Article Why everything in the universe turns more complex

[C C]

https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-every...-20250402/

EXCERPT: Many answers to Fermi’s “paradox” have been proposed: Maybe alien civilizations burn out or destroy themselves before they can become interstellar wanderers. But perhaps the simplest answer is that such civilizations don’t appear in the first place: Intelligent life is extremely unlikely, and we pose the question only because we are the supremely rare exception.

A new proposal by an interdisciplinary team of researchers challenges that bleak conclusion. They have proposed nothing less than a new law of nature, according to which the complexity of entities in the universe increases over time with an inexorability comparable to the second law of thermodynamics — the law that dictates an inevitable rise in entropy, a measure of disorder. If they’re right, complex and intelligent life should be widespread.

In this new view, biological evolution appears not as a unique process that gave rise to a qualitatively distinct form of matter — living organisms. Instead, evolution is a special (and perhaps inevitable) case of a more general principle that governs the universe. According to this principle, entities are selected because they are richer in a kind of information that enables them to perform some kind of function... (MORE - details)

[Magical Realist]

Finally, Wong said, “information itself might be a vital parameter of the cosmos, similar to mass, charge and energy.”

Well the history of mankind over the past 10,000 years certainly is one of seemingly accelerating complexification of information. The whole domain of collective human culture and knowledge is rapidly evolving new games and new rules for those games leading to new vistas of never before possibilities. It would be gratifying to know that all this is being inevitably driven by some as yet undiscovered fundamental property of the universe. Information? Mindness? Consciousness itself? We can only speculate...

https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27068

"Today, students of the Anthropocene can date when the Noösphere became the primary driver of change on the surface of planet earth. It was in the middle of the 20th century. So Vernadsky got it more or less right. The sphere of mind joined the pantheon of planet-shaping spheres just over fifty years ago. In just a century or two, the Noösphere has taken its place alongside the other great shapers of our planet’s history: cosmos, earth and life."

"Thus since the advent of man, a new habitat has been opened up to evolving life, a habitat of thought: for this I shall use Teilhard de Chardin’s term, the noosphere, until someone invents something better. This covering of the earth’s sphericity with a thinking envelope, whose components are interacting with a steadily rising intensity, is now generating a powerful psycho-social pressure favouring a solution of least effort, by way of integration in a unitary organisation of ideas and beliefs. But this will not happen automatically: it can only be achieved by a large-scale co-operative exercise of human reason and imagination."---Julian Huxley

"The great Jesuit anthropologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, has long fascinated us with his vision that the world would evolve into a “noosphere,” [1] a great web of consciousness enveloping the Earth. It seemed a lovely but distant ideal, yet the Digital Revolution has now made that dream a reality. The noosphere is here today, and it promises to transform our lives, our work, social institutions, the global order, and our very minds and souls.

Not too long ago, we relied on telephones and newspapers to communicate. We now use two billion personal computers, 14 billion cell phones and laptops, and two billion TVs. The information flows through 30 million Internet servers, 3,500 space satellites and almost one million miles of undersea cables. This planetary layer of digital connection knits eight billion people into a living overlay of thought – the noosphere.

Although the world has an abundance of communication, it is not a very happy place. Just as the Gutenberg printing press unleashed a flood of information that led to wars and the Protestant Reformation, today’s deluge of knowledge has not stemmed a “post-factual” wave of nonsense, government gridlock, raging pandemics, the climate crisis and other global threats. I suggest that a “global consciousness” able to handle such threats is likely to emerge soon. But, in the meantime, the noosphere has highlighted the limits of knowledge."---- https://www.kosmosjournal.org/kj_article...e-is-here/