Robert Frost holds with those who say the world will end in fire. Freeman Dyson was agnostic on whether the world will end in fire or ice, but he thought that ice would be preferable.
Cold environments are fundamentally more hospitable to complex forms of life than hot environments. Life is, after all, an ordered form of matter, and low temperature favors order. In the long run, life depends less on an abundant supply of energy than on a good signal-to-noise ratio […] If the hypothesis of adaptability is correct, life has a clear preference for ice over fire. In an expanding universe, life can adapt itself as the eons go by, constantly matching its metabolism of energy to the falling temperature of its surroundings […] The numerical results of my calculations show that the quantities of energy required for permanent survival and communication are surprisingly modest. For a society with the same complexity as the present human society on Earth, starting from the present time and continuing forever, the total reserve of energy required is about equal to the energy now radiated by the Sun in eight hours.
Nehaveigur 
One response to “Life Prefers Ice”
[…] goes on to argue that low temperatures aren’t much of an obstacle to life, and that zero-P and zero-G are also solvable. While he talks about life in an abstract sense, for […]
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