Chapter 33 6.6 Negentropy

I climbed the hill behind the house again and wandered into a small eucalyptus forest where the local 4-H club once stocked bees.At this time of day, the groves dozed under their characteristic steam; the hills on which the groves stood, facing west, blocked the warm morning sun. I pictured the rocky barrenness of this valley at the beginning of history—mountains of bare quartzite and feldspar, desolate and shining.A billion years flew by.Today, the rock is covered with a woven grass blanket.Life filled the space of a grove with trees taller than my head.Life is trying to fill the valley.For the next billion years, it will continue to try out new shapes and thrive in every crevice or open space it can find.

Before life appeared, there was no complex matter in the universe.The whole universe is absolutely simple, salt, water, elements, extremely boring.With life, there are many complex substances.According to astrochemists, we cannot find complex molecular clusters (or macromolecules) in the universe outside of life.Life tends to hijack all matter it can touch and complicate it.Through some bizarre magic, the more life injects into this valley, the more space it creates for future life.Eventually, this small, winding valley off the coast of northern California will become a solid mass of life.If left to sway, life would eventually permeate all matter.

Why isn't the earth as vast as seen from space?Why hasn't life filled the oceans and filled the skies?I believe that if it is left to fend for itself, the earth will one day be green as a whole.The biological invasion of the sky is a relatively recent event, and things aren't over yet.The complete saturation of the oceans requires giant algae to evolve to withstand the tearing of wind and waves.But in the end, life will prevail and the oceans will turn green. One day in the future, the Milky Way may also turn green.Those planets that are hostile to life now won't be forever.Other forms of life would have evolved to flourish in environments that currently seemed inhospitable.What's more, once a variant of life has established itself somewhere, life's inherently transformative nature sets out to modify the environment until it is suitable for other species to survive.

In the 1950s, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger called the vitality of life "negentropy", which means that it is inverse to the entropy increase of thermodynamics.In the 1990s, a technocratic subculture active in the United States called life force "external entropy." Advocates of the concept of external entropy call themselves "external entropy family".Based on the vitalistic nature of the extra-entropy of life, they issued a seven-point statement about the way of life.The third point of the statement is a programmatic clause, affirming their personal belief of "expansion without boundaries"-that is, life will continue to expand until it fills the entire universe.Those who think otherwise are labeled "deathists" by them.Judging by their propaganda, this creed is nothing more than the self-motivation of the Pollyanna: "We can do anything!"

But I am still somewhat stubborn to take their advocacy as a scientific claim: life will fill the universe.No one knows where the theoretical limit to the diffusion of matter caused by life is, or how much life-imprinted matter our sun can support. In the 1930s, the Russian geochemist/biologist Vernadsky wrote: "The property of maximizing expansion is inherent in living things, just as heat is transferred from a warmer body to a temperature Lower bodies, soluble substances dissolve into solvents, and gases diffuse into space.” Vernadsky calls this “the (physical) pressure of life” and measures this expansion in terms of rate.He believes that the expansion rate of puffball bacteria is the fastest in life.He said that the puffball produces spores at an extremely fast rate. If raw materials can be quickly provided for its development, then it only needs to reproduce for three generations, and the volume of the puffball can exceed that of the earth.According to his arcane calculations, the "transmission speed" of bacterial vitality is about a thousand kilometers per hour.At this rate, it won't be long before life fills the universe.

When reduced to its essence, life is much like a function for computation.Distinctive thinker Edward Fredkin, who worked at MIT, conceived of a heterogeneous theory that the universe is a computer.Not a computer in the figurative sense, but matter and energy are also forms of information processing in the same way that it is processed internally in a Macintosh computer.Fredkin disagreed with the indivisibility of atoms. He said frankly: "The most concrete thing in the world is information." Stephen Wolfram, a mathematical genius who has done pioneering work in the field of various computer algorithms, expressed This agrees.He was one of the first to view systems of matter as computational processes, a view that has since become popular among some small circles of physicists and philosophers.According to this view, the tiny jobs achieved in life have physical and thermodynamic properties similar to those achieved in computers.Friedkin and his collaborators would say that knowing the maximum amount of calculations the universe is capable of (if we treat all matter in it as a computer), we can know that, given the matter we see Under the distribution of energy and energy, whether life can fill the universe.I don't know if anyone has done that calculation.

Theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson is one of the few scientists who have seriously considered the ultimate fate of life.Dyson made rough calculations to estimate whether life and intellectual activity would survive to the eventual end of the universe.His conclusion is, yes.He writes: "The numerical results I have calculated show that the energy required for permanent survival and communication is surprisingly not very large... This strongly supports the idea of ​​​​optimism about the potential of life. Whether we turn to No matter how far the future goes, there will always be new things happening, new information coming in, new worlds to develop, and areas of life, consciousness, perception, and memory that can be continuously expanded.”

Dyson has pushed this concept forward to a degree that I can't even imagine.All I care about is the dynamic of life, and how it permeates all matter, and why nothing known can stop it.Yet just as life irreversibly conquers matter, so too does the life-like higher processing power we call the mind irrevocably conquer life, and thus all matter.Dyson wrote in his lyrical and metaphysical book Infinite in All Directions: