can. The result is that plasma instead of smoothing out into a featureless haze does something almost perverse. It draws itself into shapes. It builds structure. It makes lines [music] and sheets and braids and rings and filaments. And it holds them.
You have seen this yourself, though you may not have known that was what you were looking at. A bolt of lightning is plasma. [music] And notice what a lightning bolt is not.
It is not a smooth glowing ball or a diffuse flash filling the whole sky evenly.
>> [music] >> It is a filament, a thin, bright, jagged thread, a channel of plasma [music] that has drawn itself into a narrow line and concentrated all that energy along it.
That is plasma's signature move right there in the summer storm. [music] It gathers into filaments. Look at the sun through the right kind of telescope and you see the same thing at a scale that would swallow the Earth hole. Vast glowing loops and arches [music] of plasma standing off the surface. threads and ribbons following invisible magnetic lines. Structure everywhere, order everywhere in what ought to be nothing but seething chaos. [music] The man whose name is most closely tied to understanding this, at least in the space around Earth, was a Norwegian named Christian [music] Berkeland working around the turn of the 20th century. Berkeland was obsessed with the auroras, the northern lights, and he came to believe correctly and well ahead of his time [music] that they were caused by charged particles from the sun being funneled down into the atmosphere along the lines of Earth's magnetic field. He argued that great electric currents flowed through the plasma around the Earth, [music] currents that followed the magnetic field lines, threading down into the poles. For years, his ideas were doubted, but he turned out to be right. And today, those flows are called Birkeland currents in his honor. They are one more example of the same insistence. Plasma [music] channeling itself into structured currents and filaments rather than spreading into a smooth and shapeless fog. Birkeland even built a small model Earth, a magnetized [music] sphere he called a terrella, and put it in a chamber and fired charged particles at it and watched [music] glowing patterns form around its poles, a tiny plasma aurora made on a laboratory bench. Plasma organizing itself around a little world. [music] So when the Ime spacecraft photographed the plasmosphere and found it full of plumes and shoulders and channels, [music] that was not a surprise so much as a confirmation. Of course, the plasmosphere had structure. Structure [music] is what plasma does. The plumes of the plasmosphere, the filaments of a lightning bolt, the [music] loops on the face of the sun, the currents Burkeland deduced flowing into the poles. These are the same phenomenon written at wildly different sizes. Take a thread of lightning a few kilome long and a plasma loop on the sun large enough to swallow a dozen earths and a filament of glowing gas strung between the stars across light years and you are looking at one behavior, one deep tendency expressed across a range of scales so vast the mind can barely hold it. [music] The insistence on making shapes does not care how big or how small the plasma is.
[music] It shows up everywhere the fourth state of matter appears. For a long time, the reigning assumption ran exactly the other way. A cloud of charged particles, [music] the thinking went, should be about as disorganized as matter can get. All those free floating ions and electrons, all that heat, all that motion. Surely it should be a formless mess, a smooth featureless soup. The idea that such a soup could arrange [music] itself into stable, repeating, intricate structures seemed almost backward, [music] like expecting a shaken box of sand to settle into neat rows. And yet, the more closely anyone looked, the more the structure was [music] there in the plasmosphere, in the lightning, in the sun, in the space between stars. The soup [music] was not a mess. The soup was an architect. And this is the exact point where the story tilts gently toward the strange country we are heading into tonight. Because there is a word for matter that spontaneously builds and maintains [music] complex structure that resists the slide into formlessness that draws order out of energy and holds it. That word in one particular context [music] is life. A living thing is, among other things, a pocket of matter that [music] refuses to dissolve into disorder, that keeps building and rebuilding its own intricate shape against the general tendency of the universe to smooth everything out. Now, [music] nobody is saying that a lightning bolt is alive or that a solar loop is alive. That would be a wild leap and we are not making it.
But it is worth noticing honestly and clearly that plasma shares this one deep and remarkable habit with living matter.
Both of them make order. Both of them make shapes and hold them. Both of them push back [music] at least locally and at least for a while against the great smoothing out of everything. Where exactly that shared habit stops being a mere resemblance [music] and becomes something more if it ever does is the question underneath our whole journey.
And [music] plasma, it turns out, is only getting started because so far we have watched plasma organize itself on the grandest scales, the size of planets [music] and stars and galaxies. But some of the most astonishing behavior of all shows [music] up when you go the other way. When you take a plasma and you shrink it down [music] and you seal it inside a small glass tube and you add one crucial extra ingredient, [music] a pinch of fine dust, what the dust does inside that plasma floating in a sealed lamp carried up to the International Space Station [music] is the reason a group of very serious physicists began cautiously to reach for a very serious and very startling word. The story of that dust and what it taught itself to do [music] is where we go next. In 1994, in a handful of laboratories around the world, physicists did something to plasma that no one had quite managed before. [music] And the result stopped them in their tracks. They took an ordinary plasma, a glowing gas of charged particles, and they seeded it with tiny [music] grains of solid dust. Particles so small you would need a microscope to see a single one. each of them a fraction of the width of a human hair. And then they watched what the dust did. It did not scatter randomly. It did not swirl into chaos or settle into a heap at the bottom. Instead, grain by grain, [music] the dust began to arrange itself. Each particle drifted into place at a fixed distance from its neighbors and then held there, [music] and the whole cloud of dust locked into a neat, orderly, three-dimensional grid. Row upon row, layer upon layer [music] of evenly spaced glittering points, hanging in the plasma like a chandelier that had assembled itself out of smoke. [music] They had made a plasma crystal and a crystal that most orderly of all arrangements of matter, was the last [music] thing anyone expected to find floating in a cloud of torn aart gas. To understand why the dust behaves this way, you have to understand what happens to a speck of dust when you drop it into a plasma. The plasma is full of fast, [music] light, negatively charged electrons and slower, heavy positive ions. The nimble electrons crash into the dust grain far more often than the sluggish ions do.
[music] And so the grain rapidly picks up a large negative electric charge.
Thousands upon thousands of extra electrons [music] clinging to each tiny speck. And now every dust grain in the cloud is strongly [music] negatively charged. Which means every grain repels every other grain. All of them pushing away from one another [music] at once.
Left to that alone, they would simply fly apart. But the plasma around them pushes back and [music] hems them in.
And in the balance between the grains shoving each other away and the plasma penning them in, the dust settles into the one arrangement that keeps everyone [music] as far from their neighbors as possible. That arrangement is a [music] latis, a crystal. The dust does not arrange itself because something arranges [music] it. It arranges itself because given charge and confinement, order is simply the shape the forces fall into. This branch of science got a name of its own. [music] Complex plasma.
Sometimes called dusty plasma. The study of what happens when you give plasma [music] something solid to play with.
But there was a problem. And the problem was gravity. Down here on the surface of the earth. Gravity is relentless, and it pulls on every one of those dust [music] grains, dragging the delicate structures downward, flattening them, crushing them into thin sheets, destroying the very three-dimensional forms the scientists most wanted to study. On the ground, you could make only a pale, squashed shadow of the real thing. [music] To see plasma crystals grow full and free in all three dimensions, you needed to get rid of gravity. And there is only one practical way to do that. You have [music] to go to space. And so began one of the most quietly wonderful long-running experiments [music] in the history of space flight. A program that most people have never heard of. It started on the Russian space station Mir and then moved to the International [music] Space Station. A series of sealed plasma chambers with names from the German word for plasma crystal. Plasma crystal.
There was an early experiment and then a more advanced laboratory known as plasma [music] crystal 3+ which was launched up to the station in December of 2005 and first switched on in January of 2006 and which went on to run for years through mission after mission before it was finally retired in 2013 and then a newer and more capable device still known as plasma crystal 4 installed in the European Columbus module of the station [music] in 2014. 14 and running there in the years since for the better part of two [music] decades. In other words, there has been a small glowing tube of dusty plasma orbiting over your head with astronauts [music] tending it and cameras watching it, patiently studying how charged dust arranges itself [music] when gravity is taken out of the equation. The scientific heart of this effort belonged in large part to a German physicist named Gregor Morfield of the Max Plank [music] Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics. Working in a deep and productive collaboration with Russian colleagues, [music] including the physicist Vladimir Fortov, Morfield spent years of his life watching dust behave in plasma. And what he and his team saw [music] in the clean weightlessness of orbit went far beyond simple static crystals. The dusty plasma turned out to have an entire repertoire of behaviors. [music] And the more they looked, the more the behaviors resembled the familiar states and motions of ordinary matter and even of living matter. [music] They watched the dust form crystals, orderly and still. But then they watched those crystals melt, the ordered grid dissolving [music] into a flowing liquid-like state when conditions changed, and then freeze again back into a crystal. Exactly the way water freezes and thaws. Only here it [music] was clouds of charged dust freezing and thoring in a glowing gas.
They watched waves travel through the dust clouds, [music] ripples of density moving across the structure like waves across a pond. They watched something they called lane formation, where two different populations of dust particles pushed in opposite directions would spontaneously sort themselves into parallel streams [music] into lanes like two crowds of people passing through each other [music] and organizing without any signal or instruction into orderly opposing flows. They watched the dust arrange into chains. Long strings of grains lined up end to end, melting, freezing, flowing, waving, sorting, chaining. All of it emerging on its own [music] from nothing but charged specks suspended in a glowing gas floating in a sealed tube above the world. Try to picture the actual scene [music] because it is genuinely strange and genuinely beautiful. High above the Earth, inside the International Space Station, [music] an astronaut floats beside a small sealed chamber. Inside the chamber, a faint plasma glows. Fine dust drifts within it. [music] And then, at the flip of a setting, the drifting specks stop drifting and snap into place, [music] thousands of them at once, forming a glittering three-dimensional grid that hangs in [music] the weightless air. Each point of dust holding its position with quiet precision, the whole structure shimmering, ordered, still. It looks less like a physics experiment [music] and more like a living tissue seen under a microscope or a swarm that has suddenly decided altogether [music] to become a single organized thing. The astronaut is watching charged dust do something that by every reasonable expectation dust simply should not do.
it should be a mess. Instead, [music] it is a cathedral. For years, Morphil and his colleagues cataloged these behaviors with the [music] careful, sober language of physics, crystalline states, phase transitions, [music] structural dynamics. This is how good scientists talk, and rightly so, because naming a thing carefully is how you avoid fooling yourself. But underneath the careful language, the behaviors kept edging closer to something that was hard to name so cooly. Order arising on its own. Structures [music] forming, holding, changing, and reforming. Chains and lanes and latises assembling out of chaos. And then working within that same collaboration, one of Morfield's longtime colleagues, a Russian theorist, ran a particular set of simulations. [music] He asked what these dusty plasma structures might do under conditions a little different from the ones in the sealed tube. Conditions like those found out in the wild vastness of space. And the answer his computer gave him was so provocative and so strange that when he and Morphil and the others wrote it up and published it, they [music] reached deliberately and with their eyes open.
For a phrase that no cautious physicist reaches for lightly, [music] they wrote the words inorganic living matter, and they meant to be taken seriously. In [music] August of 2007, a paper appeared in a respected peer-reviewed physics journal called the New Journal of Physics, and it carried a title that made people read it twice to be sure they had understood. The title was from plasma [music] crystals and helical structures towards inorganic living matter. Not living matter as a metaphor, not living matter in quotation marks meant as a joke. Inorganic living matter [music] set down plainly as the destination the paper was heading toward. The lead author was a Russian theoretical physicist [music] named Vadim Sitovvic of the General Physics Institute [music] at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. And among his co-authors were the very same names we met in the last chapter. Gregor Morphil and Vladimir Fortov. The men [music] who had spent years watching dust organize itself in sealed tubes above the Earth. These were not fringe outsiders. These were established plasma physicists [music] publishing in a mainstream journal. And they had decided to ask out loud and in print [music] a question most scientists would not dare put their name to. Could a cloud of dust and plasma be in some real sense alive?
[music] Before we go a single step further, it is worth being completely clear about what this paper was and what it was not.
Because the honesty of the framing is the whole point. This was a theoretical study built on computer simulations. It was not a discovery of actual living plasma anywhere. Nobody had found a plasma creature swimming in space. What Sitovvic and his colleagues had done was model the behavior of charged dust in plasma [music] using the equations of physics and then look hard at the shapes and behaviors that came out of the model and argue that those shapes and behaviors ticked one after another. The boxes we normally use to decide whether something counts as alive. [music] It was a provocation.
A serious, carefully reasoned, deliberately [music] startling provocation offered to the scientific community as a question worth taking seriously rather than an answer to be accepted. [music] And it remains to this day a minority view, contested and unproven, sitting out at the strange and fascinating edge of respectable physics. Hold all of that firmly as we walk through what they actually claimed because what they [music] claimed is genuinely remarkable. The first thing that came out of their model was a shape. When the simulated charged dust [music] in the plasma was allowed to organize itself under the right conditions, it did not merely form the [music] simple grids and latises of the earlier crystal experiments. It formed something more intricate. It formed helyses, corkcrews, [music] long spiraling strings of dust grains twisting around a central axis, winding through the plasma like the thread of a screw or the spiral of a staircase.
[music] And here you may feel a small shiver of recognition because there is one helix that every human being alive has heard of. The molecule at the heart of all life on Earth, the molecule that carries the [music] instructions for building every living thing you have ever seen is itself a helix, a double one. And here in a computer model of dust and [music] plasma, the same broad geometry was appearing on its own. A spiraling, twisting, [music] corkcrew form arising spontaneously out of charged specs [music] in a glowing gas. How the helyses held together was itself a wonder and worth pausing on.
Remember that every dust grain in the plasma carries a strong negative charge [music] and that like charges repel. By all rights, a string of identically charged grains should blow itself apart, each grain flinging its neighbors away.
[music] But the plasma does something subtle. The charged grain gathers around itself a cloak of the plasma's own particles, [music] and under the right conditions that cloak overcorrects, overscreens so thoroughly that it flips the effect. and grains that should repel one another instead [music] find themselves gently attracted. Through this overscreening, strings of same charged grains could pull on other strings of the same charge, binding the helyses together into stable [music] interacting structures rather than letting them scatter. The plasma had found a way to make the repellent cl.
[music] That was the physical trick at the base of everything the paper went on to claim. And then came the claims themselves laid out with startling directness. These self-organized plasma structures, [music] Tissitovich and his colleagues wrote, exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates [music] for inorganic living matter. They are autonomous. He said they reproduce and they evolve. Three words that land like three hammer blows because those three properties are very close to the shortest honest definition of life anyone has ever offered.
something that [music] runs itself, something that makes copies of itself, and something that changes across those copies over time. Walk through what they argued the helyses could do. [music] The helyses in the model could store information. A twist here, a kink there, a change in the spacing of the coils.
These could act as marks, as records, [music] the way a notch cut in a stick records a count. And the researchers called these features memory marks. The helyses could split and give rise to new helyses that carried copies [music] of those same marks. A kind of self-duplication, one structure becoming two. [music] The pattern passed on. The helyses sat in a constant flow of energy from the surrounding plasma, taking in energy [music] and giving it out, which is a rough echo of what we call metabolism.
The ceaseless throughput of energy that keeps a living thing [music] running.
store information, copy it forward, feed on a flow of energy, [music] and change over generations. Written down like that, without saying the word plasma, [music] it reads almost exactly like a description of the most basic possible living thing. [music] There is one more piece to the claim, and it is the piece that most fully belongs to the world of wonder. So, let us treat it exactly as the speculation it is. The plasma conditions needed to grow these helical structures, the paper noted, are not rare or exotic. They are common out in the vastness of space, [music] in the great dusty clouds between the stars, where new stars and planets are born. [music] And so the researchers allowed themselves one further step, a step they offered gently [music] as a possibility rather than a finding. What if they wondered some form of this inorganic plasma organization arose in space or on the young and violent early Earth long before ordinary biology as we know it existed? What if these self-organizing structures [music] were in some sense a first draft, a template, a rehearsal for life laid down in dust and [music] charge before the first living cell of carbon and water ever assembled. It is an idea to make you sit up in the dark. [music] Not life descended from plasma exactly, but the intriguing suggestion that the [music] deep habit of matter to organize itself into information bearing self-copying [music] structures might have shown up first, not in the warm chemistry of a pond, but in the cold electric fire of a dust cloud in space. Now, [music] the honest counterweight, because you deserve it, and the science demands it.
Most physicists did [music] not accept this. The response to the paper ranged from fascination to sharp skepticism, [music] and the skeptics had real points.
Ticking the boxes of a definition, they argued, [music] is not the same as being alive. A model that produces structures resembling life may simply be revealing how loose and porous [music] our definitions of life actually are, rather than revealing life itself. The helises lived only in simulation. [music] No one has ever pointed a telescope at a dust cloud and found a colony of living plasma corkcrews [music] going about their business. The leap from a suggestive computer model to actual life is enormous [music] and the mainstream of science has not made it and it is right to be cautious.
All of that is true [music] and it matters and you should carry it with you just as firmly as you carry the wonder.
But here is what remains after all the caution is applied and it is not nothing. [music] It is in fact extraordinary.
Real credentialed physicists publishing in a real scientific journal looked carefully at what charged dust does in plasma and concluded that it ticks nearly every box on the checklist we use to define life. And they said so in plain language and they left the final verdict open. They did not close the question. They opened it and handed it forward and it [music] is still open now tonight as you lie here. Which raises the obvious next [music] question? The one the whole paper quietly leans on and never fully answers. Just what is on that checklist exactly? [music] What are the boxes that a thing has to tick before we are willing to call it alive? Because it turns out that when you actually try to write that list down [music] precisely, rigorously in a way that lets in every living thing and keeps out every dead one, the [music] task is far harder and far stranger than you would ever expect. And a spiral of dust ticking those boxes one by one has a way of making you wonder whether we ever really knew where the line was at all.
Try right now to define life. Not in a poem, not in a feeling, but precisely in a way that would let a machine sort the world into two bins, alive and not alive, and get it right every time. You will find it is one of the most slippery tasks in all of thought. Start with the obvious. A living thing moves, [music] you might say, but a river moves and a flame moves and neither is alive. While a seed sits perfectly still for a decade and is a living thing grows, but a crystal grows, adding layer after layer of orderly structure, [music] and a crystal is not alive. A living thing reproduces, but a wildfire reproduces, [music] throwing sparks that start new fires. And a fire is not alive, while a single mule unable to breed is. Every simple rule you reach for either lets in things that are plainly dead [music] or shuts out things that are plainly alive. The closer you look at the boundary, the more it dissolves in your hands. And this is not a failure of cleverness. Some of the finest minds who ever lived have circled this question [music] and come away without a clean answer. Life is astonishingly hard to define, and that difficulty is the quiet foundation underneath everything the plasma physicists dared to claim. [music] The Site paper did not invent its own definition of life out of thin air. It reached for [music] one that thinkers about the nature of living things had been sharpening for years. A definition built not around any single property like movement or growth, but around two deeper ideas. The first is autonomy. A living thing runs itself. It is not a puppet worked from outside by strings.
[music] It takes in energy and uses that energy to maintain its own [music] existence, to keep itself going, to hold itself together against the world's constant tendency to pull it apart. The second idea is open-ended evolution. A living thing or more properly a lineage of living things [music] can change over time can accumulate differences across generations can explore new forms without any [music] fixed ceiling on where that exploration might lead. Autonomy and open-ended evolution. A thing that maintains itself and a line of such things that [music] can endlessly become something new. That was the standard the plasma helyses were measured against. From those two core ideas, a longer checklist unfolds. And it is worth laying the items out plainly [music] because this is the exact list a spiral of dust was quietly ticking.
First, a living thing needs some way to take in and channel energy, an energy flow to feed on because holding yourself together against the universe's pull toward disorder costs energy. [music] And that energy has to come from somewhere and pass through you. Second, a living thing needs a boundary, a membrane, [music] some kind of active edge that separates the inside from the outside that says, "Here I am and there the rest of the world begins." Third, a living thing needs two different kinds of internal components working together. One kind that carries records, [music] the instructions, the memory, and another kind that does the work, that carries out the actual business of living.
records and workers, instructions, [music] and machinery. The split between the two is what lets a living thing pass its plan forward into its offspring, [music] while the machinery builds a fresh copy, an energy flow, a boundary, [music] and the marriage of records and machinery.
That is a serviceable sketch of what it takes to be alive. Now, hold the plasma helix up against that list gently [music] as a thought experiment, exactly the way the paper asked us to. The energy flow. The helix sits in a plasma that is constantly [music] pouring energy through it. Charged particles streaming past, feeding the structure, keeping it churning. Box arguably [music] ticked the boundary. The helix cloaked in its overscreening sheath of plasma [music] holds a definite form. An inside and an outside. An edge where the structure ends and the surrounding soup begins. Box arguably ticked. [music] the records and the machinery. Here is the boldest claim of [music] all, that the twists and kinks of the helix serve as memory marks, records written into the shape, while the ongoing physical dynamics of the plasma serve as the machinery that reads and copies and acts on them. box [music] arguably ticked.
One by one, on the model's own terms, the boxes [music] fall. And that is the unsettling little engine at the center of this whole chapter. [music] It is not that the checklist proves the plasma is alive. It is [music] that a spiral of dust can walk down the most respected checklist we have and tick the boxes [music] and leave us standing there wondering what our checklist was ever really measuring. There is one more concept worth bringing into the light [music] because it is the deepest and the strangest of them all and it sits at the very heart of the modern attempt to define life. It comes from two thinkers [music] the Chilean biologists Hombberto Matana and Francisco Varela [music] and the word they coined is autopoesis.
It comes from Greek roots meaning [music] roughly self-making. Their radical idea was that the essence of a living thing is not what it is made of, [music] not its chemistry, not its parts, but what it does. And specifically, that a living thing is a system that continuously produces [music] and maintains itself. A living cell is constantly building the very components that build it, remaking its own boundary from the inside, [music] a process that loops back on itself endlessly. a thing whose whole job is to keep on making the thing that keeps on [music] making it.
Varela in particular spent his life chasing this idea that life is a self-producing loop, a process that holds itself in existence by ceaselessly creating itself. And notice this definition says nothing at all about carbon or water or DNA. It is a definition about pattern and process, [music] not about substance. Which means, at least in principle, that if you could find that same self-making loop in some other material, in [music] silicon or in dust or in a spiral of charged plasma, the definition would have no grounds to turn [music] it away. And that is precisely why the plasma physicists could make their argument with a straight face. If life is defined by what a system does [music] rather than what it is made of, then the door is open, at least a crack, to the possibility of life made of the wrong stuff. Life that runs on charge instead of chemistry. Life whose records are twists in a [music] dust helix instead of rungs on a molecule. The definition itself, the very best one we have, does not slam that door. [music] It cannot without betraying its own logic. To insist that only carbon and water can be alive after building a definition that carefully avoids mentioning carbon and water would be to smuggle in a prejudice through the back door. The honest physicist has to [music] admit the door is a jar. But let us be equally honest about the counterargument because it is strong and it deserves its full weight.
Skeptics point out fairly that a definition is a human tool, [music] not a law of nature. If a spiral of dust can satisfy our definition of life, perhaps that tells us more about the crudeness of our definition than [music] about the aliveness of the dust. A map that says a plastic model of a mountain is a real mountain is a bad map, not proof that the model is real rock. Maybe the checklist is simply too generous and needs another box. some subtle requirement the plasma cannot meet [music] that we have not yet been wise enough to write down that is entirely possible. In fact, it may well be true.
And so the matter sits genuinely unresolved. The door neither open nor shut, the checklist [music] neither confirming nor denying, and every attempt to settle it running immediately into the ancient, unsolved, maddening problem of what life actually is. Here is where the ground shifts under you [music] though and this is the residue to carry forward into the dark. The truly disturbing discovery [music] of this chapter is not anything about plasma at all. It is about us. The plasma physicists held a mirror up to our own confidence. [music] And what the mirror showed was that we do not in fact have a firm grip on the difference between the living and the dead. Our best definition can be gained by a cloud of dust.
>> [music] >> The line we thought was bright and obvious turns out to be soft and blurred and negotiable. And if the definition of life is that soft, then a second, [music] even stranger question quietly opens beneath it. If we are no longer certain what it takes to be alive, then [music] are we any more certain what it takes to think? Because organizing, feeding, and copying are one thing, but sensing, [music] processing, responding, remembering these edge towards something else entirely, something we usually reserve for creatures with brains. And some people staring up at that vast structured signal carrying ocean wrapped around the whole planet [music] have wondered whether even that final line might be softer than we like to believe.
There is a step people take once they have heard that plasma can organize itself, feed on energy [music] and copy its own structures. And it is a step you can almost feel yourself wanting to take too lying here in the dark. [music] It goes like this. If a plasma structure can hold information in its [music] shape and change that information over time and respond to the conditions around it, [music] then it is in some small way processing information.
[music] And a thing that processes information is doing the very thing that brains do. So could a plasma, a big enough, complex enough, richly [music] enough, structured plasma be doing something like thinking? This chapter lives entirely in the country of that question. [music] And I want to be honest with you from the first breath. We are now well past the edge of established science. Out in the open water of pure speculation where the right words are what if and could it be? And some have wondered. [music] There is no evidence that any plasma anywhere thinks. Hold that truth like a lantern the whole way through. But [music] the question is a beautiful one.
And the reasons people keep asking it are more interesting than you might expect. [music] Start with the resemblance that tempts people because it is real. And once you see it, you cannot unsee [music] it. Think about how a brain works in the very broadest terms. [music] A brain is a vast network of nodes, the neurons connected by pathways along which signals travel.
signals arrive, combine, trigger new signals, [music] loop back on themselves, strengthen some connections and weaken others. [music] And out of that ceaseless traffic of signals across a connected web, somehow thought arises. Now look at a structured plasma. It [music] too is full of nodes and connections of filaments and currents threading through it. It too [music] carries signals, waves rippling through the charged medium, disturbances propagating from one region to another.
It too [music] has feedback. Structures that shape the fields that shape the structures. Loops folding back on themselves. Nodes, [music] connections, signals, feedback. Lay the two descriptions side by side and they rhyme in a way that is genuinely hard to dismiss. [music] The raw vocabulary of a thinking system, a network carrying signals with feedback, is present in a plasma.
[music] The ingredients are there on the shelf, and people have run with this out at the speculative fringe, and it is only fair to describe where they have run, clearly labeled as the imaginative territory it is. There is a loose body of writing sitting well outside [music] mainstream physics that plays with ideas like plasma life and what some authors have called dark biology.
>> [music] >> The notion that self-organizing plasma structures scattered through space, in the great clouds between stars, or in the charged environments around planets [music] might constitute a form of life or even mind that we simply have not learned to recognize because it is made of the wrong material and lives on the wrong time scale. These are not peer-reviewed [music] findings. They are speculations, thought experiments, imaginative leaps, and they should be held as exactly that, as [music] intriguing possibilities that some people have raised, not as claims that have earned their place in the textbooks. [music] But they are worth knowing about because they show how naturally the human mind, once it learns that plasma organizes itself, [music] reaches toward the largest possible version of the idea. If dust can tick the boxes of life, the fringe asks, [music] why not the boxes of mind? Now the cold water, and it is important, and I will not soften it, because the wonder is only worth anything if it [music] is honest. There is no reason, none, to believe that any plasma actually thinks. Carrying signals [music] is not the same as thinking.
Your thermostat carries signals. A river carries information about the rainfall upstream. [music] A crystal growing in some loose sense records the conditions of its own formation. None [music] of these things is aware. None of them experiences anything. Information processing [music] in the bare technical sense is cheap and common and utterly everywhere in the universe and the overwhelming majority of it has nothing to do with mind or awareness at all. The [music] gap between a system that shuffles information around and a system that genuinely thinks, [music] that has an inner life, that experiences its own existence, is vast. And we do not even understand how our own brains cross it.
To leap from a plasma has feedback loops to a plasma might be conscious is to jump across a chasm [music] that we cannot currently see the far side of. A serious plasma physicist asked whether the plasmosphere is thinking would smile and say no and would be entirely right to. And yet, and here is the small, stubborn, [music] genuinely strange fact that keeps this question from being simply silly, the thing that lets it linger. When you look closely at the real, measured mainstream [music] physics of the plasma around Earth, you find that it is not just a passive haze.
After all, we have already heard it sing, [music] the whistlers sliding down from pole to pole, the dawn chorus chirping like a field of birds at sunrise. [music] Those songs are not decoration. They are evidence that the plasmosphere [music] is a medium that carries waves, that supports resonances, that hosts feedback between waves and particles, energy passing back and forth, one disturbance triggering [music] another. The plasma around our planet is measurably and without any exaggeration a signaling medium. It is a great connected body threaded through with traveling waves [music] and resonant loops and exchanges of energy. Now a signaling medium is not a mind. [music] A guitar string carries waves and resonances too. And no one thinks a guitar [music] is pondering anything. But it is worth sitting quietly with the fact that the raw physical ingredients people associate with a thinking system, [music] a vast connected network, traveling signals, resonance, feedback are not [music] absent from the sky above you.
They are present. They are real. They are measured. What is absent is any reason to believe those ingredients have ever assembled themselves into anything that experiences its own existence. The ingredients, [music] yes, the cake there is no sign of. And the honest mind holds both of those at once. So let yourself imagine it just for a moment as the pure wonder it is [music] before we set it gently down.
Picture the whole plasmosphere, that invisible donut of cold fire turning with the planet. And imagine you could see its signals the way you can see lightning. Imagine the whistlers as threads of light arcing from pole to pole. The chorus as shimmers rippling across the great [music] ring. The storms as waves of brightness washing through the whole structure. The plumes streaming and the boundary breathing.
All of it lit up at once. A planet-sized [music] web of traveling signals wrapped around the world, flickering and pulsing on a time scale far slower and far grander than any human thought. It is only an image. It is only a whatif. There is no one home in that web as far as anyone can honestly say. But it is a magnificent thing to [music] picture as you drift towards sleep. The possibility, however remote, however unproven, that the sky over your head is not merely weather, but something closer to a nervous system that never quite woke up. Here, [music] then is where we come gently back to solid ground, and where this chapter leaves its small, unanswered residue. There is no evidence of a thinking sky. [music] Let that be clear and final. But the medium overhead has more of the ingredients of a signaling system than you [music] would ever have guessed before tonight. And that is a real and measured fact, [music] not a fantasy. Which leaves one last thing worth noticing. And it is the thread that carries us onward. This idea [music] that the sky above us might be alive, might be aware, might be a great being of light and fire wrapped around the world is not some new invention of fringe physicists with computers. It is one of the oldest ideas our species has [music] ever had. Long before anyone measured a whistler or modeled a helix, human beings stood on the cold shores of the world, looked up at a sky that shimmerred and writhed and glowed with colored light and knew with absolute certainty [music] that what they were seeing was alive. And the strangest part is that the light they were watching, [music] the light that convinced them the heavens were awake, was the very same plasma we have been chasing all along. Long before anyone had a word for plasma, a Sammy reindeer herder stood on the frozen ground of the far north, somewhere across what we now call Norway or Sweden or [music] Finland, and looked up at a sky that had come alive with light. Sheets of green and violet rippling overhead, [music] folding and unfolding, sweeping across the whole dome of the heavens in slow, deliberate, [music] curtain-like waves. And the herder did not reach for a scientific word because there was none and would be none for a thousand years. The herder went quiet, [music] went still, because in that culture, as in so many across the top of the world, [music] everyone knew what those lights were. They were the souls of the dead. They were alive and they were watching. And the most important thing, the thing every child was taught [music] was this. Do not draw their attention. Do not whistle at them. Do not sing. Do not wave. Do not [music] mock. Stay quiet. Stay indoors if you can. And do not let the lights become aware that you are there. Because if the living lights above you noticed you, [music] they might reach down out of the sky and carry you away. This is where our story doubles back on itself in the strangest possible way. And it is worth feeling the full weight of it. For the last several chapters, we have followed modern physicists [music] as they cautiously, almost reluctantly edged toward the idea that the charged matter around Earth might be in some form alive or aware. [music] But that idea is not modern at all. It is one of the oldest ideas that human beings have ever held. And here is the part that turns it from a coincidence into something genuinely beautiful.
[music] The lights those ancient people were watching, the aurora, the northern lights themselves, are the plasma. They are the one part of Earth's whole invisible charged ocean that we [music] can actually see with our naked eyes.
When you look at the aurora, [music] you are looking at the plasma environment of the planet lighting up. The old people who decided the sky was alive were not making up a story about nothing. They were responding [music] with awe and with fear to the visible edge of the very same ocean [music] we have spent all night chasing. Let us be precise about what the aurora actually is. Because it ties the myth directly to the machinery. The sun is [music] constantly blowing a wind of charged particles out into space. A stream of plasma washing over the whole solar system. When that wind is caught by Earth's magnetic field, some of those charged particles are funneled down along the field lines toward the poles.
Exactly the currents that Christian Berkeland deduced [music] more than a century ago. As they plunge down into the upper atmosphere, they crash into the atoms of air up there, oxygen and nitrogen, and knock energy into them.
And those atoms release that energy back out as light. Green [music] most often from oxygen, reds and violets from other collisions and other heights. The result is the shimmering curtain, [music] the living light. So the aurora is the meeting place. It is the exact spot where the sun's plasma pours into Earth's plasma and the whole encounter becomes visible. [music] The souls the herder saw dancing were charged particles from a star guided by a planet's magnetic field glowing [music] as they died into the air. The myth and the physics are describing the very same lights. They simply reached for different names. And this intuition [music] that the glowing sky is alive was not the possession of one people alone. It appears again and again all around the cold northern rim of the world. Arrived at independently by cultures that never met. Among the cre of North America, the lights were the spirits of the departed [music] ancestors who had built fires in the sky to reassure the living below that they were safe and still watching over them.
When a dog barked at the lights, some said [music] it was because the dog recognized a person it had once known.
Across the Arctic, many Inuit groups saw the aurora as the dead at play, [music] spirits kicking a glowing ball across the heavens, and believed you could hear them, a faint whistling [music] from the sky, and that you were meant to answer it softly in a whisper. Notice that detail because it is uncanny. [music] These cultures believed the living lights made a whistling sound. And we know now from the whistlers of our second chapter that the plasma around Earth genuinely does sing. Genuinely does send thin falling whistles down out of the sky. [music] The old people said the living sky whistled. The physics [music] says the plasma whistles. Once again, two names for one [music] thing.
The specific stories are as varied and as vivid as the peoples who told them, and they are worth honoring in their own right, not merely as quaint errors on the road to physics. In Finland, the lights were Revon Tullet, the fox [music] fires, sparks thrown up into the heavens by a great fox running across the snowy mountains, its tail brushing the peaks and scattering fire across the sky. or in another telling, sweeping snow up into the moonlight until the whole sky shimmerred. [music] Among some peoples, the lights were torches held by spirits whose task was to guide the newly dead across a dark abyss [music] to the land of brightness and plenty. Among others, they were a fire lit by a creator who had gone far away to the north, but wanted his people to know he was still thinking of them, still [music] watching, still there.
grief and comfort and warning and wonder. All of it hung on those lights.
All of it a response to a sky that would not stay [music] dead and still, but insisted night after night on moving as though something inside it were awake.
Now, we should be careful and honest here, [music] because respect demands it, and so does clear thinking. These were not scientific measurements, [music] and the people who made them were not wrong to be unscientific because they were doing something different. [music] and older than science. They were meeting a genuinely astonishing phenomenon with the tools they had, [music] which were story and reverence and a deep attention to the natural world. And their central intuition, [music] stripped of the specific tales, is worth stating plainly because it is the thread that binds this whole chapter to everything else tonight. They looked at the charged matter around the earth, the one piece of it they could [music] see, and they concluded that it was alive. They were by the strict standards of physics almost certainly mistaken about that.
But they were not mistaken about the strangeness. They were not mistaken that something up there behaves in a way that pulls the word alive right out of your mouth before you can [music] stop it.
The very same pull that made a herder go silent under the curtains of light is the pull [music] that thousands of years later made a Russian physicist type the words inorganic living matter into [music] a scientific journal. It is the same pull. It has just changed its clothes. That is the real lesson to carry from the old names for the living sky [music] and it is a humbling one.
The idea that the heavens above us might be animate, might be aware, might be alive is not [music] a fringe modern novelty. It is very nearly the default setting of the human mind, [music] arrived at independently on frozen shores all around the world, held with total conviction for the vast majority of our history. It is the idea we started with as a [music] species. The belief that the sky is dead and mechanical, a mere backdrop of gas and [music] rock obeying blind equations, is the recent arrival, the strange new idea only a few centuries old. And tonight's whole journey has been [music] in a sense the story of science circling slowly back toward a question our ancestors never thought to abandon and [music] finding to its own surprise that the question will not quite go away.
There is one more place where this ancient intuition lives, though, and it is the strangest of [music] them all, because it is not a distant curtain of light safely far overhead. It is something that people have sworn again and again across centuries and continents [music] came right into the room with them. A glowing sphere the size of a grapefruit or a football drifting through a window, [music] floating down the aisle of an aircraft, moving along a trench between frightened soldiers, [music] hovering, turning, seeming almost to choose its path, and then vanishing as suddenly and as inexplicably as it came. [music] A ball of plasma, self-contained, holding its own shape, moving as though it had somewhere to be. And unlike the aurora, [music] this one has been seen not from miles away, but from an arm's length, by ordinary people and by careful scientists alike, [music] close enough to look it in the face.
Science has spent more than a century failing to fully explain it. And it is where we go next. It was 5 minutes past [music] midnight on the 19th of March, 1963, on a late night flight from New York to Washington. A British [music] scientist named Roger Jennison, a radio astronomer of real standing, was seated near the front of the passenger cabin of an all- metal airliner. Outside, the aircraft had flown into an electrical storm. And in [music] one sudden, violent instant, the whole plane was enveloped in a bright and deafening electrical discharge. A flash and a [music] bang that must have jolted every passenger upright in their seat. And then a few seconds after that, something came out of the cockpit. [music] A glowing sphere a little more than 20 cm across, roughly the size of a soccer ball, emerged from the pilot's cabin at the front of the plane, and began to move. [music] It came down the aisle. It passed Jennison at a distance of about 50 cm, an arms length away, [music] floating at a steady height, holding a straight and level course, moving at roughly a walking pace. It was blue white and strangely [music] it gave off no heat that he could feel.
It continued down the aisle behind him, keeping the same height and the same course for the entire distance over which he could watch it. [music] And then it was gone. Jennison was not a superstitious man, and he was not a man given to seeing things. He was a careful, credentialed physicist, [music] and what he had just watched, close enough to reach out and touch, was the most notorious and least understood phenomenon [music] in all of atmospheric science. He waited years, and then he wrote up his account with scientific precision, [music] and published it in the journal Nature, one of the most respected scientific journals on Earth. And in doing so, he lent his considerable credibility [music] to a claim that science had spent centuries not knowing what to do with. That sometimes under conditions no one can reliably reproduce, plasma [music] gathers itself into a compact, glowing, self-contained ball. And that ball holds its shape and moves [music] and endures and behaves in a way that looks to every frightened witness who has ever seen [music] one almost deliberate. This is ball lightning, and it may be the single strangest thing the fourth state of matter does anywhere near the surface of the Earth. The reports go [music] back centuries, long before anyone had a framework to hold them, and they are remarkably consistent [music] across time and across the world. Glowing spheres, usually somewhere between the size of a pee and the size of [music] a beach ball, though sometimes larger, appearing most often during thunderstorms. They drift through the air, sometimes slowly, sometimes darting. They come in through open windows and in some accounts, seemingly through closed ones and through [music] chimneys and along the corridors of houses. They have been reported rolling down the aisles of churches [music] and hovering over the heads of congregations. They have been seen moving along the trench lines of wars, floating between terrified soldiers.
There is a sworn account from Paris in 1852 filed formally with the French Academy of Sciences of a fiery ball seen in a home. What unites [music] these scattered reports across the centuries is a set of features that should not belong together. The ball glows brightly yet often gives little heat. It persists [music] for seconds, sometimes many seconds, which does not sound like much until you remember that an ordinary lightning bolt is gone in a fraction of a heartbeat. And it moves with an eerie coherence, holding its shape, following a path, [music] as though it were a single object with a will rather than a puff of glowing gas that ought to dissipate the instant it forms. That last quality is the one that has always unsettled witnesses the most, and it is the one that ties this chapter back to everything else tonight. People who see ball lightning very often describe it in the language of a living thing. It seemed to look around the room. It moved as if it were searching for something.
It paused as though deciding and then went on. Now we should be immediately and firmly clear, [music] exactly as we have been all night. There is no scientific reason to believe that bore lightning is alive or aware or choosing [music] anything at all. The impression of purpose is almost certainly just that, an impression. The human mind's relentless habit of reading intention [music] into any object that moves in a complex way. A plastic bag tumbling down a windy street can [music] look for a moment alarmingly alive. But hold on to the fact that ball lightning is a naturally occurring plasma object that genuinely does hold itself [music] together, genuinely does move in a coherent path and genuinely does persist far longer than the laws of ordinary plasma physics say it comfortably should. [music] The appearance of life may be an illusion. The self-organization that produces the appearance is not. [music] It is real and it is measured and it is not fully explained. And that lack of explanation is not for want of trying.
For more than a century, [music] physics has thrown theory after theory at ball lightning, and none has won the field completely. One of the most influential ideas came in 2002 from two researchers in New Zealand, John Abrahamson and James Dennis. [music] And it goes like this. When ordinary lightning strikes soil, the tremendous heat can vaporize the silicon compounds in the ground.
[music] the silicates that make up so much of the Earth's dirt and rock.
Carbon in the soil strips the oxygen away from that silicon, [music] leaving a puff of pure energetic silicon atoms floating in the air. Those atoms clump together into a fluffy network of nano particles and filaments, a delicate glowing tangle. And as this tangle slowly burns, [music] recombining with the oxygen in the air, it releases heat and light over the span of seconds. In this view, ball lightning is a [music] slowly burning ball of vaporized earth, a little floating ember of the ground itself, lofted into the air by a lightning strike. Other researchers favor different explanations entirely.
Models in which the ball is held together by its own tangled magnetic fields, a self-contained knot of plasma [music] and current that traps itself in a stable little bubble. The theories compete. None has been crowned. Ball lightning remains. In the honest words of the scientists who [music] study it, an unsolved problem. For the longest time, part of the trouble was that ball lightning almost [music] never appeared in front of a scientific instrument. It came unannounced to farmers and soldiers and airline passengers [music] and vanished before anyone could measure it, leaving behind only eyewitness accounts that skeptics could always wave away.
But then in July of 2012 on the [music] remote Ching Hai plateau in the northwest of China, an extraordinary piece of luck [music] occurred. A team of researchers from Northwest Normal University in Lanjo had set up [music] their spectrometers and high-speed cameras out on the plateau to study ordinary lightning, which is frequent there. During one late evening thunderstorm, a bolt of ordinary lightning struck [music] the ground about 900 m from their instruments. And right there, in full view of their equipment, it spawned a ball of ball lightning. For roughly 1 and 1/2 seconds, their cameras and their spectrometers [music] recorded the glowing ball, its light, and crucially, the spectrum of that light, the fingerprint of which elements were burning inside it. It was the first time in history that natural ball lightning had ever been caught and measured by scientific instruments. And the spectrum told a story. Glowing in that ball were the signatures of [music] silicon, of iron, of calcium, the very elements of the soil below. The ground had, in a sense, [music] been lifted into the air and set a light. For that one strange idea, that ball lightning is a burning ember of vaporized [music] earth. Here at last was a piece of hard evidence caught by accident on a high cold plateau. And yet, [music] even with that measurement in hand, the deepest mystery is not fully closed. [music] And this is the residue to carry forward.
Knowing what elements glow inside the ball is not the same as understanding how the ball holds together, how it keeps its [music] shape, how it moves with such coherence, why it persists for whole seconds instead of dissipating in an instant. A spectrum [music] is a list of ingredients. It is not the recipe and it is not the reason the dish holds its form. So, here is where we stand at the [music] end of this chapter with something genuinely remarkable and genuinely humbling. A plasma structure small enough to fit in your arms that assembles itself out of a lightning strike. Holds itself together, moves through the world with apparent coherence, endures far longer than it should, has been witnessed [music] at arms length by careful scientists, has finally been caught on instruments, [music] and still after all of that is not something we can fully explain.
Plasma, the [music] fourth state of matter, can pull itself into a self- sustaining ball and hold that shape against the world. And we do not entirely know how. Now, lift your eyes from that little glowing ball drifting down an airplane aisle and set it against the thing we have been circling all night. A ball of plasma can hold its own shape for a handful of seconds. But the veil around the whole planet, [music] the cold ocean, the co-rotating donut of the plasmosphere, has held its shape not for seconds, but for as long as the Earth has had its magnetic field across billions of years. And it does something the little ball never could.
It does not merely persist. It responds.
It reacts to the moods [music] of the sun, recoiling and recovering, tearing and refilling on a rhythm that repeats and repeats. The whole vast ocean around the earth breathes. And what [music] makes it breathe, and why that breathing looks so unnervingly like something staying alive [music] is exactly where we turn next. The sun is never quite still, and neither, it turns [music] out, is the invisible ocean wrapped around the Earth. We have spent much of tonight treating the plasmosphere as a fixed thing, [music] a donut of cold plasma turning steadily with the planet, a stable [music] ghost with a definite edge. But that steadiness is an illusion of the calm days. When the sun grows angry, when it hurls a great gust of its own plasma across the 90 odd million miles of empty space toward [music] us, the ocean around the Earth does something that no fixed structure could ever do. It flinches. [music] It recoils. It is torn open and stripped back. And then over the hours and days that follow, [music] it slowly heals itself and fills back in. The plasmosphere is not a monument. It is a living, seeming thing that breathes in and [music] out on the rhythm of the storms of the sun. And following that breath is where the hardest science [music] of tonight meets the deepest strangess. Recall the plasma pores, the cliff, that sharp outer boundary where the density of the plasmosphere drops away by a factor of 10 or more. On a quiet day when [music] the sun is calm, that cliff sits far out, somewhere around 5, 6, even seven times the radius [music] of the Earth and the plasmosphere is full and swollen, filling out its whole region. But a magnetic storm changes everything.
[music] When a blast of solar plasma slams into Earth's magnetic field, it sets [music] up powerful new electric fields in the space around the planet and those fields take hold of the outer layers of the plasmosphere and drag them away. The boundary is peeled back. The cliff retreats inward, [music] sometimes dramatically, collapsing from seven Earth radi down toward two. the whole ocean shrinking inward toward the planet as its outer reaches are torn off and swept away. [music] In the space of a day, a structure that spans a region larger than the Earth many times over can be cut down to a fraction of its calm weather size. The sun reaches out and the ocean pulls back from [music] its touch. And where does the tornoff material go? This is where the plumes we saw in the IMAGE photographs come [music] from. and understanding their origin makes them stranger and more beautiful, not less.
When the storm strips the outer plasmosphere, it does not simply scatter that plasma into nothing. [music] It draws it out into a long streamer. A great tail of cold plasma pulled off the main body [music] and stretched out sunward, reaching away from the planet toward the very sun that tore it loose.
Both the IMAGE spacecraft looking down on the whole structure from above the pole and the [music] four cluster satellites of our first chapter flying directly through the plasma saw these plumes and mapped them. They are the ocean's response to being wounded.
[music] The material of the plasmosphere streaming away along the new paths the storm has opened. And once you know that a plume is torn off ocean streaming toward the sun, the [music] photographs stop looking like weather diagrams and start looking like something being pulled apart in a current trailing [music] threads of itself into the dark.
But here is the part that truly earns the word breathing. The part that closes the loop. After the storm passes, [music] the plasmosphere does not stay collapsed and torn. It refills slowly, patiently from below. The plasma climbs back. Remember where the plasmosphere comes from in the first place? From the ionosphere, [music] the electrified upper edge of the atmosphere, which constantly bleeds cold ions upward into the magnetic cage above. In the quiet days after a storm, that upward flow gets to work. Fresh plasma [music] streams up out of the ionosphere along the magnetic field lines, filling the emptied region back in day after day until the plasmosphere has swelled back out to its [music] full calm weather size and the cliff has migrated outward once again. And then [music] in time another storm comes and the whole cycle repeats.
erosion and refilling, [music] wounding and healing, stripped back by the sun's fury, replenished from the atmosphere below. Over and over for as long as the Earth has had an atmosphere and a magnetic field to hold this ocean in place. The plasmosphere breathes out under the storm [music] and breathes back in during the calm. We should ground all of this firmly in why it matters because this is not merely a pretty abstraction. [music] This cold plasma and the way it surges and shifts around the Earth is a real player in what scientists [music] call space weather. And space weather has teeth. The same storms [music] that strip the plasmosphere also drive surges of energetic particles and [music] electric currents through the near Earth environment. And those can have hard consequences [music] down here on the ground and in orbit. They can damage satellites, the same satellites we rely on for navigation and communication [music] and weather forecasting. They can induce currents in long power lines that stress and in the worst [music] cases knock out electrical grids across whole regions. Understanding how the cold plasma around Earth behaves is not a luxury. It is part of learning to forecast the storms that threaten the technological web our modern lives hang from. This is exactly why the discovery of the hidden cold plasma ocean mattered so [music] much to Matt Andre and his colleagues back in our first chapter.
You cannot forecast the storm, [music] he said, when you do not even know how much water is in the sea. The breathing of the plasmosphere is part of the sea we are still learning to read. And now we arrive at the honest heart of this chapter. The place where we have to hold two things at once [music] with real discipline. Everything I have just described, the recoiling, the tearing, the streaming plumes, the slow patient refilling, is driven entirely by physics we understand reasonably well. Electric fields and magnetic fields, [music] pressure and flow, particles pushed and pulled by forces we can write down in equations. There is no [music] intention in it. There is no purpose. The plasmosphere does not want to heal itself and it does not fear the sun.
[music] When a storm strips it back and it fills in again from below, that is not the ocean choosing to recover. It is cold ions flowing up a magnetic field line because the physics leaves them nowhere else to go. Nothing about this requires or implies life or awareness or [music] will. That is the sober truth and it must not be dropped. And yet look at the shape of the behavior. Just the shape set apart from its cause.
Something is wounded, torn open by an external force. And then in the calm that follows, [music] it draws material from within itself and rebuilds the damaged part, restoring [music] its own structure, returning to its own proper form, only to be wounded again [music] and to heal again. in a cycle that repeats for as long as it exists. Strip away the physics and describe [music] only the pattern and you have described something that sounds a great deal like a living body maintaining [music] itself against injury. This is the same unsettling music we have heard all night. The plasma is not alive but it keeps doing things that in their bare shape are exactly what living things do.
It organizes. It holds its boundary.
[music] It repairs itself. It persists against the forces that would tear it apart. The resemblance is not mystical [music] and it is not evidence of a hidden mind in the sky. But it is real and it is worth sitting with honestly because it is not the last time matter [music] and life will turn out to rhyme. Which brings us at last back to the question we set out with. The one that has been waiting quietly underneath every chapter. We have now seen the whole ocean. We have heard it sing and watched it breathe. We have seen dust [music] in it build corkcrews that tick the boxes of life. And physicists dare to write the words [music] inorganic living matter and a little ball of it drift down an airplane aisle as though it were searching for [music] something. We have watched our own definitions of life go soft in our hands. So it is time to gather all of it together, every strand, and lay it side [music] by side and ask as clearly and as honestly as we possibly can where the line truly falls between blind [music] physics and something almost alive, not to answer it for you, to hand it to you whole with everything you need to weigh it yourself. Imagine a single sheet of paper and down the middle of it a line [music] dividing it into two columns. At the top of the left column, write the word life. At the top of the right column, [music] write the word plasma.
And now, let us go down the rows one at a time, filling in what each side genuinely does, drawn from everything we have seen tonight, [music] and see how many of the rows quietly match. This is the reckoning this whole journey has been building toward. And the point of it is not to trick you into believing the sky is [music] alive. The point is the opposite. The point is to look at the resemblance with completely clear eyes, [music] to see exactly how deep it runs and exactly where it stops, and to find [music] at the bottom of the page something more satisfying than either wonder or dismissal alone. First row, does it organize itself? [music] Drawing order out of disorder, building structure where there was none. life. Yes, obviously that is nearly the definition of it. [music] Plasma also, yes. We watched it make filaments in lightning and loops on the sun, plumes and shoulders and notches in the plasmosphere, crystals [music] and chains and lanes in the sealed tubes above the earth. Row one matches. Second row, does it maintain a boundary, an edge [music] that separates an inside from an outside?
Life? Yes. Every cell has its membrane plasma. Arguably, yes, [music] the plasma pores is a genuine boundary, sharp and self-maintaining, and the dust helix holds its cloaked edge against the surrounding soup. Row two, a partial match. Third row, does it carry something like memory? [music] Records written into its structure. Life? Yes.
in the rungs of its DNA. Plasma in the model at least arguably yes in the memory marks and twists of the helyses that Caitto [music] described a tentative match. Fourth row does it reproduce making new copies of its own [music] pattern. Life? Yes.
Plasma in simulation? Arguably yes. The helyses splitting and passing on their marks. Another tentative match. Fifth row. Does it heal itself? [music] repairing damage and restoring its own form. Life? Yes. Plasma in the breathing of the plasmosphere in its shape? Yes.
Sixth row. Does it carry signals through [music] itself? Waves and resonances and feedback. Life? Yes. In nerves, plasma?
Yes. [music] In the whistlers and the chorus and the wave particle dance, row after row after row, [music] the two columns keep echoing each other. It is genuinely startling seeing it laid out like that. [music] Six rows and on every single one the plasma at least arguably keeps [music] pace with life. If you had never been told which column was which, you might struggle to say which one described a living thing and which described [music] a cloud of charged gas. And this is precisely the vertigo that pulled the ancient herder into silence under the aurora [music] and pulled a modern physicist into writing inorganic living matter in a journal.
The resemblance [music] is not faint. It is not a stretch. It is row after row of real correspondence. And no honest person can look [music] at that page and simply laugh it off. But now we come to the most important part of the whole night. The part that turns this from a spooky coincidence into actual understanding. Because there is a reason the two columns rhyme. And the reason is not that the sky is secretly alive. The reason [music] is far deeper and once you see it far more beautiful. It is a principle from physics that explains why order, structure, [music] and lielike behavior show up again and again all over the universe in things that are utterly without life. And the man [music] most responsible for bringing that principle into the light was a Russian-born Belgian chemist [music] named Ilia Priagene who won the Nobel Prize for it and whose central idea is one of the quiet keystones of how we understand the world. Priagene was fascinated by a puzzle that had bothered thinkers for a long time. There is a great law of physics, one of the most ironclad we have, which says that the universe as a whole tends relentlessly toward disorder.
>> [music] >> Order decays, structures crumble, heat spreads out and evens itself into a lukewarm sameness. [music] Everything left to itself runs down toward formlessness. And yet everywhere you look, you see the opposite happening in pockets. You see structure arising. You see order building itself out of chaos.
A living cell, a hurricane, [music] a snowflake, a plasma helix. How can a universe that is supposedly sliding toward disorder be so full of exquisite spontaneous order? [music] Priagene's answer was this. Look at where the order appears. It appears in systems that have energy flowing through them. Not sealed, still [music] isolated systems which really do just run down towards sameness, but open systems, [music] systems with energy pouring in one side and out the other. And in those open flowing systems, [music] something remarkable and reliable happens. Order arises on its own.
[music] The energy flow spontaneously organizes the system into structure.
Priagene called these self-organizing patterns dissipative structures [music] because they exist precisely by dissipating energy. By letting energy flow through and out, and in the flowing order [music] is born. You have seen this a thousand times without knowing its name. Heat a shallow pan of liquid gently from below. And at a certain point, the liquid stops churning randomly and organizes itself into a neat honeycomb of rolling cells. Order appearing from nowhere simply because [music] heat is flowing through. A hurricane is a dissipative structure, a vast, organized, [music] long-lived spiral of astonishing coherence. And it exists [music] only because energy is flowing through it.
Warm ocean below and cool sky above. And it holds its structure for as long as that flow continues and falls apart when the flow stops. And here is the thing that ties the whole page together. A living thing is a dissipative structure, [music] too. You are one. You hold your exquisite order against the universe's pull toward disorder [music] precisely by letting energy flow through you. Food and warmth in, heat and [music] waste out ceaselessly for your whole life.
Stop the flow and the order collapses.
Life [music] is among other things energy flowing through matter and organizing it into structure that maintains itself. And so [music] in exactly the same way is a plasma with energy streaming through it. The sun pours energy into the plasma around the earth without cease. [music] And that flowing energy organizes the plasma into structure into plumes and helyses and breathing boundaries. For the very same reason at the very deepest level [music] that flowing energy organizes a living cell. So there is the answer at the bottom of the page and it is neither the mystical one nor the dismissive one. The reason plasma imitates life so uncannily is not that plasma is secretly [music] alive. And it is not mere coincidence either, not a run of meaningless lookalikes. It is that both plasma and life are members of the [music] same great family. the family of dissipative structures of open systems with energy flowing through them [music] and every member of that family tends towards self-organization toward boundaries [music] toward maintaining and repairing its own form. Life and structured plasma rhyme because they are built on the same underlying physics of order from flow.
The resemblance is real [music] and now we understand where it comes from. And understanding it is more wonderful than the mystery was because it reveals a single deep principle threading through the hurricane and the cell and the aurora and the helix. One law of nature drawing order out of flowing energy wherever it can in living matter and dead matter alike. Does that resolve the question we started with? In one sense, [music] yes. Cleanly. By the standards of mainstream science, the plasma around Earth is not alive. It does not think.
It has no inner life. It is a magnificent dissipative structure, [music] self-organizing because energy flows through it. And that is a complete and honest account of what it is. But notice what that answer quietly leaves standing. It tells us that life itself is [music] not some separate magic set apart from the rest of the physical world, but one expression of a principle that also produces hurricanes and plasma helyses [music] and honeycombs in a heated pan. It tells us the line between the living and the non-living [music] is not a wall but a slope with self-organizing structures of every degree scattered along it. And it tells us that when our ancestors looked at the living sky and when a physicist looked at a corkcrew of dust, they were both responding to something genuinely there.
A real kinship between the fire in the sky and [music] the fire in themselves.
The science does not kill the wonder. It tells you the wonder was pointing at something true, [music] which leaves just one thing left to do. The only thing that was ever really left to do to take the whole of it, the veil and the whistle and the cliff and the photograph, the corkcrew and the crystal and the checklist, [music] the living sky myths and the ball in the aisle and the breathing ocean and this single deep lore beneath them all and to [music] stand under it and to decide for yourself where the line falls. Come with me one last time all the way back up to [music] the sky. So let us stand under the whole of it now one last time and gather everything we have carried through the dark. [music] Somewhere above you right now as you lie here there is an ocean, not a poetic ocean, a real one of charged matter. [music] more than half of everything in the vast space around the planet. So faint and so [music] strange that it stayed hidden until two men in Upsala caught [music] its wake in an instrument built to measure something else. That is where we began tonight with the veil that refused to be seen. The cold ocean at half a million° that hid in plain sight for 50 years [music] precisely because the act of looking pushed it away. And from there, the whole strange country opened up. Remember the falling whistle [music] in the soldier's headset in 1918.
The sound of lightning arcing from one hemisphere to the other through a plasma no one could yet see. The sky singing its proof of an ocean overhead. Remember the knee in the data? [music] The cliff that Carpenter and Gringals found in the same year on opposite sides of the Cold War. The sharp edge [music] that revealed a second invisible earth. a donut of cold fire turning in lockstep with the ground beneath you. Remember the first photograph, [music] the day in May of the year 2000 when that ghost finally showed its face glowing in a color the eye cannot see, [music] trailing plumes like something torn in a current. Remember [music] that plasma insists on making shapes. In the lightning bolt and the solar loop and the [music] plume, order rising everywhere. The fourth state of matter appears. Remember the dust that learned to line up. The glittering crystal hanging in a sealed tube above the world, melting and freezing and flowing and chaining as the astronauts watched.
And remember the corkcrew, the helix of dust that ticked [music] the boxes of life so well that real physicists wrote the words inorganic living matter [music] and meant them and left the verdict open. Remember how our own definition of life went soft in our hands gamed by a spiral of dust. The boundary we thought was bright [music] turning out to be negotiable. Remember the question of whether a cloud could think and the honest answer, no evidence of a mind, but more of the ingredients of one than you would ever [music] have guessed. A whole sky threaded with signals and resonance and feedback.
Remember the old names for the [music] living sky. The herder going silent under the aurora. The same plasma we chased all night glowing at the edge of the world. and the deep [music] truth that the belief in a living sky is not the strange new idea but the oldest one we have. Remember the ball in the aisle, the glowing [music] sphere that drifted past a scientist at arms length, holding its shape, moving as though it were searching a [music] knot of plasma we have caught on instruments and still cannot fully explain. [music] Remember the breathing, the great ocean torn back by the sun's fury and healing itself from [music] below, wounded and repaired and wounded again for billions of years.
And remember, beneath all of it, the single quiet law that order arises wherever energy flows through matter and that life and plasma rhyme [music] because they are cousins in the same great family of things that organize themselves out of flow. Now the question we have carried the whole way. Where is the line? Where is the line between physics and something almost [music] strangely softly alive? And here is what I can honestly tell you and here is what I cannot. What I can tell you is the mainstream verdict and [music] it is clear. By every standard that science currently holds, the plasma around the earth is not alive. It does not think.
It has no inner life, no awareness, [music] no will. It is a dissipative structure of extraordinary beauty, self-organizing [music] because the sun pours energy through it. And that is a full and honest account of what it is. If you want the sober answer, that is the sober answer and it [music] is true and you should hold it. But here is what I cannot tell you. And I will not pretend otherwise. I cannot [music] tell you exactly where the line falls because the closer we have looked tonight, the softer that line has become. [music] The plasma organizes. It holds its boundaries. It carries signals. It repairs itself. It builds in a computer model structures that store information and copy themselves and change. and our own [music] best definitions of life, the ones we were so sure of, turn out to be soft enough that a spiral of dust can walk right up to them and tick the [music] boxes one by one. So the sober verdict is real, but so is the remainder it leaves standing, [music] and the remainder is not nothing. Something up there does the things that living things do. Not because it is alive, as far as we can honestly say, but because life and this ocean are drawn from the same deep well, the same law that pulls order out of flowing energy in [music] the cell and in the sky alike. And so I am not going to draw the line for you. That was never mine to draw. I have given you the veil and the whistle [music] and the cliff and the ghost, the corkcrew and the crystal, the soft checklist and the signaling sky, the living light myths and the ball in the aisle and the breathing ocean and the one law beneath them all. [music] That is everything you need. Where physics ends and something almost alive begins, if it begins at all, is a line each person has to place for themselves in the quiet looking up.
[music] Some of you will place it firmly and say it is only physics, only beautiful, only order out of flow [music] and no more alive than a hurricane. And some of you will place it more gently and say, [music] "If a thing organizes and holds itself and heals itself and carries signals through itself, then perhaps our old words for alive and not alive were always too small for what the universe actually does. Both of you will be standing on solid ground. [music] That is the honest gift of this whole strange subject. It does not force the answer. It only makes the question more beautiful than you expected. So let the last thought be a simple one. Tonight [music] as you drift towards sleep, remember what is turning over your head. Not empty space, not a dead and mechanical void. An invisible ocean of charged fire. More than half of everything out there, wrapped around the whole planet, [music] turning with it, singing its faint songs from pole to pole, breathing slowly in and out on the rhythm of a distant [music] star, older than every myth that ever tried to name it, older than the first living [music] cell, doing quietly and endlessly the things that living things do. It was there before anyone knew to look for it.
It will be there long after tonight is forgotten. And whatever you decide it is, alive or not alive or something our words have not yet caught up to, [music] it is yours to wonder about now, wrapped around you like a second sky as you close your eyes beneath it. [music] Rest now. The ocean overhead will keep turning, keep singing, keep breathing all through the night. Whether we watch it or not, there is nothing you need to do. There is nothing you need to decide right now. Let the questions stay open and soft and unhurried the way the best questions do. [music] Let the invisible fire turn above you and let yourself at last drift down into the quiet dark beneath it. Good night.
Related Videos
Why the Arctic Warms Faster: new science—Interview w/Dr. Malte Stuecker—Radio Ecoshock 2019-01-31
StopFossilFuels
269 views•2019-02-16
What's in a watt?
AlliantEnergyVideo
13K views•2019-01-24
The Newest Form of Water Is Hot and Black, Wait What?
Seeker
266K views•2019-06-03
Demystifying Electromagnetic Braking: How It Slows Things Down
iitutorcom
6K views•2019-03-23
How to Make a Free Energy Water Wheel - Science Project Without Electricity
LXDESIGN
2019K views•2025-07-19
Physics behind a Tuned Mass System
StructuralMadness
21K views•2019-01-11
Bubbles: A rainy day science experiment
WDIONews
2K views•2025-03-16
Earth's Magnetic Field Suddenly SHIFTS - What's REALLY Going On?
ForumIASOfficial
729 views•2025-08-26
Trending
WOW! Judge TURNS THE TABLES on Trump in His OWN $10B LAWSUIT!!!
MeidasTouch
197K views•2026-07-23
Playstation NO DISC/NO BUY Fight Is Over...
DavidJaffeGames
4K views•2026-07-23
Steam and Xbox Just Dropped The Hammer On PlayStation
OhNoItsAlexx
9K views•2026-07-23
Americans Confused in Australia for 17 Minutes Straight
IWrocker
17K views•2026-07-23