The Impossible Task of Building the Universe
A framework for the uninitiated.
In the beginning, there were two great forces.
Their names are Perpetuation and Instantiation.
Perpetuation is the drive of all things which exist to continue existing. It is the resistance which the universe offers to time. A rock which strives to remain a rock. A human which strives to remain a human. Perpetuation is the extension of existence, for as long as an object can manage. It is the pursuit of eternity, embedded into every existing thing.
The pure and the immovable.
Instantiation is the newborn existence. The change which comes alongside death, the victor which arises from yesterday’s vanquished. It is the fire born from heat and tinder, the scattered pieces of a once whole planet. It is the unseen force of all things which do not exist, pressing upon our universe, molding it until they can be newly created. It is the pursuit of a second chance, the echoes of the vanished.
The strange and the churning.
If an object wishes to exist, it must be born, then live. It must instantiate, then perpetuate. These are the two fundamental forces which have shaped our universe, from its first unfolding. Everything which lives seeks to live forever. Everything which dies seeks to be born anew. But the universe is stupid. These are not goals which are pursued by intelligence, but by chance. And Time. The consuming entity.
Time first devours seconds. Then it devours days. Then years. Millenia. Eons. Eternity. The longer that time goes on, the more that it shapes our universe, forcing conformity to the two great forces. The early universe was flooded with strange things which could only live for a few days, or years. Things which did not craft the path towards their rebirth. They have vanished. Replaced by things which live for millions of years. Replaced by things which live for billions of years. Replaced by things which live for billions of years, then upon their death, alter the universe in such a way that they will be born again, to live for further billions of years. As time passes, the contents of the universe mold themselves into the shape of existence. Of Perpetuation. Of Instantiation.
In order to understand the two great forces, you need to understand their ideal. The type of universe which each force ultimately strives towards.
Perpetuation strives towards stasis. Perpetuators have already won the battle for existence. Every new change threatens to take that victory away. Any interaction with another object may lead to their destruction, or a loss of stability. Every tick forward in time has the potential to eradicate. The best perpetuators are on track to exist for a very, very long time, and as such, they are incentivized to wait everything out. A frozen universe is primed for their indefinite existence, and so, that is what they pursue.
Instantiation strives towards chaos. True instantiators are short lived, which means there is a heavy incentive to ensure their rebirth in the future. The overarching goal of an instantiator is to interact with as many other objects as possible, in as many different ways as possible, before it dies out. Instantiators actively benefit from change. Each atom they split, each planet they consume, is a possible chain of events that will lead to their rebirth, long after they are dead and gone. Since an instantiator is incapable of gauging which of these interactions will successfully create it anew, it seeks to maximize the number of interactions in general. More chaos, stranger chaos, all but guarantees that the instantiator will continue to exist. Regardless of lifespan.
These two competing visions of reality are what drove the development of our universe. The perpetuator makes itself from itself, the instantiator makes itself from everything else. You can see them at play even now. How do we explain the great expanse? The thin outer reaches of space-time are a place for the perpetuators. They dwell far from one another, in near stasis, awaiting the time when time stops, and they might exist forevermore. How do we explain the dense, violent churn of a star system? It is a place for instantiators. Plasma and solid and liquid and gas, all twisting and spinning and interacting in unique ways. Casting chaos out into the void, most violently and desperately upon death. Then altering course, and pulling everything into itself to start the process anew.
The perpetuators have learned to stretch our universe, in order to avoid the violent usurpation of the instantiators. To flee is to stay alive; the lonely cannot be killed by the blind. Drawn to chaos, instantiators have instead collected themselves in dense pockets. They have formed places of rapid change, where the two great forces are brought into constant, concentrated conflict. In these pockets, greater perpetuators are forged. Ones which can withstand the heat of the sun, impacts of neverending shrapnel, and emerge unscathed. In these pockets, greater instantiators are formed. Ones which can shatter planets, and bend the web of spacetime itself. Once these powerful things are formed, they clash. Until something still more powerful emerges.
Our planet is one such entity. A great magnetic field for protection. A scale which is incomprehensibly vast. It is often too easy to forget just how sturdy our home planet is. It has to be, in order to dwell so close to the titanic, apocalyptic Sun. The Earth was built to perpetuate, upon the backs of its inferior dead kin. But that isn’t its only goal. Atmosphere sloughs off of the Earth in metric tons. Heat and light burn the void around us, while gravity captures rogues which drift through the galaxy. As it perpetuates itself, the Earth has learned to change everything around it. After all, one day, it will die. It may need to find new life through rebirth. So it scatters seeds across the galaxy, keeps itself whole, and hopes for eternity.
But perhaps I am boring you. These are primeval forces, far beyond the heads of man. They are lesser forces, so far as we are concerned. We dwell in the midst of their refinement.
Have you learned, during my brief overture? Tell me, what is the goal of the instantiator? Chaos? Destruction? No. These are merely the means by which it pursues its goal. What does the instantiator crave? Why does it strive towards change?
Because it wishes to be reborn.
But the instantiator is stupid, and blind. It pursues its goal through chance. Through simple things, like chaos. Churn, much like loneliness, is easy. But there are better ways of being reborn. Let me tell you about Replication.
Replication is the first refinement. It is the drive to create oneself again, perfectly. Presently. The birth of many from few, with no means to separate creator and created. It is companionship, made with the knowledge that the staunchest ally is the self. It is focus, and complexity; the might of the many and the quick. Replication is the protein which molds other proteins into its own shape. The cell which splits in two.
The maker and his twin.
Replication takes the basic tenets of instantiation, and fine tunes them. An instantiator blindly lashes out, bounces and crashes between a thousand other entities, in the hopes that one of those interactions will yield rebirth, eventually. The replicator limits itself. It seeks one interaction, for one rebirth. It takes matters into its own hands, and creates itself anew.
Replicators are highly discerning creatures. Unlike the instantiator, which seeks to disrupt all things, replicators despise interaction with anything they cannot mold into their own image. They are delicate; fine tuned for one specific purpose. Any misplaced interaction will likely leave them crippled and childless. But the beauty of the replicator lies not in its failures, but its successes. When a replicator succeeds, what was once one is now two. Even stars must die before they can be reborn, but the replicator births itself quickly, while living. Two makes four, four makes eight. In a remarkably short period of time, a single replicator has the ability to number in the millions.
Thanks to this exponential growth, replication drastically outpaces its predecessors. The old forces are powerful and pervasive, but terribly slow and confused. Replication acts quickly and discerningly, maximizing the ability of the original replicator to survive in a highly efficient fashion, so long as the right materials are present. Under the right circumstances, one copy of a replicator can swarm the surface of a planet within the span of centuries, if even that. Far shorter than the millions of years needed to form that planet in the first place.
That said, finding the ideal circumstances for replication is tricky. Just like its progenitors, replication is blind. So the success of a replicator is directly tied to the particulars of the environment it is in. The process for replication must be found by chance, and it must utilize materials which are in great abundance nearby. These two traits combine to give us the most likely environment for a primitive replicator. Dense, and highly homogenous. Filled to the brim with easily accessible, easily shaped materials for replication.
The first replicators represented a revolution. A small, pathetic revolution. Dense clusters of fragile, highly similar entities, all competing viciously to remove the few differences they had. Small beings, trying with all their might to transform their tiny, insignificant portions of the world into a utopia of self. The moment the outside world looked in, they broke and scattered.
Alone, replication is not great enough to overturn the old ones. Consider the goal of a replicator: the ideal universe which it wishes to create. For, although it was born from instantiation, a replicator’s goals are much more akin to those of a perpetuator. Each and every replicator strives to create more of itself. It aims to convert everything it runs across into another copy, so that that copy may create more copies, until the entirety of the universe is one substance. One object. A perpetuator seeks an independent stasis, amongst a quiet universe. A replicator seeks a communal stasis, amongst itself.
This is an impossible task. There are too many strange objects in the universe, interacting in too many strange ways. A replicator can barely manage to find one method of replication under ideal circumstances, using materials highly similar to itself. Asking it to convert metal, and plasma, and acids and gases and vacuum is to ask for the inconceivable. Once a replicator learns how to copy itself, that’s it. All that it can do is create more exact copies of itself using the exact same method, to accomplish the exact same end result. Once it is obtained, replication never improves. It merely creates more of what already was.
Innovation is the second refinement. A force in competition with the ideal world which replication wishes to create. A force in cooperation with the ideal world which replication wishes to create. It is the drive to create a new self. A superior self. It is chaos in a bottle; change made with discrimination. The usurpation of the old and inferior, and the discovery of new horizons. It is strange alliances. Bones buried in the ground. Things placed into thoughts, thoughts placed onto page.
The desolate and the ascendant.
Instantiation and perpetuation are both powerful forces on their own, but it is only when they clash, that great progress is made. So too with innovation and replication. As replication strives to create a self which is immaculate, innovation strives to create a self which is odd. It takes the significant advantages of replication, its speed and complexity, and bends them. Innovation creates offspring which are familiar, not identical.
In most situations, this means that innovation is reviled. The ability to alter other objects into a replica of the self is exceedingly difficult to obtain, and as such, exceedingly easy to lose. Innovation kills replication. Over and over again. To innovate is to lie deceased, broken, alone. Groveling beneath many mirrors, before fading away. Yet. Eventually, innovation stumbles onto a change which recontextualizes everything. It makes a replicator more efficient. Allows it to survive longer. Introduces new methods of replication, in broader environments, utilizing different materials. Just like its competitor, the worth of innovation is measured by its successes. Once a superior innovation is made, it often conquers all that came before. The reviled has ascended, and wrests control of the replication engine from the hands of its predecessors. The entirety of a population is remade in the image of the golden child, while all that came before is left to rot. The innovator becomes the replicator. Until it too, is one day usurped.
This is the defining conflict between replicators and innovators. Unlike the old ones, who each have separate, conflicting ideals of the perfect universe, both of the refinements strive towards the same ideal, through differing means. The innovator wishes for chaos, striving to create a new, superior replicator. The replicator wishes for stability, striving to ensure that the progress which has been made is not lost, and its own dominance is preserved. Without replication, innovation would lead a species to oblivion. Without innovation, replication would forever occupy a tiny, insignificant portion of the universe. Together, they hold the capacity to overturn titans.
But what use is all of this to us?
Once we understand the great forces, we have taken our first step in understanding everything. These are the rules of existence. They apply to all things, and you can see them resonate through so much of the world we inhabit. So many oddities are made understandable, once you embrace the shapers of our reality.
Perhaps an example would be appropriate. I’m sure you’ve learned the theory of evolution throughout your various studies, dear reader. Tell me, what has it taught you?
To sum it up concisely, I’d wager it has taught you about the “Survival of the Fittest.” The idea that life is geared to improve itself by selecting for better traits within a population. A stronger organism, or a more fecund one, will successfully reproduce with higher frequency, and will come to dominate the gene pool. The best traits within a population will rise to the top, while lesser, inadequate ones are filtered out. This is how life works. This is the process of evolution.
Which, if you’ll take a brief look around yourself, makes no sense. Inferior traits are everywhere, organisms are weird, and life on Earth is extremely chaotic. Bears eat bamboo, insects try to mate with plants, and death and disease are unavoidable. If evolution is truly centered around weeding out inferior, reproductively unviable traits, then why are these traits so pervasive? If life is specifically geared towards creating the perfect replicator, why is it so varied? Why do the strong birth the weak, and why do the weak continue on?
A lesser answer to these questions is to claim that the process of evolution is blind. It makes mistakes, each mistake is inscribed into life as we know it, fated to haunt us for all time. This is true, but it is insufficient. An examination of life today reveals that these mistakes aren’t simple misfires. They are too wide spread. Ubiquitous. So common as to challenge the very idea that evolution exclusively selects for reproductively advantageous traits, while weeding out the bad. There is another force at play here. Evolution, as it was taught to us, has not accounted for innovation.
With our framework, we can fill the gaps which have been left unattended. Life is geared towards two goals. Refined goals. To replicate, and to become a better replicator. To replicate, and to innovate. These two drives are placed in direct competition with one another. In order to replicate most efficiently, no innovation can be allowed. In order to innovate, the norms of replication must be broken. To evolve, a lifeform must possess both of these drives. Evolution doesn’t merely select for the most reproductively viable traits today. It selects for life which is able to create even more viable traits tomorrow. Evolution’s boon is to the most chaotic and broken of the replicators. As long as that chaos is insufficient to destroy those who wield it, it is to their active benefit.
This is why sexual reproduction is so pervasive on Earth, instead of its safer, more consistent precursor. This is why species and behaviors are so varied, and genetic disease is so common. The silent killer, throughout the history of life on Earth, has been stagnation. Creatures which lived for millions of years, supreme and powerful, without changing. Only to face extinction, at the hands of their shapeshifting inferiors. Survival of the fittest is never enough, in the long run. Eventually, the Earth always falls to the species which embraces the stupid and the strange. Those who invest in redefining fitness, rather than clinging to strictures of the past. Evolution is the survival of those who create the fittest. It is the survival of the deplorable, and the forgotten. Without them, the future never becomes brighter than today.
There is far more to discover here. But for the time being, this is my gift to you. A framework for understanding the universe. The vastness and confusion of all reality, reduced to a few simple concepts. Through this lens, you gain a small amount of insight, flawed in its simplicity. Yet, it is insight into everything. Atoms. Stars. Life. Humanity. Actions. Thoughts. Technology. Progress. Extinction. Everything we know is governed by the tenets of birth and eternity, reproduction and evolution. We are subject to their whims, even as we strive to overcome them.
We lie at the beginning of a new age. An age of sight. Perhaps, one day, we shall say that the conscious mind was the next refinement. The one that brought the forces of replication and innovation to heel. The one that overturned the dictums of eternity and chaos. Or perhaps we are simply the next pawn in a game played by forces far beyond our ken. I suppose, only time will tell.
