Thought experiment: Consider the span of history from early humans to today? Is it progress? Or do you believe that progress does not exist? That for every gain something of equal value is lost? This is not a meaningless question. The fundamental battle between stasis, decline, and progress is an ancient one.

Breakeven at best but, more likely, endless decline may be the way the universe works. That would comport with physics. That entropy / disorder is always increasing. And that any increase in order is usually random and always temporary.

If that is the case, if the main goal of physics is maximum entropy, then “life” — that is, all of life on earth — is the most successful, durable, and scalable anti-entropy system in the universe. At least as far as we know.

What does this mean, an “anti-entropy system?” Especially a durable, adaptive, and scalable one?

It means, I think, the ability of an organism to use physical reality to enable its own survival and replication. Like a little machine, life’s ability to take energy and matter and build something that lives, replicates and adapts may be unique in the universe.

More startlingly, “anti-entropy” means the ability to counteract one of the most inviolable principles of physics, at least for a time, at least in a place. To organize matter and energy into a little neighborhood of increased order.

This ability, to self-replicate, also appears to be very fundamental in the world. Anywhere the ability to capture, store and re-use information is developed, according to computer models, replicating “beings” emerge and evolution begins.

When these two fundamental realities come into conflict, which dominates? Does the inexorable dissipation of order assert primacy? Or does the ability to understand the world, including rules about dissipation of order, win out?

In the first case, we likely arrive at something the physicists call “Heat Death,” a scenario for the end of the universe predicted by many based on achievement of maximum entropy. Heat Death is an end state of all matter in which all the suns and concentrations of energy dissipate into space until there is not enough available energy to “move an electron or to think a thought” (Thanks, Brian Greene!). Imagine a giant yellow blanket smothering the universe into stasis. At that point human observation and learning about material reality comes to an end.

My couch and I are familiar with this state of being.

Alternatively, knowledge, as David Deutsch has said, is an “emerging and powerful force in the universe.” A force of unknown potential, with the ability to bend physical reality in ways not yet imagined. “Life,” for example, has been gaining knowledge for 4 billion years and has remade a planet. Humans have simply taken that knowledge creation to new heights of speed and creativity. Who knows what might be next?

Galactic domination might be fun, but I’m not convinced.

Perhaps the end of this branch of the universe is the emergence of a being with such knowledge and power as to become disconnected from this version of material reality and able to explore other parts of the multiverse. We just don’t know! Simulation theory tells us that such a complete understanding of underlying reality eventually becomes indistinguishable from itself. That “we” might become an indistinguishable element of reality.

To be one with the universe, one might say.

Now, we fight it out

The only way to answer this question is to run the experiment: “In the red trunks, the known laws of physics (raises a gloved fist). And in the white trunks, humanity and the ability to learn (taps gloved fist to their heart). Shake hands and come out fighting.

These are the stakes. The outcome is in our hands. All we have to do is continue the experiment, infinitely into the future, doing what we do best and what comes naturally: to learn about ourselves, each other and our place in the world.

Further good news is that, while this is a difficult task, and extraordinary events and people play extraordinary roles, all that is required from most of us is to live a life, an ordinary life, steering toward the good as best we can.

It may be that some of us will be called upon to do extraordinary things, but most of the rest of us will be simply doing what we can with what we’ve got. I personally lack the courage, strength, or conviction, of an MLK or Alexei Navalny, I’m pretty sure.

I hope not to be tested.

I could go on, but I am expected back on planet earth now. My next notes will have a more substantial toe-hold on actual reality, usually.