Life as an Accelerator of Chaos

A few years ago, in Nick Lane’s book, The Vital Question: Why Is Life the Way It Is? , I read a sentence that went something like this: “Consider the stars. They pay for their ordered existence by emitting enormous amounts of energy into the universe.” Every now and then, I come back to that idea, and it pushes me to think further. In this post, I’ll try to summarize and organize the thoughts that…