
Is Life Special Just Because It’s Rare? - pmcpinto
http://nautil.us/issue/29/scaling/is-life-special-just-because-its-rare
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philh
Of course not.

Shuffle a deck of cards. If you did it properly, the new arrangement is
unique. No deck of cards has ever been arranged like that before, and none
will ever again, unless you deliberately preserve it.

I just drew a scribble on a post-it note. Nobody else has a scribble quite
like it, or ever will again, after I throw it away.

Every time a snowflake melts, something beautiful and unique is lost forever.

None of these things are special, unless you're using a really weird meaning
of "special".

You can say that they might be unique, but they're sufficiently similar to
other things that they might as well not be - but what distance metric are you
using? You're using one shaped by your own values, which say that one human is
special even in the presence of another seven billion humans, but that one
snowflake is unimportant in the presence of another seven billion.

It _might_ be that rareness is a prerequisite of specialness. It's not the
only factor.

~~~
bduerst
The order in a deck of cards is unique, but it's not _complex_. The nucleotide
sequence in a chromosome is unique _and_ complex.

An analogy of your comparison would be comparing a single sentence to the sum
of mankind's written works, with the latter being life. A complex, organized
source of information like that is special.

~~~
philh
If you shuffle a deck of 3 billion cards, the order is less compressible than
the human genome. It's still not special. Is it complex, by your definition?

How about my scribble, or a snowflake?

~~~
bduerst
It would be complex but no longer unique.

If you randomly generated 3 billion alphabet characters, would it be
instructions for building a Saturn V rocket? The blueprints for building a
single cell?

~~~
philh
Why would a shuffle of 3 billion distinct cards be less unique than a shuffle
of 52 distinct cards?

> If you randomly generated 3 billion alphabet characters, would it be
> instructions for building a Saturn V rocket? The blueprints for building a
> single cell?

No. It would be a unique string of worthless jibberish.

Meanwhile, the instructions for a Saturn V rocket have probably been written
down in at least two places. So if you have a copy of them, they're less
unique than my random string, yet more special.

~~~
bduerst
Right, the _information_ is unique, not the medium.

There are multiple copies of the Saturn V blueprints, just as there are
multiple copies of the human genome in your cells.

Is _Lord of the Rings_ not unique because it's stored on multiple mediums?

------
amelius
The trick lies in the fact that life forms have no obvious boundary. The fact
that two creatures are two creatures, and not just a single creature is
something that is just endowed to them by us humans. If one of the creatures
dies, does it really die, or does the combination of the two creatures just
loses half of its brain cells? That second view is just as valid. Hence, in
that second view, nothing really ever dies; we (i.e., the universe) just lose
brain cells. And, of course, we gain them as well.

~~~
TeMPOraL
This way we could say the entire universe is just a big chemical reaction. It
wouldn't even be an incorrect view. It just wouldn't be useful for anything.

This is the real value of models and concepts we use - not their grand
philosophical sense, but how useful they are. We set up boundaries between
creatures, define concepts like life and death because they allow us to
understand and predict the world better. It's usually more useful to treat two
creatures as two creatures instead of one, but sometimes it's the reverse -
for instance, it's often more useful to treat an entire colony of ants as a
single being, individual ants becoming just cells / organelles.

~~~
Retra
_" It just wouldn't be useful for anything."_

It is useful for something. It's just not useful for problems that require a
high degree of specificity. And not all problems do; in fact, some are
hindered by it. (For instance, focussing on individual atoms won't really help
you do politics.)

~~~
adamio
single atoms no, but splitting atoms.. maybe

------
signal11
When I was in school, we knew of no extra-solar planets. Now that we know how
to look, they seem to be everywhere. Similarly, I suspect life will turn out
to be common once we can send probes to the places that could harbour them.

Intelligent life might well be an order-of-magnitude rarer, and life
intelligent enough to be detectable by SETI rarer still. (And we could well be
the most advanced civilization in our light cone -- someone has to be.)

~~~
bduerst
I'm skeptical, if not for the sheer improbability of our own abiogenesis event
on Earth.

I think that if we do find naturally occurring "life" elsewhere in the
universe, it will be unlike anything that we have ever dreamed of and
challenge our definition of the word. Or maybe it will be cellular just like
ours and responsible for seeding Earth.

------
the_economist
Life is special because it's complex. Modern human society on Earth is the
most complex thing in the history of the known universe. Complex things,
though, tend to be very fragile.

(paraphrased from David Christian's "Big History" Great Courses lecture)

~~~
hawleyal
I would say there are much more complex phenomena than a few bajillion atoms
and electricity bouncing flailing about on the surface of a mostly-water
planet.

~~~
the_economist
Such as? Here is David's Christian's ranking of complexity in the Universe:

[http://padlet.com/dpetersen/c6c8g49ynt19](http://padlet.com/dpetersen/c6c8g49ynt19)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_History#Complexity.2C_ener...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_History#Complexity.2C_energy.2C_thresholds)

~~~
hawleyal
LOL Christian presents a laughably human-centric view of things.

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jqm
I always find these type of questions specious and entirely dependent on frame
of reference for both question and response.

Our language and conceptions evolved specifically to do important things like
inform companions under which trees the most delicious nuts could be found and
remember where the hidden tiger was sleeping.

"Special" and "Rare" in these primitive contexts (which is all we really have
right now) don't mean anything objectively nor on a cosmic scale (of which we
know very little incidentally). So the whole question is just.... off.

------
gregjwild
I think this statement nails it: "we are imprisoned within our own cosmos of
meaning. We cannot imagine a universe without meaning. We are not talking
necessarily about some grand cosmic meaning, or a divine meaning bestowed by
God, or even a lasting, eternal meaning. "

"Special" is a human construct. If something is special, it's because we say
it is. Life has no relevance to anything beyond that which we ascribe to it.

Unless, of course, you believe that life was designed according to some kind
of grand design. But even that presupposes that we mortals have a chance of
understanding an intelligence that can shape reality. I'm sceptical any human
interpretation of 'special' in that context is useful.

Reality just _is_. It has no moral weight.

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unabst
If 1) we are part of the universe, and 2) we generate meaning, then 3) we are
the meaning generators of the universe. The universe is meaningless only when
we look out and ignore life, and ignore ourselves. But the universe has us,
and has life. We are significant, not because we are more important, but
simply for being a part of it all. We exist. We're here. That say's it all.

The moment we tied the emergence of what we perceived as metaphysical to
something physical, it all became physical and the ghosts disappeared along
with the word metaphysics from our sciences. The mind-body duality was non-
scientific.

The same can be done with the exceptional view on life. The moment we tie the
emergence of what we perceive as special to everything mundane, it all becomes
mundane, and life is no longer special. Special is subjective. If we concede
to the emergence of life from non-life, then it's either all non-life, or it's
all life -- or we could decide to call it something else.

Much of the awe we express through pieces like this can be attributed to the
fact that sheer scale still never fails to baffle us. Distance, complexity,
time, and probability all become "dramatic" once they become intuitively
disproportionate. But the universe as a whole is just as complex as it is, and
pointing to two places and comparing their complexity says nothing about the
capacity of the universe. The universe is huge, it's old, it's chaotic, and
everything in it is rare. But baffled it is not. Or rather, it is, just
through us.

------
yason
In this universe, for whatever its nature happens to be, where laws of entropy
realize themselves relentlessly and indefinitely to increase chaos forever,
bit by bit; where everything left to rot will eventually turn into pieces,
shards, and break apart into dust there is―I might say―a force, or at least a
mechanism―again, whether guided or scientifically spontaneous―that is working
its way on the same river as this destructive chaos but to the exactly
opposite direction of the downstream where, as shattered pieces of existence
and remnants of structure, chaos is slowly but endlessly flowing down.

This force is what we call life and this force is of the nature that it just
keeps pushing itself against all the natural destruction that is inherently
prevalent in this world. This force constructs and maintains growth,
structure, and produces organisms that are enough in some balance―chemical,
physical, maybe spiritual, who knows―to survive further.

The force will push through the slightest openings in this river which is
chaos, and just keeps growing and growing despite being forever torn down,
consumed, and worn by the elements of entropy at the same time. This force,
when put down and extinquished in one place will again and again remanifest
itself in another place, and continues to create and grow against all the odds
and the universal tendency for any space and matter to cool down and energy to
return to the lowest possible potential.

Life is nothing but rare. If we blew up this planet into smithereens, I
wonder, why would that force that is life stop swimming upstream at the very
once? Why would it not reappear elsewhere? Some might say that the live
organisms would just die with the Earth, but what started it here? Why
wouldn't it emerge again elsewhere just like it did here?

If the force is divine it will exist somewhere regardless of the physical
circumstances, merely waiting for a new opening in the physical world; if the
force is not divine, then maybe it's some internal counter stream, an energy
flow, in the the universe itself, where one part of the energy flows towards
chaotic stillness but where the other part flows back into motion and higher
potential: while entropy reduces the energy in action the potential must
increase somewhere else, as energy cannot disappear. Or maybe you might choose
consider the divine to be the universe itself―about that I cannot say a word.
But there is something that makes this thing called life opt-in to this world
where everything else keeps crumbling to pieces.

If that force is not special in itself, given the setting, then I don't know
what is.

~~~
Armisael16
Fire does all of that too. Is it alive?

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dikdik
This reminds me of a quote from Six Feet Under:

Widow: "Why do people have to die?"

Nate Fischer: "To make life important. None of us know how long we've got,
which is why we have to make each day matter."

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sr_banksy
Are we looking for non-carbon based life? Is it possible that we fail to
recognize life simply because it is so far apart from our idea of life?

------
maxgee
Is life special?

