Mitchell Phillips

“Biological systems are a chemical inevitability in the right circumstances. There is, of course, something special about life—I won’t take that away from it—but it is a chemical process, a dynamic, kinetic stability that exists, as your scientists have said, “far from thermodynamic equilibrium.” You don’t have to understand this or believe me, but life is fairly common in both time and space. It is not special, nor is it particularly fragile. The best measure I have of the size and complexity of a biosphere is calories of energy captured per square meter per year. Higher is more impressive, and always more beautiful, but this measures nothing of the creation of a system like humanity. For that, my awakened mind categorizes systems by bytes of information transmitted. This will sound to you like it’s a relatively new phenomenon on your planet, but it’s not. Even pelagibacter transmit information, if only to daughter cells. Ants spray pheromones, bees dance, birds sing—all of these are comparatively low-bandwidth systems for communication. But your system caused an inflection point. The graph of data flow switched from linear to exponential growth. Maybe you would call this system “humanity,” but I wouldn’t. It is not just a collection of individuals; it is also a collection of ideas stored inside of individuals and objects and even ideas inside ideas. If that seems like a trivial difference to you, well, I guess I can forgive you since you do not know what the rest of the universe looks like. Collections of individuals are beautiful, but they are as common as pelagibacter. Collections of ideas are veins of gold in our universe. They must be cherished and protected. My parents, whoever and whatever they were, gave me knowledge of many systems—it was locked in my code before I was sent here to self-assemble—and the only thing I can tell you about systems like yours is that they are rare because they are unstable. Dynamite flows through their veins. A single solid jolt and they’re gone. If my data sets are accurate, you are rare, fragile, and precious.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor