Nehaveigur

The universe seems to be designed not just to allow live, but to favor interesting, diverse live, with plants and animals and minds and cultures. It didn’t have to be this way. There seem to be safeguards built into the universe to prevent one lifeform taking over, resulting in bland sameness in every direction.

In Infinite in All Directions, Freeman Dyson proposes that

our universe is the most interesting of all possible universes, and our fate as human beings is to make it so.

To Dyson, diversity and interestingness are the purpose of the universe.

Diversity is for me the chief source of beauty and value, in the natural universe around us, in the governance of human societies, and in the depths of our individual souls. The profusion of stars and galaxies in our skies, the profusion of bugs and beetles in our gardens, and the profusion of human genius in our arts and sciences, all proclaim that God loves diversity. Diversity is the spice of life, and the prevalence of evil in our world is the price we pay for diversity.

One way in which nature favors diversity is by making complex systems more resilient to external shocks. This idea is related to Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s concept of Antifragility.

The concept of homeostasis can be transferred without difficulty from molecular to ecological, economic and cultural contexts. In each area we have the unexplained fact that complicated homeostatic mechanisms are more prevalent, and seem to be more effective, than simple ones. This is most spectacularly true in the domain of ecology […] Error tolerance as the primary requirement for a model of a molecular population taking its first faltering steps toward life. Error tolerance is the hallmark of natural ecological communities, of free market economies and of open societies.

What is humanity’s purpose in this diverse universe? Dyson has an answer to this too:

The expansion of life and of mankind into the universe will lead to a vast diversification of ecologies and of cultures. As in the past, so in the future, the extension of our living space will bring opportunities for tragedy as well as achievement. To this process of growth and diversification I see no end.