1: Genesis
Creation is the emergence of standing waves in the whirlpool of the Universe as it explodes, constrained by cosmological constants, along a 100 trillion year arc to absolute rest or rebirth.
Life is a localized paradox of universal death, a mythical Ouroboros that oscillates the world, devouring and renewing itself, entraining matter at every temporal and physical scale simultaneously — the atom, the molecule, the cell, the organism, the colony, the ecosystem, the planet, the solar system, the galaxy — propelled by the inescapable laws of thermodynamics to dissipate chaos through order.
From this genesis emerges a purpose for life, a meaning, albeit one so abstracted and grandiose that it is hard to feel anything for it yet. As we trace the metabolic pathways that this quixotic purpose pursues through evolution and cultural history, a story about the meaning of life emerges.
“We sort the mail, build sand castles, solve jigsaw puzzles, separate wheat from chaff, rearrange chess pieces, collect stamps, alphabetize books, create symmetry, compose sonnets and sonatas, and put our rooms in order, and all this we do requires no great energy, as long as we can apply intelligence. We propagate structure (not just we humans but we who are alive). We disturb the tendency toward equilibrium. It would be absurd to attempt a thermodynamic accounting for such processes, but it is not absurd to say we are reducing entropy, piece by piece. Bit by bit. [] Not only do living things lessen the disorder in their environments; they are in themselves, their skeletons and their flesh, vesicles and membranes, shells and carapaces, leaves and blossoms, circulatory systems and metabolic pathways — miracles of pattern and structure. It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe.”
― James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, 2011
Living is thermodynamically more exhaustive than death. You conduct lightning by living, from the point of view of the Universe, not by dying. The candle wants to burn forever.
Life as we know it lives within a narrow band of environmental conditions anchored on each side by the freezing and boiling point of water and, from below, by the solubility and reactivity of earth compounds (especially with oxygen), and from above, by the bombardment of solar rays. We are far from equilibrium, living on the ‘edge of chaos’ — the edge where the swarm of low probability events drifts into pattern and structure.
Life dissipates chaos. Maximizing biodiversity is the same as filling as many metabolic pathways as possible for the longest time possible; that is why destroying the environment and other species is wasteful; we are setting planetary evolution back millions of years. Maximizing sustainable biodiversity is a more efficient way to explode.
More on this: Humanity contra Virus
