Life is anything that moves, reproduces, senses, grows, respires, excretes and eats.
Consciousness is more mysterious and less well defined.
Yes, but how do living things come into existence? What makes a cell alive?
It’s not about defining what a living being is.
“Jiggle physics is the real science. Everything else is stamp collecting.” - Einstein maybe
“And so people come to sorts of agreements about, uh, how much of a wiggle is a wiggle; that is to say a thing. One wiggle, you can always reduce any one wiggle into sub-wiggles. Or see it as a subordinate wiggle in a bigger wiggle. But there’s no real fixed rule about it”
What is “sensing” or “growing” or “respiring” or “excreting” or “eating”?
I would define those terms, but you would just ask me to define the terms I used to define them, wouldn’t you? Eventually, language is known by other people without being defined in terms of language.
Not really, i left out the term reproduce because i think it has some reality. But others like sensing — does an atom changing the electron cloud due to an electric feild or nearby atom count as sensing because it senses the presence of nearby atoms or whatever?
Won’t growing constitute of some large mass body collecting more mass due to its gravitation?
I hate that this is popular. This is a creationist level understanding of the big bang.
You ever use a spray can for a while and the can gets cold? It’s more like that.
Holy shit. That was pretty profound.
I love the line “when an explosion explodes hard enough, dust wakes up and thinks about itself”
But it wasn’t really an explosion, it was more like a spontaneous, insane inflation that found itself suddenly huge and empty, only after it was through with that particular stage did it zap itself full of energy and matter everywhere all at once. Then it continued growing in volume and thinning out via regular ol’ relativistic expansion.
EDIT: looking a little bit closer, there’s the thing about zapping all over itself after Inflation, it was almost perfectly half-and-half matter/antimatter, which then proceeded to join and annihilate into pure energy, but for some reason probably related to the Weak Force, just a little bit more matter was created than antimatter.
And that’s what we are and see today, 1 part out of every 8 million-and-one. For every 4,000,000 parts antimatter, there were 4,000,001 parts matter, only that 1 left over particle of matter, multiplied a bazillion times.
That’s just a whole other level of amazing than just saying “an explosion”.
An explosion is pure entropy. It’s high energy releasing to a low energy state in an uncontrolled manner
We climb down the energy slope very slowly to reverse entropy and create order
The universe is like us - temporary order emerges as it slides towards entropy
But are we actually creating order? To maintain life’s order, we are creating much more disorder somewhere else.
Life is but an entropy maximization machine.
On the overall scale of the universe? No, not even remotely close. On the local scale of the Earth, generally yes.
Well, as much as possible anyway. When considering mass alone, life is quite efficient.
According to Wolfram Alpha:
The sun produces 3.8 * 1028 watts.
A single human produces 104 watts (calculated through the average caloric intake assuming that intake ≈ energy consumption) through heat radiation.
Therefore:
1 kg of human converts 1.5 watt into heat.
1 kg of the sun converts 0.0002 watt into (heat) radiation.
And while I have nearly no understanding how entropy is calculated, from those values alone it seems like humans produce more entropy per kg than the sun. I’m pretty sure entropy is somewhat related to energy production though.
Perhaps another way to think of it is that we’re a patch of localised order in an overall disordered universe
