The discovery that life on Earth looks a lot like information propagating itself offers new clues, and new directions, to the hunt for life elsewhere | Opinion
What if the search for life in the universe is really a search for how the cosmos computes? That’s the intriguing, and perhaps unsettling, possibility that we are exploring as a part of our quest to find out whether or not we are alone.
Seeing biology as information might offer some answers. Independently, since the 1940s and the work of scientists like Claude Shannon, we’ve learned that information theory and the physics of thermodynamics are, in essence, one and the same way to describe the world. Information is always represented in matter—by 1s and 0s, or by one molecular bond or another—and information can in turn change matter’s configurations.
Remarkably it seems that biology also adheres to that limit, and can operate very, very close to it. In 2017 the biologist and complexity scientist Chris Kempes and his colleagues pointed out that when the process of RNA translation takes an amino acid and attaches it to a chain of other amino acids the energy involved is within a factor of 10 of the Landauer limit—which is an absolutely tiny 10-20 joules at room temperature.
But we also have to figure out what parts of a living system are truly computational. DNA transcription or RNA translation look and smell like computation, and they’re explicitly informational in nature. But what about metabolic processes, or gene regulation? This is where we have to be cautious in seeing terrestrial biology as any kind of “simple” collection of computational proesses.
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