Great summary with interesting comments. However I have a doubt: The author posits that the goal of life is to dissipate solar energy. Say by living a life, we are dissipating solar energy but the things we do while living just “transforms” the energy into something else but the net energy remains constant. If we drop water on the floor then it gets dissipated into heat but the net energy is same in the universe with that water just changing its state.
From the perspective of earth, it is definately throwing up “extra” energy it can’t consume. From the perspective of universe, the energy remains constant.
So perhaps a better way to think about this is that life is an interplay of energies going on ad-infinitum. This line of thinking implies that life is not a big conspiracy for “wasting” solar energy. It is more like a creative game where life and death have no meaning in itself but only as an inevitable infinite cosmic game. It surely doesn’t sound so pessimistic this way.
Great summary with interesting comments. However I have a doubt: The author posits that the goal of life is to dissipate solar energy. Say by living a life, we are dissipating solar energy but the things we do while living just “transforms” the energy into something else but the net energy remains constant. If we drop water on the floor then it gets dissipated into heat but the net energy is same in the universe with that water just changing its state.
From the perspective of earth, it is definately throwing up “extra” energy it can’t consume. From the perspective of universe, the energy remains constant.
So perhaps a better way to think about this is that life is an interplay of energies going on ad-infinitum. This line of thinking implies that life is not a big conspiracy for “wasting” solar energy. It is more like a creative game where life and death have no meaning in itself but only as an inevitable infinite cosmic game. It surely doesn’t sound so pessimistic this way.