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Selection itself as an entropy reducer Here we're looking not directly at Ilya Prigogine's Nobel Prize-winning findings that complex systems under some conditions, instead of disintegrating into meaningless rubble, actually explode into higher forms of order. Instead, we go back to the simple example in classical thermodynamics where, by pouring a glass of hot water and a glass of cold water into a bucket, what you have and all that you can pour back into the two glasses is luke-warm water. The hot and cold molecules of water have randomized their distribution. Only if you have someone or some agency acting as a selective gate, passing hot molecules in one direction and cold molecules in the other, can you restore orderi.e., hot and cold concentrationsto that system. Some further implication can be sensed in all of this when we put together the tendency of conditions to evolve life into coping successfully with wider and more differentiated sets of conditions. Put that tendency together with several other interesting phenomena Evolution of intelligence. ![]()
Earth can be counted as average not because we are here and therefore where we're looking from has to be the middle. Rather, periods of many millions of years of unchanging conditions are inefficient in evolution; as are also those catastrophes which undo so much of the preceding sophistication. So out of the huge variety of conditions obtaining throughout the Universe, there have to be settings more efficient or faster in giving rise to these universal tendencies than those of our Earth, just as obviously there must be many, many places even where life is flourishing that must have settings less efficient, slower. (It also appears that most of the "missing" mass or dark matter of the Universe may actually be comprised of planets, ranging from the planetesimal to "brown dwarf," though most of these are wandering lifelessly in the cold of interstellar spacea marvelous resource for some future technology to develop!)Nor are we limited to planetary environs as the habitat for life to evolve and flourish. Even within the range of what we recognize to be organic, huge interstellar clouds of organic compounds, each aggregating more mass than the Earth itself, are to be found almost everywhere in space. Infinitely evolving. ![]() (It seems we might not have to assume God or a god creating the Universe in order to come up with the possibility that, even if the Universe in the beginning did not have a universal being as part of the picture, one emerged long since.)Take to infinity such tendencies as not only intelligence but the taking into account of more and more factors, and survival over a wider and wider range of conditions either overwhelming all environments or finding more and more supportive and mutually supportive ecological ways to involve with all environments, and at this late juncture we here still exist! and the general mutually-supportive tendencies which move specific species from predation and parasitism toward symbiosis. Can this be love? Or are we a farm, and what's getting harvested? If we can put aside some old and emotional assumptions and do some fresh thinking on fresh data, we might obtain some useful or even practical insights. We don't even have to go to such ultimate(?) levels to find ourselves neck-deep in some pretty large considerations. And that brings us toward the general situation which the title of this exploration reflects: the general strangification of everything in the Universe. ![]() |
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