Hi Karen, 

A really good way of thinking about stable units of complexity is a very readable and foundational article by Herb Simon called the Architecture of Complexity. 1962

Lucy

Karen, I think this is a very good way to think.

In Science Fiction, there was the 'terraforming' theme. But goldilocks pods, or buds, might be a way to begin.

First, though, we need to get through the really big energy transition ahead of us, in a way enabling us to export goldilocks seed pods. 

I personally think the Moon is a better place to start than Mars. But if we have a sufficiently large, vigorous, sustained ecumene on Earth, then we could try to design development kits. 

There would be a lot of discussion going into this step or stage. But designing for a bootstrapping, developmentally equipped system could make sense, it seems to me.

I suspect there would be a good deal of expensive trial and error. But if we got some successes going, then earthlife would have begun to bud. 

cjp

In Lucy's approach, or perspective, a given goldilocks condition might be considered the compositional effect of x... 'emergences', or external manifestations of the particular compositions creating each x.

The way to relate to this picture the Simon perspective -- which I also found to be foundational -- is that each unit which goes into a set of units, each x, has to be internally stable to allow the x's to have a set of interactions, or relations, which are discrete and high-probability enough to come into being and to sustain being. 

Thus are hierarchies built. In an hierarchy of dynamic units, the compositional rates of interaction within a base unit are high relative to the compositional interactions of between the units which make up the next level of correlation, or composition. 

Sorry if this seems a little mathematical, or logically rigid. But once you bend your mind to it the picture seems clearer, and indeed compelled. 

Have a MS in process which devotes a few short chapters to the process. 

Jack

Well, this is a nice approach, but the term 'goldilocks conditions' usually has been applied to conditions which allow replicating patterns of energy to arise and evolve -- like life on Earth. 

Restating or extending the term as you suggest leads to considering the process of correlation, more broadly and generally. That is, correlational processes lead to concentration of units and energy flows. In rare circumstances this leads to replications of energy flow patterns into life units, and in rarer cases leads to hierarchies of dynamic life units in an evolutionary process.

In the Universe as a whole, the process  we call cooling, which is attended by the expansion of "space" (the separation of the correlated units), allows for concentrations of atoms we call suns, and attendant smaller aggregations we call planets. And then we go through Drake's equation to life units and hierarchies thereof. 

One approach to this is set out in Chaisson's "Cosmic Evolution". In its own way, this is a beautiful piece of work, though it requires some interpolation to be restated in the approach you seem to be looking for.

In a manuscript now in the proof reading stage, I set out a somewhat more schematic treatment. Your conceptual investigation is in a way convergent with one I have been pursuing for some time. 

There is some earlier exploration of this area on my website Pearceblog.net in the "Order Theory" section.  But the MS in process is intended to synthesize all this in a connected fashion.  I hope the MS will be available in publication form soon,  so that we could perhaps review it and use it in  developing  your inquiry in a systematic way. 

Jack Pearce

OK, you point to a wider use of the 'goldlock's principle' than I had seen, or noted. So I traced through the wikipedia treatments of the use of this term, and 'big history' itself. (This last is somewhat repetitive, but the terminology keeps evolving, so that is fun in and of itself.)

My own versions of order building is parallel with much if not most of the conventional themes of big history, with particular reference to and use of Chaisson's work. His thinking certainly  underlies, or parallels, mine, and has for some decades. 

One way, it seems to me, of exploring the parallels is to think of order building as an hierarchical combinatorial process, which proceeds through phase transitions throughout an evolving universe in decentralized, nested (one evolution inside another), probabilistically realized,  stepwise way. Looked at this way, your question, or way of using the goldilocks term, is to ask where and how conditions arise for these stepwise phase transition evolutions of more-complex processes. 

Drake addressed this with his stepwise, probabilistic, formula for evolving life, of course. And Chaisson follows that same track. And of course, so do I, since I don't know another way for the universe to organize itself. 

So one way of proceeding is to try to follow a common theme of where and how another level of complex hierarchical ordering can evolve in a post-hoc, fact oriented way. Again, it seems to me, Drake is helpful, since he steps through suns, planets, planets with water, planets with liquids, solids and gases maintained in such phases over sufficient time to allow permuting of each basic phase and derivatives of the basic phases leading to the progressive entrainment of chemical processes which serve as the substrate of the life-level hierarchical developments. 

Now if one asks what is common to all such stepwise developments of ordered systems, it seems to me, recapitulating, that one can say that the common factor is simply correlation processes, proceeding through hierarchical levels of correlation of dynamic processes. But if one strips down the logic that far, one still needs to see the sorts of benchmarks used by Drake, Chaisson and the various wikipedia discussions (which I find much better crafted than many Wikipedia discussions).

I am not sure I have been helpful to you at all. You have been helpful to me in causing me to re-review current treatments of Big History itself. But thanks for pushing the dialogue, and it is nice to have this forum where conversational exchange at least potentially leads to some refinement in the various elaborations of the dialogues or narratives. 

cjp