What if the search for life in the universe is really a search for how the cosmos computes? That’s the intriguing, and perhaps unsettling, possibility that we are exploring as a part of our quest to find out whether or not we are alone.
Since the beginnings of our scientific understanding of genetic inheritance in the 1800s and our discovery of molecules like DNA and RNA in the 1900s, we’ve seen that life is informational in nature. There is a “code” of sorts at the heart of living things. It’s a hugely complex code for sure, a code that constantly rewrites itself on the fly and isn’t structured like our digital inventions, but we see it running across the wet, carbon-based biochemistry that pervades the Earth. And just like the manufacture and use of your power-hungry PC or game console, that biosphere reworks the planet, making it a Gaian machine of water and oxygen, nitrogen and carbon.
That planetary reworking is something we might look for with telescopes like JWST, but it’s a scientific struggle to fit all the pieces together to know what a planet and its life can become together. Critical questions revolve around how climate and geophysics provide an environment that can support life, and how life gets its energy and its essential chemical ingredients, and what it does with those.
Seeing biology as information might offer some answers. Independently, since the 1940s and the work of scientists like Claude Shannon, we’ve learned that information theory and the physics of thermodynamics are, in essence, one and the same way to describe the world. Information is always represented in matter—by 1s and 0s, or by one molecular bond or another—and information can in turn change matter’s configurations. But it takes energy to make change, and so information and energy are endlessly swapping back and forth, all described by the laws of thermodynamics.
Pull these threads together, and life begins to look like information controlling matter to propagate. And that happens through processes that we would call computation—the shuffling and combination and recombination of information through algorithms that are themselves written in that same information. It’s a mind-blowing, weed-smoking trip to contemplate. It also provides an extraordinary way to connect life and its habitats.
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