The Living Universe - Duane Elgin [14]
• Ninth, design a process that enables the cosmos to be continuously regenerated in its entirety using the flow-through of stupendous amounts of energy. This flow of continuous creation must include the fabric of space-time, and all manifestations of matter, thought, feeling, and consciousness.
“If you can meet these nine construction requirements, you are ready to begin building a new universe,” says the Mother Universe. Although these design requirements are adapted from my book Awakening Earth, written more than fifteen years ago, each time I return to them it awakens my appreciation of the power, wisdom, and subtlety embodied in our cosmos. Our universe is a supremely elegant masterwork of ongoing creation. Recognizing the magnificent feat of design engineering it represents, we look at ourselves and the world around us with new wonder and appreciation. Stretching our imagination in this way is useful preparation for our inquiry as we turn to look at our mysterious universe through the lens of science and ask: Is it reasonable to regard our universe as a living system? The pivotal nature of this question is summarized in the following table, which contrasts the perspectives of a dead or a living universe.
Contrasting a Dead and a Living Universe
Chapter 2
The Science of a Living Universe
Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science
becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws
of the universe—a spirit vastly superior to that of men. . .
—ALBERT EINSTEIN1
This chapter applies the tools of science to explore the possibility that our universe, taken in its totality, is a living system. I am not seeking to prove that the universe is a living system; instead I will show that, by drawing insights from different areas of science, the available evidence points strongly in this direction and offers a compelling invitation for deeper engagement and inquiry.
In thinking about how the universe could be alive, we naturally turn to the living things already known. It is understandable that many of our theories on the nature of life are based on animals and plants; however, to confine our understanding of life to these familiar forms is to confuse the material expression of aliveness with the energy of aliveness itself. The form is not the aliveness, but its container. We need to broaden our inquiry into the meaning of life.
As mentioned earlier, it is the very tools of science that are challenging the traditional scientific assumption that the universe is non-living at its foundations. The powerful instruments of science are allowing us to peer down into the realm of atoms as well as out to the realm of stars. What we are discovering is astonishing; the deeper and further we look, the more complex, subtle, mysterious—and alive—the universe appears to be.
At the outset, it is important to recognize that the idea that we live in a non-living universe is a recent invention. The next chapter makes it clear that, throughout most of human history, we humans did not question whether the world around us was fundamentally alive. Only in the last few centuries that science has made a great separation between ourselves and the rest of the universe, assuming the universe to be mostly non-living matter with only a few islands of life such as ourselves.
In launching our inquiry, it is important to recognize that, within the scientific community, there is no widely accepted definition of life. To illustrate the difficulty scientists are encountering, there is no clear demarcation between the living and non-living realms. There is considerable debate, for example, over whether a virus is alive. By itself a virus is a non-living entity but when it finds a suitable host—such as a human being—it can rapidly replicate itself (think of the common cold) and evolve into new, more contagious forms. Because the ability to replicate and evolve is fundamental to life, a virus hovers in the gray zone between life and non-life.
Since we