Stumbled across an article around why life originated, and why it continues...
What is more relevant, the scientists note, is the fact that the physical tendency to diminish energy differences makes no distinction between systems that are inanimate or animate. As the researchers explain, the order and complexity that characterize modern biological systems have no value in and of themselves, but structure and hierarchical organization emerged and developed because they provided paths for increasing energy flows.
The scientists give several examples of mechanisms associated with life that increase entropy. For instance, when systems (e.g. molecules) become entities of larger systems (e.g. cells) that participate in larger ranges of interactions to consume more free energy, entropy increases. Genetic code might have served as another primordial mechanism, acting as a catalyst that could increase energy flow toward greater entropy. Today, complex organisms have cellular metabolism, which is another mechanism that increases entropy, as it disperses energy throughout the organism and into the environment. The food chain in an ecosystem is another example of a mechanism for transferring energy on a larger scale.
In this sense, life is a very natural thing, which emerged simply to satisfy basic physical laws. Our “purpose,” so to speak, is to redistribute energy on the Earth, which is in between a huge potential energy difference caused by the hot Sun and cold space. Organisms evolve via natural selection, but at the most basic level, natural selection is driven by the same thermodynamic principle: increasing entropy and decreasing energy differences. The natural processes from which life emerged, then, are the same processes that keep life going – and they operate on all timescales.
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Now this idea actually moves counter to my own thinking about how life transitions energy from "raw energy" into creativity/thought which is a bank of potential energy. So in the case of an open universe where it continues to expand and ultimately we reach maximum entropy where the universe goes dark, biological systems continue to grow in complexity and advance ultimately to artificial systems (post-singularity) where we eventually can take advantage of the same something-from-nothing principals that launched the universe at the moment of the big bang... and re-ignite the dying universe... perhaps it is a white hole instead of a black hole? (See Carl Sagan's Contact for that idea).
I guess it all comes back to the definition of entropy... because it takes TONS of energy over the lifetime of a human to build one... and it takes unimaginable amounts of energy to build an entire species to a point where they transcend their own biology and unlock the vast secrets of the universe... but the sun outputs more energy in 15 minutes than all of humanity uses in a year at our current level of technology. So when you think about the energy expenditure in entropy to build a species that could ultimately harness technology to prevent maximum entropy in the universe... it starts to seem like a bargain!
Although if you consider that all of the suns in the unvierse have to burn so that by chance enough planets are around to produce a post-biological species... maybe it starts to look a bit less efficient. But seriously, what else does the unvierse have to do with itself? :)
Oh well... I don't plan to resolve this any time soon. :)
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