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I think we are agents of accelerating disorder, somewhat like a growing fractal with order inside but a much higher disorder produced at the edge. The internal order supplies the growth, and the external disorder grows exponentially atop it. Behaviourally, when you look at a lot of the things we do (e.g. breaking big chunks of metal to tiny coins and distributing them into people's pockets, or turning big clumps of clay and tree and metal into small piles to live in, or retail stores in general), you can see that humans are pretty good distributors, dis-aggregators, disintegrators. At least so far, we don't disintegrate most things to the point that they are useless. Only to a point where they serve our growth. If one day we were to become a truly spacefaring, or an intergalactic, disintegrator, we might meaningfully hasten the advance of universal disorder as a whole. What better purpose for life, as a function of the universe, than to advance the march of a primary universal trend? All that said, it's hard to see how our work will meaningfully bring about a true final state any faster, because we're not likely to accelerate proton decay. Maybe protons decay faster in isolation! Maybe we'll find out that we can poke them just the right way, and it'll be surprisingly useful. |