Scientists explain the meaning of life (and we don't matter much)

Below is an article that I read on the net that was written several years ago by several scientists that come to the exact same conclusion as I have. For a different perspective read on:



A new theory states that it is entropy which drives evolution to higher levels of complexity -- for the sole purpose of disseminating energy gradients

By Arne Jernelov

Thursday, Sep 30, 2004, Page 9

Most religions embrace and promote certain notions about the meaning of life, offering the faithful reasons why we and all other organisms exist. Indeed, perhaps the fundamental definition of religious faith is the belief that life serves a (divine) purpose. Science, however, has always given a resounding "no" to the question "Does life have a higher meaning?"

At least until now.

In a series of lectures and in a forthcoming book, science writers Eric Schneider and Dorion Sagan argue that even from a scientific perspective, life does serve a purpose, and thus does have a meaning that transcends the self. They arrived at this conclusion when trying to reconcile a contradiction that has long puzzled those who study both biology and physics.

Living organisms obviously embody arrangements of matter into complex structures. They transform chemicals and, in an orderly fashion, transport and store them in purposeful ways. Above the level of individual organisms, they form societies and ecosystems. All of us are familiar with these fundamental biological notions, and we are all part of these processes. Order seems to be the name of the biological game, and evolution leads to more complex organisms and more organized structures.

This is, of course, at odds with one of the fundamental principles of physics: the second law of thermodynamics, which holds that entropy -- the degradation of all matter and energy in the universe to an ultimate state of inert uniformity -- increases as a result of each and every process. The more the world develops the more disorder there will be. Physics even accepts the idea that entropy defines the direction of time. In the end everything will be broken down and randomly distributed.

How do Schneider and Sagan reconcile the contradiction between what appears true of life -- that it organizes matter into increasingly complex creatures and structures -- and the notion that disorder should increase and order should be lost? Equally important, how can science see any meaning of life in the reconciliation of that apparent contradiction?

The bottom line is that the second law of thermodynamics rules and that the existence of life helps increase entropy. In other words, life promotes disorder. Some might think that this could be true only if the logical end of evolution and intelligent life were to be a nuclear explosion that pulverized Earth. But that is not what Schneider and Sagan mean. Instead, they make a distinction between matter and energy and say that matter organized in structures disseminates energy gradients faster than randomly distributed matter.

As one example, they consider a phenomenon of which beer drinkers have long been aware. If you want to empty a bottle of water (or beer) and turn it upside down, the water will come out in uneven glugs. If you spin the bottle and create an eddy inside it, the water will flow out much faster and more smoothly. The eddy in the bottle is a structure in the water. Water running down is matter losing its potential energy. The structure speeds up the dissemination of the energy gradient.

Similarly, on a hot day, the air in a forest is cooler than over adjacent bare lands, thanks to evaporation and transpiration in the trees. The energy gradient, in this case that of heat, is disseminated more effectively by the structure of the forest and the life within it.

The more complex the structure the more effective is the energy dissemination. Populations are better in this respect than single individuals; ecosystems even more so, and most effective of all -- so far -- are human high-tech societies.

Thus, goes the argument, the second law of thermodynamics is not contrary to the existence of life; rather, it is the cause of life. That law drives evolution to higher levels of complexity and to more sophisticated societies and technologies for the sole purpose of disseminating energy gradients.

So life, at long last, has a higher meaning in the eyes of science -- even if serving the second law of thermodynamics is not exactly what the religiously faithful had in mind.

Arne Jernelov is professor of environmental biochemistry, an honorary scholar and former director of the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis in Vienna and a UN expert on environmental catastrophes.

Copyright: Project Syndicate

An Introduction To Spark Theory

Before a meaningful discussion of the meaning of life can take place, it is helpful to get into the right state of mind. To most of mankind the meaning of life largely comes from how we view and perceive our world and our role in it. We assume and will likely only accept a meaning of life that is grand and full of importance. The major question is must the meaning of life be grand and important? We would like it to be, but what if it wasn’t? What if the meaning of life is much bigger than Earth and mankind? Looking towards the skies you realize that Earth is one planet of nine that orbits a star that is one of billions in our galaxy and that our galaxy is just one of a billion that exist in the universe. Are we so certain of our self-importance that we can say in a universe so vast and complex that we on Earth must have and important meaning? When you read on remember that perhaps accepting the answer is harder than finding the answer itself.

As soon as I was old enough to realize that my life on Earth was finite, I thought about how to make the most of it. My many ideas were always designed to fulfill “the meaning of life”. The trouble was there was no widely accepted meaning of life and thus my ideas seemed to vary with the seasons. As I grew up hundreds of ideas crossed my head. Was religion the meaning of life? Was it being happy? Was it making money and being successful or was it closer to home by raising a successful family? Each and every life experience seemed to change the meaning of life for me. Then one day my world turned upside down when I took the first look through my telescope towards deep space.

What I saw, looking through that telescope that one cold night in December, was a universe so large, so vast and so awe inspiring I could only help but think one thing. Are we important? If a simple ant on Earth had the ability to reason, it may conclude, based on its daily experiences that its life was very important and meaningful. After all, it works together with its fellow ants to create a wonderfully complex home in which to raise its children. Some ants around the world even raise their own bugs to help feed their young much as we humans raise cattle. The trouble is, we as the dominant species on Earth look down on ants and consider them while fascinating in their behaviors and ability to survive and multiply, ultimately unimportant. If the universe had a conscience and was able to reason, how would it look down upon us? The most difficult and powerful thought to ever cross my mind was that the universe would probably view us much like how we view a common ant.

With this one new powerful idea, that perhaps the meaning of our lives is not important, I began to take another hard look at the world around me. I began by taking a hard look at what I was. This forced me to accept something that on the surface seems so obvious, but deep down has so much meaning. I realized that I was made up of billions and billions of atoms. We’ve known this for hundreds of years, but people have assumed that these atoms formed together in order to make a life, full of life and destined for greatness. If, as I suspect our importance is only self induced, why would these atoms decide to form together?

To answer this question I had to go back in time, to figure out where we came from. Evolutionists like Darwin have shown that humans evolved from primitive forms of life. While Darwin stops short of explaining how the most primitive of life started on Earth, there are many theories backed up with laboratory experiments suggesting that the conditions on early Earth were conducive to forming primitive life. While the theories hint at why primitive life was formed, they don’t out right come out and say it. To understand why atoms formed primitive life, we need to understand what atoms do.

The answer to what do atoms do is again simple to state but hard to accept. Atoms themselves do nothing. In fact at absolute zero and outside the presence of another atom, an atom will remain motionless. It will do nothing. It is only when you introduce some sort of energy that the atom will do something. Introduce enough energy and other atoms and eventually atoms begin to interact with each other. Science tells us some rather interesting things interactions between atoms. First and foremost the total energy in a reaction remains constant, that is to say energy can be converted from one form to another, but it is never created or destroy. Another important theory about reactions comes from the 2nd law of Thermodynamics. It states that while energy is conserved each and every reaction results in an increase in entropy or disorder. That is to say the universe prefers a state of disorder to a state of order. To understand why this makes sense, think about a tower of blocks. What is the preferred state of the blocks? Neatly stacked on top of each other or strewn out randomly on the floor.

If the universe prefers to be in a state of high entropy or disorder, why then doesn’t it just do so? What is stopping it from instantly going from a state of high order to a state of low order? Think about the first science experiment you did in school when you mixed baking soda with vinegar. Just as soon as you mixed the two together, a reaction immediately took place creating a bubbling mess. Why don’t all reactions work this way? There are many reasons, but for our discussion here the most important reason is that some reactions need energy to get started. Gasoline is a perfect example of this. Gasoline and oxygen can coexist together indefinitely without reacting. They require energy or a spark before they can react together.

As Earth began to form billions of years ago, very quickly all of the reactions that could have taken place without a spark took place and soon after the Earth reached a state of equilibrium. What broke that equilibrium was the interaction between Earth and the Sun. Not only do the suns nuclear reactions give off vast amounts of energy, the gravitational attraction between them (and between the other planets and moons) caused the inside of the Earth to heat up. The energy given off would have sparked reactions on Earth.

The trouble with reactions is that often not just any spark will do. Sometimes that spark comes from heat energy while other times from stored chemical energy. When the energy needs to come from heat, the energy from the sun will do just nicely. The trouble is when the energy needs to come from stored chemical energy things get a little bit more complicated. On early Earth for chemical reactions to occur all of the various atoms and molecules would need to be in the same place at the same time and under just the right conditions.

Let’s say an imaginary reaction needs 5 atoms to be in the same place at the same time. What would happen if one day, 4 of those atoms using the energy from the sun joined together? What would happen is the next time those 4 joined atoms met the 5th a reaction would take place. If luck was good and these 4 atoms joined together regularly then perhaps reactions between these 5 atoms would happen more often.

Certain configurations of atoms do something absolutely amazing. They can make copies of themselves. While this sounds incredible, this type of behavior has been studied in the laboratory and occurs around us each and every day. What would happen on early Earth if atoms joined together to form one of these replicating configurations? What would happen is a great deal of chance would be removed from sparking reactions and these replicating configurations would spread rapidly.

Before going any further we need to reaffirm something vitally important before our imaginations run wild. Remember atoms do nothing. Reactions occur because they will create disorder. Reactions can and do spawn other reactions. Reactions need to be thought of like dominos, one leads to another, which leads to another. There is no master plan, just reactions occurring one after another. Applying the former idea to the latter, we need to realize that the self-replicating configurations of atoms came about through the falling of dominos, from a long series of chain reactions, nothing more nothing less. These reactions occur because they can occur.

With that fresh in our mind let’s now change some vocabulary. The astute reader will have already realized that self-replicating configurations of atoms is just another word for primitive life. Using our new word, the primitive life would have stared out as its name implies as quite primitive. But over time, and billions and billions of different reactions many different replicating configurations would have come into existence. Each one would be capable of sparking a certain type of reaction.

Fast forward to today and with a little help from Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, we live in a world of replicating life. Each specialized to sparking a certain type of reaction. Plants that carpet our world convert the raw energy that pours from the sun each day. Animals which are cable of moving consume energy from a variety of sources and spark their own reactions. All the while the disorder or entropy of the universe is being increased.

While I theorize that the meaning of life is to increase the entropy or disorder of the universe by using stored energy to spark reactions, this isn’t the whole story. What this theory doesn’t explain largely due to a lack of knowledge is why there is a universe in the first place. However we don’t need to understand one to understand the other. While it would be interesting to know both and it would help shed some additional light on the meaning of life, life itself is a result of how our universe is unfolding.

The answer to the meaning of life

I've started this blog to stimulate discussion on the meaning of life. Specifically it's here to explore the possibility that, while not to sound overly negative or depressing, that the meaning of life isn’t grand or important at all. It’s here to discuss the possibility that perhaps life is just another part of a vast and complex universe. A part that is no more or no less magnificent than any other part of that universe. I will conclude this first post with what I theorize the meaning of life to be:

The meaning of life is to increase the entropy or disorder of the universe by using stored energy to spark reactions.