Ploum: Has humanity found the meaning of life? (2017)

French original by Ploum on 2017-05-14, translated locally into English by Firefox/Librewolf, minor edits (of the translation only) by me

What is the meaning of life? Why are there living things in the universe rather than inert matter? For those of you who have already asked yourself these questions, I have good and bad news.

The good news is that science may have found an answer.

The bad news is that you won’t like this answer.

The imperfections of the big bang

If the big bang had been a perfect event, the universe would be uniform and smooth today. However, imperfections have been created.

Because of the fundamental forces, these imperfections have agglomerated to the point of forming stars and planets made of matter.

If we are not today a simple soup of atoms perfectly smooth but solid beings on a planet surrounded by emptiness, it is thanks to these imperfections!

The Law of Entropy

Thanks to thermodynamics, we understood that nothing is lost and nothing is created. The energy of a system is constant. To cool its interior, a fridge will have to heat outside. The energy of the universe is and will therefore remain constant.

The same is not true of entropy.

To put it simply, entropy can be seen as “energy quality”. The higher the entropy, the less usable the energy.

For example, if you place a cup of boiling tea in a very cold room, the entropy of the system is low. Over time, the cup of tea will cool down, the room warm up and the entropy will increase to become maximum when the cup and room are at the same temperature. This very intuitive phenomenon is believed to be due to quantum entanglement and would be the basis of our perception of the flow of time.

For an outside observer, the amount of energy in the room has not changed. The average temperature of the whole is always the same. On the other hand, there was still a loss: the energy is no longer exploitable.

It would have been possible, for example, to use the fact that the cup of tea warms the ambient air to operate a turbine and generate electricity. This is no longer possible once the cup and room are at the same temperature.

Without the supply of external energy, any system will see its entropy increase. So the same applies to the universe: if the universe does not contract under its own weight, the stars will inevitably cool down and go out like the cup of tea. The universe will become, inexorably, a perfect continuum of constant temperature. This process is referred to as “Heat Death”.

The appearance of life

Life seems like an exception. After all, are we not complex and very orderly organisms, which implies a very low entropy? How to explain the appearance of life, and therefore elements with lower entropy than their environment, in a universe whose entropy is increasing?

Jeremy England, a physicist at MIT, brings a new and particularly original solution: life would be the most effective way to dissipate heat and thus increase entropy.

On a planet like the earth, atoms and molecules are bombarded permanently by a strong and usable energy: the sun. This creates a very low entropy situation.

Naturally, atoms will then organize to dissipate energy. Physically, the most effective way to dissipate the energy received is to reproduce. By reproducing, the material creates entropy.

The first molecule capable of such a feat, RNA, was the first stage of life. The mechanisms of natural selection favoring reproduction then did the rest.

According to Jeremy England, life would be mechanically inevitable if there was enough energy.

Humanity in the service of entropy

If England’s theory is confirmed, this would be very bad news for humanity.

For if the purpose of life is to maximize entropy, then what we do with the earth, excessive consumption, wars, nuclear bombs are perfectly logical. Destroying the universe as quickly as possible to make it an atom soup is the very meaning of life!

The only dilemma we could face would then be: must we immediately destroy the earth or succeed in developing to bring destruction into the rest of the universe?

Either way, the ultimate goal of life would be to make the universe perfect, tasteless, uniform. To destroy itself.

What is particularly distressing is that, seen from this angle, humanity seems to be getting there incredibly well! Much too well...