Random thoughts attributed to the cockroaches in my apartment that I fought so hard against.
Disclaimer: train of thoughts in this article is unorganized and messy. Read at your own discretion.
Recently I was unfortunate enough to have to deal with a cockroach infection in my apartment, and one of the most unexpected — yet totally reasonable — fact about these demonic little creatures is their dependence on water (of course they would!) even so much more than food. During my online research for a cure of the situation, it is frequently mentioned that you need to make sure there’s no food that the cockroaches can easily gain access to, but the fact that struck me the most was that they can only survive up to 10 days without water vs. 30 days without food. While the infection is hopefully over now, this simple yet overlooked fact got stuck in my head, ever reminding me of the role water plays in essentially every life form that has lived on Earth.
Today as I pour out the water from some leftover food before throwing them into the trash — in hope of not giving any potential pest a favorable spawning condition — this idea of water being important to life randomly arose from my memory, and I started to wonder what’s one defining feature for water to be so crucial for life. “Perhaps it is their ability to dissolve and transport,” I thought, “but there could be much more to it that I just haven’t realized yet.” Then I thought about air, and how the role that air plays in life is pretty clear in comparison. All lifeforms need energy, and the oxidation-reduction reaction is probably the most representative “make me some energy” mechanism for lives on Earth. Unfortunate for the ideal short length of this article, the train of thoughts didn’t stop here; instead, the next question emerges: why does life need energy?
It’s pretty reasonable for any toddler to associate life with anything that moves by their choice. That is, not entirely dominated by their environment and the physical laws, such as things generally moving from higher places to lower places. This is an acceptable approximation until you take into consideration plants and fungi, which grow (often upwards, thus satisfying our toddler approximation of moving against merely physical laws) but it is hard to verify that such movement is indeed a result of their “choice”. Well, I guess free will and all that can be a topic for another day. For this collection of random thoughts, I’ll try to focus on the discussion of energy.
What is the significance of utilizing energy and thereby being able to take actions that are not merely dominated by physical laws? Before answering this question, there is an important disclaimer to be made first. All living being still operates fully under the governance of physical laws. Rules like they cannot make energy out of nothing or making an isolated system more orderly (i.e. less even/uniform) than it already was (with enough effort you can separate a spoon of salt after it has been dissolved into water, but external energy is always required in such processes). The argument I’ve used above is just a rough attempt to sum up what makes life different than say, a rock. After all, even a planet (which is arguably lifeless) can produce mountains which would violate the physical laws if we take the rule “things always moves from higher places to lower ones” too literally.
Now that the disclaimer is out of the way, let’s discuss the real question. Maybe life evolved to be able to utilize energy because that’s is the best for a species’ continuation. Energy gives them abilities to eat, which conveniently gives them more energy; to move, which might be helpful in finding shelters against rough living conditions, or to hide from their predators; to think, something apparently useful in making all of the actions above more efficient and effective; and to sleep, an essential part of self-preservation and recovery. But these aspects lie on the surface. Sure, being able to do these help lives to stay, well, alive. But how is any of these make life superior to a rock? If we make the argument that the fundamental need for life is to survive and reproduce, then by this metric, a rock will probably outlive most living beings on Earth, while the collection of all rocks on Earth will certainly outlive any species that has ever emerged or will emerge here, barring the possibility of a miracle that human or another species after us become an interstellar species all while managing not to wipe out themselves in the process.
To take the discussion one step further, could this distinction of being able to utilize energy merely a distinction by definition? Going back to the planet example that I mentioned earlier, any celestial body goes through a sequence of phases that are analogous to the phases of a living being. For example, a star incepts from a proto-star, a dense concentration of materials held together by gravity with a mass close to that of a star but not quite massive enough to start nuclear fusion. Then, it evolves to the stable, balanced burning phase through the fusion of hydrogen, before moving onto the unstable, cyclic burning phases through the fusion of heavier elements. A star’s evolution either culminates in a violent supernova explosion or stops gradually to form a white dwarf. The latter eventually cools to a black dwarf, which by then is just a massive ball of unburnt carbon-oxygen mixture. Throughout my astronomy education about stars, words like “young”, “dying” and “short-lived” are thrown around a lot. And if we look beyond the superficial idea that these are just figurative speech, especially after taking into consideration the grim fate that scientists have predicted our universe would face, many of these analogies start to look serious and philosophical.
By then if you have raised the question “but aren’t these stars purposeless and directionless, unlike lives?” Then congratulations, you have found the bigger question that both underlies and overshadows today’s discussion, but one that I’ll try not to get into here. I guess from the tone of this article I started to sound like a nihilistic pessimist really fast. But quite to the contrary, I believe that there is something fundamentally meaningful about life, that life is meaningful and precious precisely because everything that lives is designed to end. I don’t deny that there are aspects of life that might seem (or truly are) meaningless. But maybe, life is all about deriving meanings from a meaningless world, and that it is meaningful not as an end, but as a means to an end. Would you agree?