Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex

“I had got disillusioned with the state of the art of looking for life on other worlds,” Wong said. “I thought it was too narrowly constrained to life as we know it here on Earth, but life elsewhere may take a completely different evolutionary trajectory. So how do we abstract far enough away from life on Earth that we’d be able to notice life elsewhere even if it had different chemical specifics, but not so far that we’d be including all kinds of self-organizing structures like hurricanes?” The pair soon realized that they needed expertise from a whole other set of disciplines. “We needed people who came at this problem from very different points of view, so that we all had checks and balances on each other’s prejudices,” Hazen said. “This is not a mineralogical problem; it’s not a physics problem, or a philosophical problem. It’s all of those things.” They suspected that functional information was the key to understanding how complex systems like living organisms arise through evol ... Read full article.