Thought-provoking write-up. One part of this is the "meaning of human life". Part of that for me is: humans are the only known lifeform that can look at the stars and try to understand. And, to the best of our understanding, this ability arose from winning a billion biological lotteries, from the blind system of nature and natural selection which by complete coincidence, stumbled on intelligence as a beneficial trait for reproduction, and optimized for it to the point of creating sentience and free will.
It's this incredibly improbable event that I think gives humanity as a whole an obligation to try to understand and explore the universe. To not do so, I think would be a waste of this incredibly unlikely "gift". And that appears to require complexity in order to understand and explore.
Note I think this is an obligation of humanity, not necessarily every individual human. I think free will means individuals can choose not to.
The other part of this is complexity of modern society. I'm not certain whether all the elements of modern society are necessary for this overarching meaning, and pieces of it could potentially be reduced, but I think it would be tricky. Society begins whether you want it to or not as soon as you have more than one individual with free will, and some complexity arises inevitably. But haven't thought about this side as much; it's an interesting side of this discussion.
;)
You might find this interesting
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2025/10/2025-a-space-absurdity/
Your view might fall under planetary management and beyond. Across so many people maybe the dominant view would prevail in a consensus, but it doesn't seem to be the case.
https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/environmentalissues/chapter/1...
Interesting reads! Apologies, that's not what I intended to communicate, but I can understand where that conclusion came from.
I think understanding and exploring the universe is an essential "success metric" for intelligent life like humanity -- but I don't think it's at the expense of all else. I mentioned it because it, to me, makes a humanity that abandoned complexity a "failed" humanity. Although again, on an individual basis I think this is a fine option.
An underlying principle I believe in is an avoidance of waste. It's this principle that underpins part of why I think there is an obligation for humanity to understand/explore: to avoid wasting our improbable "gift". This principle constrains the principle of understanding/exploration and relates to Earth. Earth and life on Earth is itself rare and the result of its own biological lotteries. To blindly exploit Earth's resources is not only wasteful but shortsighted as well towards humanity's own survival. So I think I'm in stewardship on that spectrum, but need to sit with it a bit more.
With regards to the first article, I think it outlines many of the complexities around humanity's space travel and habitation. For me, the key bit is understanding and exploration; ie the seeing/understanding of what the universe is/has (on Earth as well as elsewhere). I don't actually think this has to be humanity. I think more broadly the obligation I've mentioned lies with intelligent life not necessarily humanity (we just happen to be the only example of such we're aware of). Habitation isn't as big a piece for me. If we can send robotic "eyes" for intelligence to see through, or if we create other intelligent life with different properties from humanity that can see/explore, I consider this goal met.
I completely agree with you. It’s honestly wild to think about the sheer capacity of the human mind. Beyond our ability to process complex emotions or reflect on our own existence, we literally have the biological hardware to rewire our brains and learn just about anything through neuroplasticity. We are built to achieve extraordinary things.
But it's frustrating to see how traditional education systems often fail to push us to that full potential. Seeing this firsthand, I've realized that digging into topics on your own, really committing to rigorous, self-directed learning is often the only reliable path forward. The problem is that the modern attention economy makes this incredibly hard. Instead of diving deep, so many of my peers are caught in the loop of endless scrolling, and it’s actively eroding our capacity for sustained thought. Blaise Pascal’s quote that 'all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone' hits incredibly close to home right now. If we could just break that cycle and encourage even a small percentage of people to become genuine deep thinkers, our ability to actually fulfill that obligation of understanding the universe would change drastically.
But evolution doesn't make those developments improbable or coincidental. I recently read a book called Time's Second Arrow about how selection, when present in systems that can create many combinations, naturally evolve more functional information, which is the number of bits it takes to identify specific combinations that are (in a certain contexts) more functional. (log base 2 of the number of possible combinations divided by the number of combinations that "work" for a given function). They argue that the number of functional bits has been increasing since the big bang and is basically a law of nature in itself.
Hopefully I stated that correctly. You sound like you'd be interesting in this type of book too, but here's a shorter article about it I randomly searched for and read to make sure it was a good representation of the book (ignore the clickbait title of the article): https://nextbigideaclub.com/magazine/new-theory-upends-150-y... But I think the book itself is even better, even just the first chapter that has a quick history and summary about the discovery of the known laws of nature we have so far.
"But evolution doesn't make those developments improbable or coincidental." (not sure what you are on about with respect "Time's Second Arrow")
So, why are you not enslaved by your lizard overlords? 8) Homo is a bit of a johnny come lately and yet has managed to travel to the moon and back.
We only have a single extant example of hom sap to work with. We can work backwards, within reason, and still not manage to come up with a completely satisfying origin story. There is no way you can "derive" hom sap from first principles.
We(mammals) kind of were enslaved by those lizard overlords. Mammals evolved around 225 million years ago and by the time dinosaurs went extinct (through no fault of their own!) 160 million years later, mammals were, at best, small nocturnal mouse-sized creatures. Anything bigger was stomped out by the dinosaurs before it could leave a trace.
Agree.
If you walk through a forest there are billions of little things from creatures to bits of dna just looking to pass on their particular brand of biologic layout to another generation. They would love to involve you.
on a world swirling through the chaos of hard and ephemeral matter one big rock away from a new trajectory.
No, we in no way created the complexity. We have some baby complexities we've created sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not. We have complexities we've created to understand the world. Some to try and improve how we live. Some to mimic how we see existing systems or control others. It's all just a drop in the bucket.
I happen to subscribe to the general belief that we should aim to make life suck less for others in the future. I think we do that by learning more, not trying to back step into ignorance and forget how we got here. That is a dead end. Our present complexity of life is just the farthest we've got so far. Not very far at all.
It's also a good idea to learn our own nature better. Example: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
Except most of the complexity has nothing to do with “understanding and exploring the universe”, it’s just byproduct of the ever changing fractal composition of attempts to gain or obtain something over someone else.
Physicists are Atoms way of understanding themselves