Revisiting the work of physicist Jeremy England, we’re reminded that his new theory posits that the conflict between entropy (the idea that the universe tears down order to create chaos) and life (the continuous build-up of evermore-complicated organic molecules and increasingly complex living organisms) is solved by a simple principle: it is the nature of matter to spread energy.
At the most extreme macro level, this makes perfect sense and is observably happening: since the Big Bang, energy has been pouring out into the universe like spilled water on a kitchen floor, finding every possible path to every possible destination. Like kitchen furniture, the specks of matter in the universe - planets, comets, asteroids, interstellar dust - block and deflect that energy. And, as kitchen furniture gets wet, matter in the path of energy soaks it up.
Per Einstein, we know that matter itself - including us! - is simply condensed energy. That condensation is nothing more than an incidental consequence of certain thermodynamic conditions in certain places in space. Our planet, its atmosphere, its water, all the life on it - including us! - are an incidental mass of condensed energy, no different than all the other chunks of not-quite-energy dancing around stars and wandering through cold interstellar space.
Except...
Here on this particular planet, things are a little bit different.
Spreading Energy
First, a bit more of England: his team observes in their published papers that the Spread Energy imperative, elegant and simple, is observable everywhere in Nature. So ubiquitous is it, when sought out, that it is clearly the rule, not the exception: the properties of matter, both living and non-, all give service to this imperative. The Spread Energy imperative appears to be the very nature of Nature (though the theory is not yet proven).
England appears as a character in Dan Brown’s novel Origin, which provides examples of natural organization that promotes entropy: simple objects, like snowflakes - frozen water - which spontaneously form complex shapes to most efficiently distribute light and heat. They cannot not do so. Quartz displays similar properties – elegant organization of non-living matter, optimized to radiate energy efficiently.
Origin’s examples include weather, which can be characterized as complex systems that optimize to dissipate energy in the atmosphere, from the pressure-relieving vortex of a tornado to the electrical discharge of a lightning bolt, dispelling the structured ganging of charged particles in a thundercloud.
Even the simple mechanisms of life demonstrate England’s principle – and life turns out to be matter’s best innovation yet, when it comes to the spreading of energy. Photosynthesis, Origin points out, is a marvelous example: a tree absorbs a steady stream of sunlight, absconding with some of it to extend and replicate itself, while dissipating the remainder as infrared radiation: increased entropy.
And as for DNA, the engine of organic replication – it, too, exists in the service of entropy: a forest, for instance, can dissipate far more energy than a single tree.
If all of this is how Nature really works - and it appears increasingly likely - then England's Spread Energy principle explains how organic molecules came to be, and why increasing complexity is their rule: what we call life is in fact just another expression of matter's inherent imperative to get out of energy's way, and to exploit energy in that endeavor.
(This new feature of the universe, by the way, closes the final gap that God has been filling since Darwin. With the tendency of organic molecules to form under certain thermodynamic conditions, and for those molecules to form increasingly complex structures, the origin of life is now explained in full - the need for a 'Creator' has finally expired. The question, “How do living systems arise from non-living matter?” has finally been answered, if England is correct. This is a major theme of Origin.)
Physicists have already skipped ahead to the end of the universe's book: in the last pages of the final chapter, it will experience 'heat death' - the final cessation of all energy exchange, as there will eventually be no remaining thermodynamic fuel for entropic processes. England's model not only supports this long-accepted conclusion - it helps explain it.
Between now and the death of the universe, per England, the energy that it contains will continue to spread relentlessly - and all the specks of condensation, all the matter, will inadvertently interrupt that spread, catching and trapping energy in the process. And that captured energy will cause the substance of that matter, the cold particles that cause it to be, to rally for its release, scrambling to combine with other particles in whatever way will promote the energy.
There is no other outcome. All of physics, all of reality, all the laws of Nature yet discovered, bow in service to this unceasing agenda.
...including, again, us.
The Last Resort
It is matter's job to get out of energy's way, however it can, as fast as it can. It is energy's job, when it attempts to spread and finds itself thwarted by intervening matter, to infiltrate that matter and do what it must to push through; and, if possible, cause that matter to return to its own natural state – to become energy, when conditions are favorable.
If England's inspiration causes us to reconsider the origins and purpose of life, how does that inform our opinions about whether there's any more of it out there in the universe?
If anything, the England Imperative - Spread Energy! - makes the universe an easier place to understand. We are already very clear on the laws of thermodynamics, and so the imperative isn't exactly a sharp turn. But it casts a new light on our assumption that since we live in a universe where the elements of life are abundant, given uncounted billions of opportunities to occur, life will certainly make many appearances.
The England Imperative strongly suggests that life is only going to arise in places where matter can't easily spread energy in a less complicated way. Energy, interrupted by matter, will push through the path of least resistance; matter, organizing to optimize energy's quest, will only become as complex as it needs to be to accomplish that mission. Put another way, life – as the most complex of matter’s mechanisms for dissipating energy – is a last resort.
A wickedly simple expression of the England Imperative might be an asteroid orbiting a star - composed of pure iron, let's say, and spinning slowly. The area of the asteroid facing the star will absorb energy from the star, then shed it into cold space as it rotates. It is, at most, a very temporary interruption of energy's journey to where. Nothing as intricate as life is necessary for the asteroid to perform its essential energy hand-off.
Even if the asteroid contained the elements of life, it wouldn't matter: because the thermodynamic system of the asteroid is so simple and performs so efficiently, nothing else is needed - and the additional conditions we know to be necessary for life are absent, in any case.
But an amazing thing happens when we begin to add those conditions: we begin to see direct parallels between the conditions required for life and the complexity of the energy capture of the place where it can take root. Put another way, a celestial body of great thermodynamic complexity and a planet that has conditions friendly to the emergence of life are one and the same.
The more thermodynamically complex the planet, the greater its friendliness to the emergence of life.
Using Earth as our only real baseline, we can observe that even with its staggeringly complex thermodynamic systems, life took its sweet time developing here. Once it did, it began doing its job - spreading energy! - and it is no great undertaking to chart the changes in the thermodynamics of the Earth in parallel with the increasing complexity of its emerging biosphere. What had to happen for such a system to emerge was for the planet's thermodynamic complexity to occur in the first place.
Let's examine that complexity briefly.
Complexities
The most famous of the characteristics of a life-bearing planet is that it be a Goldilocks planet. This means the planet exists in its parent star's circumstellar habitable zone (CHZ) - not too close, not too far away - so that its surface can support liquid water. The not-too-close/not-too-far, then, translates to not-too-hot/not-too-cold, in terms of surface temperature.
To have liquid water on its surface, the planet must have atmospheric pressure to hold it in place - and to retain an atmosphere heavy enough for that kind of pressure, it must be impervious to solar winds, which would ordinarily strip away the atmosphere of a planet so close to its star. Earth passes this test (while, for instance, Mars does not), possessing a rotating liquid nickel-iron core (a natural dynamo) that gives the planet a solar radiation-repelling magnetic field. [Venus possesses only a sparse magnetic field, yet holds an atmosphere far denser than Earth's; even so, the consequences of this are life-prohibitive - the solar winds are indeed eroding its upper atmosphere, and that activity has been depleting the planet of low-mass hydrogen and oxygen ions for billions of years, ridding it of all the water it may have originally possessed.]
A planet must also rotate at a certain pace - fast enough to pass heat in the course of rotation such that the surface water doesn't ever get hot enough to boil outright, but slowly enough that some of it evaporates, in order to carry water to land by way of clouds. And its mass must be such that it creates a gravitational field wherein life, once it forms, is secure without being crushed.
These characteristics, in combination, put a planet in an entirely different thermodynamic class than a simple iron asteroid. As the planet rotates, it will catch and release heat, as the asteroid does - but with liquid water on its surface and a gentle thermal cycle, vast amounts of energy will nonetheless be trapped to endlessly cycle between land, sea, and air.
The endless cycling of energy creates for Earth an England problem: the matter contained within this huge thermal vista must further organize and complexify in the service of spreading it. Snowflakes happen; tornadoes spring up.
But even that isn't enough, thermodynamically, to create a need for an energy-spreading mechanism as complex as life.
The Earth traps energy above and beyond storing it in air and water and rocks: it shakes and stirs it like a bartender.
Earth spins on an axis, as all planets do. But the spin of the Earth literally has a twist: the planet's axis is tilted, rather than perpendicular to the solar plane. This is, of course, the basis of the seasons. And the seasons are, almost by definition, the gradual shifting of energy from one planetary region to another, in yet another endless thermal cycle, as it revolves around the sun.
And the shaking and stirring goes further still: even more thermodynamically important than the Earth's axial tilt, perhaps, is the gravitational effects of its oversized moon. At one-quarter the size of the Earth itself, the moon is by far the largest satellite of a planet known to exist, ratio-wise.
The consequence, of course, is the intense tidal forces it brings: the moon churns the planet's oceans, generating still more energy to be trapped in liquid matter. The Earth’s oceans are literally vast reservoirs of energy.
Now the complexity of the Earth has it working overtime to spread energy, because there are so many constantly-interacting systems trapping and re-trapping energy within - and new mechanisms for spreading it must rally to the task. Elements must combine, molecules become more intricate. New systems must interrupt the existing ones, to push against the bulwark of this tense equilibrium.
Now Life emerges. Self-replicating energy couriers of microscopic size, dedicated to scooping up energy from the environment and radiating it out, with far more intensity than a snowflake and far more intricacy than a tornado. A whole new chapter begins, as life interrupts not only the equilibrium of Earth's dancing thermodynamic systems, but their chemical composition as well. Carbon dioxide, methane, and other heat-trapping molecules of the sort that are currently broiling Venus become essential players in this disruption, paradoxically leveraged to solve the problem they themselves create. If Earth was a complicated story before, now it's a James Joyce novel.
And the supreme complexity in the system – life! – serves to introduce new complications that perpetuate the precarious balance between thermodynamic systems, even as they succeed in spreading energy to high heaven. We have named those complications flora and fauna.
In its simplest forms, life is a marvelous dissipative adaptation; even in an incarnation as simple as algae, it absorbs and redistributes energy, using some of it to replicate itself and thereby increase its utility, thus contributing to entropy. And as we've noted above, more sophisticated forms - land-based plant life being a great example - are even more impactful, turning an empty expanse of heat-absorbing dirt into a sprawling, infrared-radiant entropy engine that will spread and spread.
Algae and plants - all forms of life, really – are reorganizations of matter in the service of energy redistribution. But unlike snowflakes and tornadoes and other transitory, one-off mechanisms, living organisms themselves take on the role of energy trap: they collect more energy than their raw materials would, if dissociated, and apply that energy to the purposes of entropy.
And when we get to animal life, the England Imperative gets more creative still: animals don't just absorb solar energy, exploit it, then redistribute it; animals can capture and trap the energy of other living things, other energy traps. They extract the energy of other plants and animals. In this process, entropy is served on yet another level: the animal consumption of other forms of life, in releasing that life's energy, breaks it down - order into chaos - entropy, once again.
This stupendous innovation is remarkable enough in itself. But it gives rise to one of the most unusual features of the Earth's biosphere: the thermodynamically precarious swap of gases between plant life and animal life. Respiration is experienced by plants and animals alike, with plants emitting oxygen and animals emitting carbon dioxide - a complementary accommodation that benefits both, keeping both kingdoms of life in equilibrium. If either kingdom were to vanish from the Earth, the other would be hard-pressed to survive.
And it grows more complicated still: as animal life has taken the lead as both the premiere redistributor of energy on the planet and its most explicit and dedicated hoarder, it simultaneously (and unwittingly) contributes to the planet's entropy interruption: carbon dioxide and methane, the two gases animals emit, are themselves energy traps. They capture and retain heat; when expelled into the atmosphere, they cause the atmosphere itself to hoard more energy than before.
Repurposed
In hindsight, the emergence of life here on Earth seems inevitable; but the take-home point is that the Earth is as thermodynamically different even from planets of comparable size as an internal combustion engine is from a wind-up watch. We are children of the most unlikely of planets. To say that Earth is one in a billion would be almost certainly understate. And, as a side note, the implications of the England Imperative make the ubiquity of complex life in the universe a very distant possibility. It is highly improbable that the universe is teeming with life – which makes the life here on Earth all the more precious.
We can, if England’s theory proves true, employ it as a predictive tool as we venture out into the universe: encountering new worlds, we would estimate the likelihood of finding life or something like it based on the world’s observable energy traps, its thermodynamic complexity. The more straightforward its energy transfer, the less need for an energy dissipation system as intricate as life.
Here on Earth itself, however, it would have been impossible, given the planet's staggering energy burden, for life not to have emerged: our planet is a clogged energy sink, capturing the radiation of the sun and hoarding it shamelessly, passing it from system to system, releasing to the night only what it absolutely can’t permanently ensnare during the day.
The conclusion is simple and profound and deeply disturbing: we are products of entropy interruption. And our purpose, as far as the universe is concerned, is the spreading of energy. We are here only because in this universe, elements combine in the way that most efficiently pushes energy along, and our particular molecules happen to be situated in the mother of all energy traps.
Any purpose beyond that transcends that of the universe - and is entirely ours to define.
Stars are the forges of energy, emitting it endlessly in an effort to warm the void; planets are interrupters of that entropy; and we are, ironically, planetary disrupters.
We are both agents of and disruptors of entropy. We, the highest form of life, having emerged as reality's champions of energy dissipation, are uniquely positioned to seize the reins of energy distribution – and have already begun doing so, in the order we have created for ourselves out of the raw materials of the Earth. As self-directed entropy engines, we can use our power to increase the interruption of entropy in the service of order, redirecting the dissipation of energy in a manner that complements our industry as the gases of plants and animals complement one another. We can refine our powers of disruption, redirect the role of matter, and leverage entropy's chaos as a means, not an end.
We can, put simply, repurpose the universe.
Origin, indeed...
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