Seven Secular Sermons, Part 2: The Games of Entropy

So, being dust, what lets us live? What raises us above the countless, mindless, primitive raw atoms, we're made of?

Transcript

So,

Being dust,

What lets us live,

What raises us above the countless,

Mindless,

Primitive,

Raw atoms we're made of?

There is no life within this dust.

Most specks remain unchanged from back in ancient stars.

It must be how they are arranged.

Each human we have ever seen,

Each beast,

Each bird,

Each tree,

We all are atoms that have been arranged amazingly.

All these arrangements,

Big and small,

Might well inspire mirth in us,

Surrounded by them all,

The greatest show on earth.

There's more to learn in nature than is found in any book,

And it appears more alien the closer that we look.

Below the surfaces we see,

The skin and scales and bark,

The cycles of biology are working in the dark.

Right now,

Our lungs take oxygen out of the air we share.

Our hearts and blood streams take it,

Then,

And pump it everywhere.

If we zoom closer,

We can see our lungs to be a place where in a dance of chemistry our breath and blood embrace.

We are built from many works of art,

From organs that combine small tissues,

Each a special part with intricate design.

Now each such tissue then contains innumerable cells,

And here inside each cell again are tiny organelles.

Within all forms of life we see,

There is hidden vastly more bewildering complexity that must inspire awe.

The stars we see through telescopes are big and bright and far,

But we find life through microscopes yet more spectacular.

In fact,

There is more complexity in one small butterfly than we see in the galaxy out there beyond the sky.

All living things we've ever seen are built from living cells.

Each cell is like a small machine comprised of chemicals.

In all ourselves,

There is utterly infinitesimal molecular machinery.

They are nano-technical.

Still zooming closer,

We just find a multiplicity of ancient atoms that are kind of bouncing randomly.

The static things we think we know are maps.

The territory has constant and chaotic flow beneath the shapes we see.

It's here right now,

As close to us as anything can be.

The movements of the specks of dust shape our reality.

The randomness in what they do we call their entropy,

And its domain is where into our lives have come to be.

It disassembles all that thing unless they can outgrow its ceaseless,

Blind disordering and spread within its flow.

It moves the dust and lets it start to join the gain or dance of molecules that fall apart or last a while by chance.

So hydrogen and oxygen join water,

Which can gain entropic warmth that makes it then play games of cloud and rain.

Where entropy is less intense,

These drops will crystallize and dance the longer,

Slower dance of snowflakes and of ice.

Inside our cell,

We feel right now our living,

Breathing form to be and to remain somehow comparatively warm.

Our atoms lost the stellar heat and left behind the cold of empty space.

In warmth we meet.

In warmth does life unfold.

For heat destroys all forms and flows that chance may introduce,

While cold does not select for those that work and reproduce.

In warmth the growing randomness of entropy can be just right for the profound finesse of biochemistry.

Warmth such as ours makes atoms stay a little restless,

So they bump into each other's way,

React and change and grow.

With carbon in particular,

Reactions are not rare,

But the majority by far do not lead anywhere.

Yet chemical reactions need mere moments to be done and let the dust join games that lead to others further on.

So given lots of time,

Mere chad must sometimes foreordain that specks of dust will start to dance along reaction chain.

Around four billion years ago,

On earth a warm,

Wet sphere,

Reaction chain began to grow the paths that led us here.

In chains of random chemistry,

The molecules that they unite can in their unity join bigger games to play.

In sum,

The flow of molecules could circle and arrive in lasting cycles that grew tools to multiply and thrive.

In them,

The games that entropy forever plays have come to let emerge biology that all of us grew from.

We are built from this,

From cyclical and still ongoing games of atoms and of chemicals that do not know our names.

These games take place in everything,

In every breath we take,

Are trillions of them happening.

All cells in us partake.

A cell is what we call games far too numerous to count,

Sustaining one shared reservoir that holds the whole amount.

Here,

Games that build each other spin a membrane to engulf them all.

A greater game begins,

A game that builds itself.

Though molecules can't learn or feel,

The cells they joined into have learned to sense and eat and heal as in us now they do.

The games inside them match and fit each other.

They create each other's necessary bits and thus self-replicate.

The largest DNA has space like memory to hold stored information.

That's a place for new game to unfold.

From codes that self-store in there stem large hosts of proteins that build us here to carry them.

We call these codes our gene.

Cells need to harvest energy to fight their slow decay by ever-present entropy and thus keep death at bay.

Some games can help the cells with this,

Hence some cells now include microbial photosynthesis that harvests light as food.

Cells work so well that everywhere we look now they are found,

On every surface,

In the air and deep within the ground.

They are the winners that remain.

The losers are all dead.

Life born to entropy's domain must die if it can't spread.

These cells competing,

Growing rife for countless years on end,

Turned earth into this ball of life to which we now attend.

Once single cells were all there was,

But some of them became much bigger forms of life because they joined still greater game.

In unity they found new ways to gain more energy and grow within the fertile space we humans call the sea.

With size,

Forestalling entropy becomes much more complex.

But life invented,

Brilliantly,

A game that does it—sex.

Sex tests and recombines the genes that parents contribute,

Makes novel progeny and screens resulting attributes.

And genes that happen to succeed in making progeny will travel in them and proceed through time and entropy.

In each of us,

Now breathing here,

Are genes that long have gone through many generations.

We're built just to pass them on.

And entropy remains at play.

All life that it has bred,

However complex,

Must obey its rule that things must spread.

To do this,

Cells must organize and function as a whole.

So they have nerves which harmonize their work on common goal.

One common goal is to explore new places which is why some sea-born creatures left for moor,

For land and for the sky.

And thus arose the multitude of Earth's whole biosphere that fills us with this gratitude we feel for living here.

Yet now the human species shapes this world.

And that transpires because a recent bunch of apes played cooking food on fires.

This gave them much more energy.

And they could use these gains to breed descendants such as we,

With big and playful brains.

With playful brains we understand the gains of entropy that played us into being and can play them consciously.

With growing knowledge we can trace all aspects of our lives to gains that built the mental space wherein this knowledge thrives.

At every scale we see again so many things that draw upon each other.

We might then think that's design or law.

And yet no law or plan exists.

Mere chaos has let on each scale some lucky gains processed that others built upon.

Now we join into greater gains that may outlast us all,

Including laws and wealth and claims of states that rise and fall.

Great gains like science or the arts or cities or machines we hope will help their human parts,

Like bodies help their genes.

And in a sense we all are one gigantic global game of interplaying games begun without a plan or aim.

That's true.

And yet one brain can't grasp it all.

It's too immense.

One can but try and fail and gasp at life's magnificence.

So human brains invented speech and writing to transport what brains would want to share and teach each other useful thoughts.

By sharing thoughts we operate like large connected minds that ponder and accumulate the knowledge that we find.

The thoughts we share help harmonize our work on common goals and join in ways to organize the knowledge we control.

This knowledge helps us build new games that let us dive and fly and even let us ride on flames to pierce the waiting sky.

We humans know there's so much more surrounding earth,

The stars.

We're curious and can't ignore how unexplored they are.

The games of entropy coerce us still.

We must diffuse to roam this playground universe and put it all to use.

One day self-replicating ships will from this earth be hurled to leave on interstellar trips and spread from world to world.

In but a short few million years such ships can easily spread many daughter biospheres throughout the galaxy.

And yet no other life comes here.

The sky we watch looks still.

No life is spreading.

Maybe we're the only life that will.

But probably out there we'll meet life stranger than our own.

Life made from something else than meat.

By games as yet unknown.

And all we'll find and understand can join in what will be still greater cosmic truly grand new games of entropy.

One day all worlds our ships can reach shall learn to live and care.

For we have many games to teach to all the dust out there.

Reviews

Lovely verse about the universe…

Very poetic. A bit over my evolutionary level, I'll have to come back to it in a few years

Interestingly and fascinatingly brilliant!👍🏽🙏🏾💫

cosmic dreamer of humble human form -we evolve and like "sea borne creatures" leave "for more...for land and sky" may our meditation dissolve our barriers and boundaries.