"Energy and matter didn’t dissipate after the Big Bang, didn’t flatten out like a puddle into homogenous atomic soup, but clumped and hiccupped into structure. Stars formed, and planets, and surfaces, and seas. That disequilibrium eventually led to us as well.
From this vantage, the question of whether we’re alone could almost become moot. We’re not alone because we’re not separate from the swirl of a galaxy’s arms or the way wind catches dust in a gyre. We’re no more an anomaly than an atom is. How could we ever consider ourselves alone?
But at the same time, life is also something apart from the rest. A protein is more than an atom, a cell is more than a protein—some thresholds are clearly being crossed. Even if the lines are arbitrary, the differences are not.
When we pursue knowledge about the origin of life, we’re thinking about what life is. Is life self-replicating information? Is life a new way for the universe to organize energy? Is it, as Carl Sagan and others have put it, a way for the universe to experience—and hope to understand—itself?
It’s all of those, of course. Life is information and energy and awareness. It’s a squirreling away of entropy, so that one bit of ordered matter can look at another and try to know it. It’s momentum rolling, for a moment, uphill."
--"The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination, and Our Quest for Kinship in the Cosmos" by Jaime Green: https://a.co/239Dkpi
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