Some fundamental truths don’t bear thinking about. It is a sublime accident that we are here at all. We are all prisoners of the second law of thermodynamics, on a journey towards ever greater entropy. It is just your luck and mine that part of that universal trajectory from Big Bang to ultimate and inescapable cold and darkness includes an episode in which a little of the inexorable increase in disorder is here and there temporarily reversed, and sustained complexity – the sun, planets, you, me, trees and your friendly neighbourhood cosmic physicist – becomes possible.
Life is a process, an emergent property of this complexity. Atoms are in no sense alive, but collectively our constituent atoms shape the very special assemblies called you and me. Life may not be a vital spark, but it has been defined by one Nobel laureate as “nothing but a free electron looking for a place to rest”. And life does have purpose, according to one geochemist: “The purpose of life is to hydrogenate carbon dioxide.”
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