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You may be interested in this article, which espouses a similar idea that life is a mechanism for more efficiently dissipating energy, and thus a natural conseq
by kornish 10y ago
You may be interested in this article, which espouses a similar idea that life is a mechanism for more efficiently dissipating energy, and thus a natural consequence of a universe following the Second Law of Thermodynamics: https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140122-a-new-physics-theory-of-life/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140122-a-new-physics-theory...
(disclaimer: the article is quite handwavy, but could be a good jumping-off point if you so choose. Sounds dubious to me but interesting to consider)
- mtdewcmu 10y agoLife seems like a very inefficient way to dissipate energy. And that's kind of the point, you need to hang onto the energy long enough to do something with it before it dissipates. The most efficient way of dissipating energy seems like it would be something like Photon comes in -> photon reflects off water -> photon goes back out to space
- justinator 10y agoLife is pretty good at entropy. Take for example: humans. We've been digging up vast amounts of fossil fuels to then burn them up. Without us, those reserves would stay in the ground probably forever. Is there another organism that's better entropy as us? (actually I think there are contenders) Perhaps that's our reason for being.
- Razengan 10y agoWe are just a different, temporary state of the same stardust, as everything else around us — as in, a small part of the Universe transformed into us, then started trying to understand the rest of itself. :)
- Retra 10y ago"Reasons" are human constructs. We don't need a reason to be, we just are.
- justinator 10y agoEh, but it makes sense we still follow the Second Law of Thermodynamics, right? When people ask themselves, "What's the point of Life?" That's it: We're agents of entropy.
- Retra 10y agoThere's nothing that makes that the point of life, though. It's just a fact about it. Just as it is equally a fact about non-life.
- kornish 10y agoAs a layperson, I've no opinion on this – just sharing the article because it seemed amenable to your idea that life emerged non-acutely as a natural consequence of physical laws.
- JumpCrisscross 10y ago> Life seems like a very inefficient way to dissipate energy It seems like a good way to dissipate complex energies. Chemicals pouring out of deep sea vents contain lots of chemical potential energy, but it's difficult to unlock without a complex mechanism. Life unlocks those mechanisms. Taking it several steps further, a uranium-powered particle accelerator produces massive amounts of complex entropy.