"Life has no purpose" -and that is exciting !

I know it is a bold, counter-intuitive statement but reading this article would be worth it and may create a small impact in understanding.

Does life has inherent purpose? Is there a God that gives us purpose?
Is there any meaning to life? What it means to be alive in this universe? 

Let's dive in- What happens when you open floodgate? water just flows, you have no control on how it moves and where it goes, it just flows and finds its way. Though some water will be stuck in potholes or a pound along the way but rest will keep flowing. Origin of life and origin of universe follow similar approach. "Why" you ask?, lets explore..

Evolution is a fact with lots of evidence. It explains why animals and plants are so good at surviving in their environments, the places where they live. What it means is that a species changes over time and can even split in two new species. How one species evolved as human.  Modern species are a result of factors like survival of fittest, natural selection and gene mutation. But it is incredibly slow and takes million of years to see any change.

If you are alive today that means your 100 million forefathers all the way up to a fish (yes fish was our forefather) everyone of them survived successfully and all mutations were successful. All unsuccessful could not make it to today. So, it is often said that we are living in a very very special time. We were lucky every-time w.r.t. evolution and same goes for creation of the universe (which I will try to present later). I would argue that there is no luck but would agree that we live in a special time. Because this is the only time when we are alive and able to think, understand and appreciate the grandiosity. Rest of the times we were dead.

Single cell life started on earth as soon as it cooled down in habitable zone to a favorable temperature around 3.5 billion years ago, with most abundant elements in universe hydrogen, oxygen, carbon. More than 99 percent of all species that ever lived on Earth are estimated to be extinct and humans are just one of remaining. Humans evolved from apes which started only 10 million years ago.

To give prospective, It takes just 100,000 years to fully develop an eye. Evolution is so slow and full of numerous trial and errors that it took 3.5 billion years to make first human that can survive. Here, time lapse is so humongous and counter-intuitive to fathom. Modern species are evolved into beautiful and highly functional design but many still carry bad design as long as it doesn't hinder in their survival. There are numerous evidence to support the same. Our existence is no luck. Gene tried all kind of mutations and some sequence of mutations lead to humans and others could not survive or did survive as other species.

So, evolution just flows and on the way it always creates new species some of them survive and some don't.

Evolution of the Universe:

We always wondered why universe is so fine tuned as the way it is. who did this? It is exactly the same way we use to wonder about humans, why they are so intelligently designed and why do they exists?
Now, it is easy to understand evolution because all evidence point to one and only one direction i.e. it is one of many products of evolution. Highly probable universe evolved the same way and many "mutations" have already happened in other universes and may be happening in some other universes which may or may not survive. This would mean we live in a multi-verse.
A beautiful analogy would be: In a superconductor the current experience no resistance and travel forever. It just happens that in this universe photons experience no resistance and travel forever. It is likely that our universe is some sort of superconductor for electromagnetic waves of photons. Others may have different properties.

Space-Time:
It is highly probable that it is just our experience of time that flows. We feel the flow of time in the space-time we live in. This experience breaks-down when we are looking at an object near black-hole as we see time passing very slow for that object. Time slows down when you travel in your day-to-day life too but it is insignificant. This effect magnifies when you travel at high speed like our satellites. And 'yes' our satellites experience significant time slow down everyday and they have to adjust their atomic clocks often. If they don't, GPS on our cell phones will not work accurately and you will see accidents all around.

There is so much more to write about but in conclusion:
There were billions of years before us and infinite universes other than ours.
There will be billions of years after us and infinite universes other than ours.
We just happen to live in a time where one of the universe just happen to sustain so long and create elements like carbon, hydrogen, oxygen etc. Which then in favorable conditions on earth reacted for over very long time and happen to create a single cell which represented first sign of life. This flow went for billion of years and out of numerous combinations just happen to develop a brain which then asked this question: "Why we are here?"



Why no inherent purpose is exciting?:
A single cell in itself is highly complex form. And there are more than trillion of them conspiring together to make a functional body which can run, eat , think, care, create art, create music and create the model of the whole universe in a small organ called brain..."What an amazing body to live in !!"

It is us who gives meaning to the universe which otherwise flows meaningless. We can setup new purposes of our own and thus introduce a new kind of purpose in the universe which it never had before. So, go out and love, care for others, do poetry, do music, do art, do science and find a purpose of your own coz thats what makes us human.


--
Nikhil Aggarwal

P.S.
An interesting cross-roads of poetry and science. When, Javed Akhter vividly describes time and
Paul Davies describing Einsteinian understanding of time.
Link:
https://youtu.be/yID6bPTpcQo?t=769
https://youtu.be/G8FnFjqiAWs?t=2730

It suggests time is stationary and we just feel intervals of time. Like a youtube video, everything is already there. There is no birth and no death happening in actor's life and there is no event that occurs only once, everything is happening and available all the time.

Interesting famous arguments:
1. Chimpanzees and humans differ by only 2% in DNA and we consider them as dumb and cant talk to them. May be there is some Alien life which is just 2% better DNA than us. For them we would be too dumb to talk to.

2. Newton believed apples falls because of gravity but Einstein turned it over and proposed that actually earth falls to apple. Analogy would be in a roller coaster we feel force similar to gravity but it is the roller coaster which moves.

3. Time started as a side effect of big-bang. There was no time before that. So there is no question of someone creating a universe, there was no time to create a universe.
4. If God created the universe then who created God?