[Newfie]

It was already well known life defies entropy.

Bold statement. Proof? By what reasoning?

[onlooker]

It was already well known life defies entropy.

Bold statement. Proof? By what reasoning?

That is an absurd statement. All living things deteriorate and eventually die. If that is not an example of entropy I do not know what is.

[SeaGypsy]

The life as denial of entropy argument is an old one, since entropy seems to signal perpetual devolution, the evolution seems to contradict the Law, the OP postulates the reversal of the argument- Life increases entropy, particularly our species. Pretty out there stuff.

[dohboi]

"when you find yourself to be alive, as I oftentimes do, it is very comforting to ponder why life exists and what it means."

efarmer, much of what you write is really quite witty, like almost on a David Sidaris or Garrison Keillor level. Have you written any longer humorous works, and perhaps tried to publish them?

[evilgenius]

Then where is all of the life that should be newly forming around us, even intermittently?

You seem to have no sense of time scales. The article used the word "gradually" which seems consistent with what is being talked about.

Do you expect to see mountains newly forming around us, and mountains eroding around us, when we're here for under 100ish years and a mountain might hang around for 100ish million?

Time scales or no, we can't trace life back to several different origins, to a time outside of the epoch when life may have started. Evolution speaks of the environment forming life according to what will survive. Life changes according to what sorts of forms it throws out that happen to live. Now, this is life as we know it, from whatever very distant origin. If new life is forming, even very intermittently, there is no reason to assume that it would have to operate the same as other life. It would, for starters, have no DNA baggage to contend with, no historical forms or iterations that had to be overcome, though they only be present in the strands. Without the history to contend with new life might be able to survive more readily, due perhaps to increased cellular efficiency because of the lack of history to burden it. And if it didn't we should see evidence of its anomalous existence in the fossil record. There ought to be many one off blips. We can trace almost everything we find into family trees. We should see a discontinuity from that in fairly great numbers because the planet is 4.6 billion years old and life as we know it has existed upon it for a long time.