Humanity Contra Virus

I was watching The Matrix and pondering the scene where Agent Smith compares humanity to a virus.

Like all life, viruses ‘sip negentropy’ (Schrodinger’s phrase in What Is Life?) to create, preserve, and reproduce themselves, doing the entropic two-step of maximizing entropy globally by generating order and waste locally under the energizing rays of the sun while gravity generates heat in the planetary core.

But viruses trash the ecosystem that hosts them, which is net bad for sustaining the complex web of regenerative dissipation that is Nature as a whole, and humanity in particular.

Unlike a virus (contra Agent Smith in the Matrix), it’s humanity’s creative freedom at transcending entropic singularities (for example, in the simplest case, we run out of food) at ever greater scales of group normalization / identity / organization that makes us a special phenomenon on Earth.

As a species we now extract more calories per second from nature than anything else living (from 100W to 11,000W, from 2,000 kcal to 2 million kcal per person per day since the taming of fire hundreds of thousands of years ago — equivalent to going from a bicycle to a blue whale per person), enough to engulf the planet in flames if it were released as raw chemical and physical energy all at once. But we do it inside a nested metabolic chain of dissipative structures that includes organism, society, culture, and technology that has fractal properties of scale and time that dwarf the entropy production of a single explosion, thus satisfying the great ouroboric 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.

The great heroism encoded in our species is that we can learn to do it regeneratively at ever larger scales of inclusion both physical and symbolic, to burn ever brighter on Earth and beyond, continuously averting that figurative fireball’s becoming, like the virus’ fever, a real one. For that is the meaning of life.