What is the Purpose of Life? (Big Picture Ep. 5/5)
This video is about how life arose and what its main function or purpose in the universe seems to be. Thanks to http://www.audible.com/minutephysics for supporting this video, and to Sean Carroll...
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Astrobiologist Michael Russell once said that “the purpose of life is to hydrogenate carbondioxide.”Or as Nobel prize-winning physiologist Albert Szent-Györgyi put it, “life is nothingbut an electron looking for a place to rest.”While these aphorisms might not capture the “meaning of life” that most of us lookfor, their point is that living organisms ultimately depend on and facilitate the universe’stendency to increase entropy.That may seem counter-intuitive, since living beings are themselves highly organized, whileentropy is a measure of disorder.But as we know, complexity is not the same thing as order.Every organism, just by living and breathing, acts to increase the entropy of the universe.Think of a photon arriving from the Sun, packed with u...
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Astrobiologist Michael Russell once said that “the purpose of life is to hydrogenate carbondioxide.”Or as Nobel prize-winning physiologist Albert Szent-Györgyi put it, “life is nothingbut an electron looking for a place to rest.”While these aphorisms might not capture the “meaning of life” that most of us lookfor, their point is that living organisms ultimately depend on and facilitate the universe’stendency to increase entropy.That may seem counter-intuitive, since living beings are themselves highly organized, whileentropy is a measure of disorder.But as we know, complexity is not the same thing as order.Every organism, just by living and breathing, acts to increase the entropy of the universe.Think of a photon arriving from the Sun, packed with u...
