Doñana (Spain)

"Maybe the probability of Life spontaneously appearing is so low, that Earth is the only planet in the observable universe in which it happened.” (Stephen Hawking, Life in the Universe). Whatever the case is, we celebrate that the Biosphere is a unique event in the universe.
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But, what is Life? None of the definitions is completely comprehensive. My contention (also limited) is that Life is the only system in the universe that is formed by something physical and something intrinsically non-physical, matter and written information, atoms and intangible ideas written in a language with infinite possibilities.
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Any written word is made out of matter, ink and paper or bits in a computer or even ions in our brain, but the information contained in any word, its meaning, has not matter at all. The existence of any idea behind a word or sentence is determined by an essential absence of any physical property. The idea of a form, the information, the significance, the purpose, the meaning, the value, the beauty, have no mass, no volume, no inertia, no weight, no density, no electrical charge, no spin, no color. They cannot be measured in our external world, neither in our interior, nor in any other part of the material universe. The information and the ideas are “nothing”. Zero. But exist.
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Life is the only physical system that is formed by matter and written information, by something and nothingness, by mass and "missingness", by atoms and intangible information of ideas written in a book, the DNA. Life is the only system composed by blood and ideas, by tangible matter and something essentially and intrinsically intangible. Moreover, Life is the only physical system that pursues the exchange and transmission of something non-physical, information and ideas.
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With Life the universe reached the critical evolutionary stage that is the development of language, particularly the written language. It meant that information could be passed on, from generation to generation, through written books of DNA containing the instructions and construction drawings of life forms, and that these ideas were not like the information contained in the physical constants or in the laws ruling the physical matter but, as with any coded language, could be exchanged, combined and changed to produce infinite results, infinite posibilities, immaterial concepts and meanings. (Thus, Homo sapiens has not the copyright of the written language; we only have the rights of the ‘conscious’ written language).
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The book of DNA of many complex animals, like the human being, contains about three thousand millions letters (the nucleic acids). A paperback novel of four hundred pages has around half a million letters. So a complex animal is made-out of atoms plus the information and ideas contained in 6.000 books of four hundred pages each. However, much of the information coded in these DNA books seems to be (apparently) meaningless (like the filling garbage books in many libraries), so certain scientists, like Stephen Hawking, say that the total amount of "useful" information in the genes of complex animals like the human being is only 100 million bits, 50 times the bits contained in an average novel (one bit of information is the answer to a yes-no question). Hence, any complex animal would be made-out of atoms plus the information, meanings and ideas contained in 6.000 books, out of which 50 books would be the only ones that contain the important instruction manuals, cooking recipes and construction details drawings.
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In any event, with Life the universe reached a critical evolutionary stage in which incredibly beautiful systems combine matter with non-material ideas and information about forms of so many goodly creatures, ideas that are transmitted in a written language, with the purpose of passing the old information and any new combination of ideas to the next generation, perpetually, apparently chasing to overcome the space-time, apparently pursuing the eternity.
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The value of a photo, the information that it contains, its beauty and its significance, are also features whose existence is determined by an essential absence of any physical property. Its beauty and meaning are 'nothing'. Zero. But exist. However, although the most unique feature of any Life is its concrete physical form plus the information to produce that form contained in its own written language, paradoxically the beauty of a life moment cannot be measured physically, neither described with words... Like (I hope) the one of this photo.
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(File#: 2017-04-11 16.18.29_2_DxO)
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