Story of Us | From Chemicals to becoming Human | What Future holds

Summary: In this article, we will go through the journey of our beginning, how inconspicuous chemicals during the formative year of planet Earth got arranged in forms such that they became self-replicating, ultimately giving birth to us. This story is awe-inspiring as to how we are being formed, more beautiful than Aesop’s fable. We have been bestowed with once in a lifetime opportunity to understand it. Learning about our beginnings will give us a perspective to shape our future.

Fig. 1 How chemicals might have become self- replicating.

Thanks to the sequence of events that might have happened in the hydrothermal vents in the ocean or warm ponds. With the fortunate stroke of serendipity along with the propitious environmental condition, life is created — the beginning of the self-replicating mechanism. Due to the low entropy state of our universe at the beginning, which helped in creating complex being like us during progression to high entropy state.

Think for a moment; if the above activity would not have happened, then you would not be here to read this article and comprehend the world. Everything is going to the disordered state in-universe, but if you see in life, the ordered state is maintained. We can explain this principle from the perspective of entropy. The universe is going to the state of high entropy (disorder); during this transition, the complexity of the particle in transit increases, thus we get a complex creature, and we find the birth of planets and brains formed in this journey. We are a product of this intermediate churning.

Fig. 2 How complexity might have emergent as the entropy is increasing.

A bunch of self-replicating chemicals is not only the condition to create life. For the evolution to take place, it should have true heredity, which means the self-replicating identities should replicate with high accuracy but with not 100% accuracy, such that the population of such entities should not be identical. Thus some of them will be better at natural selection than others; this is the starting point of natural selection. We can say with certainty that the sprouting of life on the planet Earth is accidental. If the condition is propitious, then life can evolve very quickly.

If you carefully look at other species, they have a specialized intelligence that help them to navigate throughout the environment. Thus they are masters of specialized job, be it running, smelling or cutting. We have general intelligence that can be used for any environment. General intelligence is our most important adaptation. This is a significant epoch in our journey; without this, we would be only specialized for a particular job or set of jobs. Consciousness is the byproduct of this general intelligence.

For example, intelligence is directly correlated to enhanced survival and reproductive fitness, but intelligence has other expressions such as art, music, humor, fiction, religion and philosophy. One possibility is that art, music and so forth are evolutionary spandrels. In evolutionary biology, a spandrel is a phenotypic trait that is a byproduct of the evolution of some other characters rather than a direct product of adaptive selection. The unintended consequence of our intelligence is the formation of art, music and philosophy. As a social being, we enjoy unintended part of our intelligence. The consciousness and general intelligence combination that we have should be used for exploring the universe because this is the once in epoch opportunity that we have been bestowed with.

We are predisposed to do stuff that is socially acceptable rather than what is correct. This is evolutionary bias in our behavior, which is impeding our progress. It is good to be aware of the fact that, as humans, we are being conditioned by our biases. We should not become a slave of our biases and repeating the same thing forever, like the curse which Sisyphus has received, who was punished for eternal punishment for forever rolling a boulder up a hill. Even after coming this close to reality, if we cannot understand the fabric of the universe; then our life is futile.

The future depends on us; it is up to us how we should move ahead with it. We should understand our biases which will help us do the right things. Let us aim to use indented part of our intelligence rather than unintended. During the dark ages if we would have made scientific progress rather than spending time persecuting for witchcraft, we would have airplanes and miracle of modern medicine, much early.

Regarding the meaning of life, I could not agree more with Astrobiologist Michael Russel that “the purpose of life is to hydrogenate carbon dioxide.”. but it depends on us what we wish to do while we are hydrogenating CO2, it is personal for each of us.