Energy
The Cosmic Aspect
13.8 billion years
Is technology a human accident, or the universe's latest way of building complexity?
Step far enough back and technology looks less like an interruption of nature than its continuation. The cosmos has spent fourteen billion years assembling ever denser, faster flows of energy — stars, life, brains, and now machines. Technology may be the next rung on a single ladder of complexity, and its origin the same as the universe's: the relentless dissipation of energy gradients.
01Energy rate density
Eric Chaisson measures complexity by 'energy rate density' — the flow of energy through a gram of a system each second. By this yardstick a star is simple, a plant denser, a human brain denser still, and a microchip or a jet engine denser than anything biology ever made. Seen this way, technology is not against nature; it is nature's complexity-building tendency, running at a new and ferocious rate.
02Evolution by other means
Kevin Kelly argues the technium extends the very trajectory that biological evolution began — toward more diversity, more complexity, more sentience. Stuart Kauffman sees both life and technology as the universe ceaselessly exploring its adjacent possible. Whether or not technology 'wants' anything, the deep view dissolves the line we drew between the natural and the made: the spear and the supernova are events in one long story.
“From the first star to the first chip, one process runs through: the universe building structure against the dark.”
In short
- By energy rate density, an engine is more 'complex' than a star or a cell.
- Technology may continue the same complexity-building arc as evolution.
- The deep view erases the line between the natural and the made.