Is Life Special Just Because It’s Rare?

Of course not.

Shuffle a deck of cards. If you did it properly, the new arrangement is unique. No deck of cards has ever been arranged like that before, and none will ever again, unless you deliberately preserve it.

I just drew a scribble on a post-it note. Nobody else has a scribble quite like it, or ever will again, after I throw it away.

Every time a snowflake melts, something beautiful and unique is lost forever.

None of these things are special, unless you're using a really weird meaning of "special".

You can say that they might be unique, but they're sufficiently similar to other things that they might as well not be - but what distance metric are you using? You're using one shaped by your own values, which say that one human is special even in the presence of another seven billion humans, but that one snowflake is unimportant in the presence of another seven billion.

It might be that rareness is a prerequisite of specialness. It's not the only factor.

The trick lies in the fact that life forms have no obvious boundary. The fact that two creatures are two creatures, and not just a single creature is something that is just endowed to them by us humans. If one of the creatures dies, does it really die, or does the combination of the two creatures just loses half of its brain cells? That second view is just as valid. Hence, in that second view, nothing really ever dies; we (i.e., the universe) just lose brain cells. And, of course, we gain them as well.

When I was in school, we knew of no extra-solar planets. Now that we know how to look, they seem to be everywhere. Similarly, I suspect life will turn out to be common once we can send probes to the places that could harbour them.

Intelligent life might well be an order-of-magnitude rarer, and life intelligent enough to be detectable by SETI rarer still. (And we could well be the most advanced civilization in our light cone -- someone has to be.)

Life is special because it's complex. Modern human society on Earth is the most complex thing in the history of the known universe. Complex things, though, tend to be very fragile.

(paraphrased from David Christian's "Big History" Great Courses lecture)

I always find these type of questions specious and entirely dependent on frame of reference for both question and response.

Our language and conceptions evolved specifically to do important things like inform companions under which trees the most delicious nuts could be found and remember where the hidden tiger was sleeping.

"Special" and "Rare" in these primitive contexts (which is all we really have right now) don't mean anything objectively nor on a cosmic scale (of which we know very little incidentally). So the whole question is just.... off.

I think this statement nails it: "we are imprisoned within our own cosmos of meaning. We cannot imagine a universe without meaning. We are not talking necessarily about some grand cosmic meaning, or a divine meaning bestowed by God, or even a lasting, eternal meaning. "

"Special" is a human construct. If something is special, it's because we say it is. Life has no relevance to anything beyond that which we ascribe to it.

Unless, of course, you believe that life was designed according to some kind of grand design. But even that presupposes that we mortals have a chance of understanding an intelligence that can shape reality. I'm sceptical any human interpretation of 'special' in that context is useful.

Reality just is. It has no moral weight.

If 1) we are part of the universe, and 2) we generate meaning, then 3) we are the meaning generators of the universe. The universe is meaningless only when we look out and ignore life, and ignore ourselves. But the universe has us, and has life. We are significant, not because we are more important, but simply for being a part of it all. We exist. We're here. That say's it all.

The moment we tied the emergence of what we perceived as metaphysical to something physical, it all became physical and the ghosts disappeared along with the word metaphysics from our sciences. The mind-body duality was non-scientific.

The same can be done with the exceptional view on life. The moment we tie the emergence of what we perceive as special to everything mundane, it all becomes mundane, and life is no longer special. Special is subjective. If we concede to the emergence of life from non-life, then it's either all non-life, or it's all life -- or we could decide to call it something else.

Much of the awe we express through pieces like this can be attributed to the fact that sheer scale still never fails to baffle us. Distance, complexity, time, and probability all become "dramatic" once they become intuitively disproportionate. But the universe as a whole is just as complex as it is, and pointing to two places and comparing their complexity says nothing about the capacity of the universe. The universe is huge, it's old, it's chaotic, and everything in it is rare. But baffled it is not. Or rather, it is, just through us.

In this universe, for whatever its nature happens to be, where laws of entropy realize themselves relentlessly and indefinitely to increase chaos forever, bit by bit; where everything left to rot will eventually turn into pieces, shards, and break apart into dust there is―I might say―a force, or at least a mechanism―again, whether guided or scientifically spontaneous―that is working its way on the same river as this destructive chaos but to the exactly opposite direction of the downstream where, as shattered pieces of existence and remnants of structure, chaos is slowly but endlessly flowing down.

This force is what we call life and this force is of the nature that it just keeps pushing itself against all the natural destruction that is inherently prevalent in this world. This force constructs and maintains growth, structure, and produces organisms that are enough in some balance―chemical, physical, maybe spiritual, who knows―to survive further.

The force will push through the slightest openings in this river which is chaos, and just keeps growing and growing despite being forever torn down, consumed, and worn by the elements of entropy at the same time. This force, when put down and extinquished in one place will again and again remanifest itself in another place, and continues to create and grow against all the odds and the universal tendency for any space and matter to cool down and energy to return to the lowest possible potential.

Life is nothing but rare. If we blew up this planet into smithereens, I wonder, why would that force that is life stop swimming upstream at the very once? Why would it not reappear elsewhere? Some might say that the live organisms would just die with the Earth, but what started it here? Why wouldn't it emerge again elsewhere just like it did here?

If the force is divine it will exist somewhere regardless of the physical circumstances, merely waiting for a new opening in the physical world; if the force is not divine, then maybe it's some internal counter stream, an energy flow, in the the universe itself, where one part of the energy flows towards chaotic stillness but where the other part flows back into motion and higher potential: while entropy reduces the energy in action the potential must increase somewhere else, as energy cannot disappear. Or maybe you might choose consider the divine to be the universe itself―about that I cannot say a word. But there is something that makes this thing called life opt-in to this world where everything else keeps crumbling to pieces.

If that force is not special in itself, given the setting, then I don't know what is.

This reminds me of a quote from Six Feet Under:

Widow: "Why do people have to die?"

Nate Fischer: "To make life important. None of us know how long we've got, which is why we have to make each day matter."

Are we looking for non-carbon based life? Is it possible that we fail to recognize life simply because it is so far apart from our idea of life?

Is life special?