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Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex | Quanta Magazine

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In 1950 the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi was discussing the possibility of intelligent alien life with his colleagues. If alien civilizations exist, he said, some should surely have had enough time to expand throughout the cosmos. So where are they? Many answers to Fermi’s “paradox” have been proposed: Maybe alien civilizations burn out or destroy themselves before they can become interstellar wanderers. But perhaps the simplest answer is that such civilizations don’t appear in the first place: Intelligent life is extremely unlikely, and we pose the question only because we are the supremely rare exception. A new proposal by an interdisciplinary team of researchers challenges that bleak conclusion. They have proposed nothing less than a new law of nature, according to which the complexity of entities in the universe increases over time with an inexorability comparable to the second law of thermodynamics — the law that dictates an inevitable rise in entropy, a measure of disorder. If

Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex | Quanta Magazine Home Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex Read Later Share Copied! Comments Read Later Read Later complex systems Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex By Philip Ball April 2, 2025 A new suggestion that complexity increases over time, not just in living organisms but in the nonliving world, promises to rewrite notions of time and evolution. Read Later Irene Pérez for Quanta Magazine By Philip Ball Contributing Writer April 2, 2025 View PDF/Print Mode astrobiology biology complex systems complexity evo

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