The purpose of life, from a cosmic perspective
The universe is dying.
If you’ve been paying attention, this isn’t really news. We’ve known it for a while. And truth be told, it’s hardly an urgent issue: the old girl still has (depending on which theory you ascribe to) at least 5 billion years of gas in the tank — probably quite a few billions more. But regardless, the Second Law of Thermodynamics is still driving us down a one way road, the end of which still seems to be total cosmic entropy.
Now, at first glance that piece of information doesn’t seem to have much to do with the purpose of life, much less the purpose of your life in particular. So what am I going on about? Well, let’s dig a little deeper and I promise we’ll find ourselves circling back around to this.
The question we’re looking at is this: does life have a purpose? Do we human beings have a purpose in this dying universe? I believe we do. And while I certainly can’t tell you what your individual purpose may be in the grand scheme of things, if you come with me on this 1600 word journey, I hope when we arrive you’ll have a little more context for discovering your individual purpose within the larger one I propose here.
So. How do we discover a thing’s purpose? Let’s start with a simple example: that a hammer’s purpose is to pound nails becomes eminently clear as soon as you see it in action. From that we can understand that knowing the purpose of a thing requires looking at what it does. Likewise, in order to understand the purpose of life, we have to look at what life does.
But it can be difficult to get perspective on what a thing does when you’re inside that thing looking out. Observing from the outside, it’s obviously much easier for us to determine a hammer’s purpose that it is for the hammer to look at itself and divine its own purpose. Unfortunately, we don’t have this luxury with life; we’re stuck right in the middle of it for as long as we’re alive. And while a hammer might be able to find some other hammers to observe, life on this earth is the only life we’ve seen so far in this universe. We don’t have any comparable examples.
Because of this, in order to try to understand life’s purpose, we have to try to gain a different perspective on it — to look at it from the outside, or to compare it to other things that exist in our neighborhood.
Take stars, for instance; we have one nearby. What is a star’s purpose? Like with the hammer, we can determine a star’s purpose by looking at what it does: fuses hydrogen into heavier elements. Stars are the universe’s heavy element factories. This is their purpose.
What about planets? Some of the heavy elements produced by ancient stars have fallen into our sun’s gravity well and, over billions of years, have formed the eight planets of our solar system. Each of these planets contains a different mix of elements, and each of them is a constantly changing landscape, just like our earth. Speaking of earth, it is the one planet in our solar system that has done something: produced life. Who knows if, in the millions of years remaining in our solar system, another planet or moon will produce a similar result (or — in the case of some of the moons of Jupiter and their subsurface oceans — has already)? Each planet, with its unique qualities — elements, volume, gravity, orbital distance, and so on — has some greater or lesser chance to produce a replicating molecule of some kind, giving rise to life. But given a long enough time frame, it seems inevitable that many planets will do so. Planets are factories that produce life. This is their purpose.
And so we arrive back at life, conveniently with a couple nearby examples in hand for comparison. What does life produce? Most obviously, it produces more life, but this is not necessarily interesting or unique, since it could also be said that it is merely the planet in question continuing to produce that life. If we look just a little more closely, we see one possible — and very interesting — result: consciousness. There are all sorts of different varieties of consciousness that have arisen from earth’s diverse life. And, given the vast numbers of stars and solar systems out there in the universe, the probability of some of them producing different forms of life, and therefore different forms of consciousness, borders on certainty. So, life is a factory that produces consciousness. This is its purpose.
Which answers our initial question, though it’s not a particularly satisfying answer. “Really? I’m just here to produce consciousness? That doesn’t even make sense!” But this realization should suggest to us that our initial question might not have been what we really wanted to know (and it does raise an interesting question for a potential future article: Is consciousness something we are? or something we do?). In any case, now we must ask ourselves, “what is my purpose as a conscious being?”
To answer that, let’s return to our initial discussion of entropy.
When we gaze up at the black of the night sky — which represents only the tiniest portion of the vast darkness of the entire universe — the idea that entropy is slowly eating away at everything seems sensible. After all, what we see up there is made of mostly nothing, and that mostly nothing is spread out over an incomprehensibly enormous amount of space.
And yet, sprinkled throughout this blackness, we see those little pinpricks of light we’re all familiar with, and each of them represents an organized resistance to the slow decay of the surrounding universe. Little bubbles of order show up all over the place — billions of them, in fact.
These stars — many of which have planets, a few of which may have life, some of which could have produced consciousness — are pockets of space where something incredible is happening. In the midst of the slow decay of the universe, and apparently in contradiction to it, new things are being created: new stars, new planets, new life, new consciousnesses. (Some very rough math on this: if there are 10²³ planets in the universe, and 1 in a billion of them has produced life, and 1 in a billion of those planets with life has produced consciousness, there are a million different planets with consciousness on them out there right now, not even counting those that may produce it in the future.) Each of these consciousnesses is looking out at the universe and asking questions, learning about entropy, formulating a Second Law of Thermodynamics in their own equivalent of language. So while the universe itself may not be a conscious thing, parts of it certainly are, and likely more and more of them as time passes.
So what might these consciousnesses conclude as they look up at the night sky? What purpose might they divine for themselves when they look at the stars, planets, and other life in their neighborhood, as we have done here?
This is what I see: Gravity creates stars. Stars create heavy elements and their gravity captures and creates planets. Planets create life. Life creates consciousness.
Gravity creates. Stars create. Planets create. Life creates. Consciousness, too, then, must exist to create.
And what is all this creation in service of? Why, staving off entropy, of course! Holding back the encroaching darkness of the night sky. We conscious beings are partners with the stars and planets and life and consciousnesses across the universe in creating new things, bringing new ideas into reality, resisting entropy. Caring about our dying universe. Perhaps one day one of these million consciousnesses will create the idea that will extend the life of our universe, as a doctor does for her patient.
What if all acts of creation were merely practice for saving the universe?
What if music, language, controlled fire, cooking, visual art, tools and simple machines like the wheel, clothing, agriculture, domesticated animals, writing, government, religion, justice, sanitation, mathematics, engineering, philosophy, history, fiction, science, journalism, photography, radio, television, computers, the internet, smart phones, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, particle accelerators and increasingly powerful telescopes and detectors of all kinds were simply steps in a cosmic footrace against entropy?
If so, we need your creativity, too — and your work. We need you to bring the ideas in your head into reality, whether they be artistic or scientific or philosophical or spiritual. We need you for two reasons: first, because it is only by continuing the work of our species that we will have the chance to realize the potential we have in the universe; and second, because, just as a star that does not burn is no star, a consciousness that does not create is not conscious. Creating makes us more fully human, gives us purpose.
We are a part of one small bubble of order within a slowly disintegrating cosmos. All around us others shine dimly in the night sky; they would certainly be brighter but for the vast distances between us.
As eons pass, those lights will begin to wink out, one at a time. Stars will burn up the last of their fuel, planets will be released into the void, black holes will consume more and more of the flesh of the universe before they dissolve into nothingness. Perhaps before the end, our descendants, or the descendants of some conscious species out there circling one of those other lights in the night sky, will come up with the idea that will stop it, that will bring entropy to an end, that will reinforce the walls of their bubble of order to such an extent that they will never fall.
Carl Sagan famously said, “we are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” I think it’s more than that: we are a way for the cosmos to shape its own destiny.
Being a part of a story like that is purpose enough for me.
Hi there! This was a difficult article to write. It was not an idea I’ve encountered before, so I spent many weeks typing, arranging, and retyping in an attempt to order my thoughts in a coherent and compelling way. If you appreciated it, please 👏 or comment. If you disliked it or disagree with me, please share your thoughts. The worst result of all the work I put into this is NO feedback. So please, positive or negative, in whatever way you choose: say something. Thank you.
