Chapter 2292 - 1480: The Finiteness of Life_3

Chapter 2292: Chapter 1480: The Finiteness of Life_3

But then what? After life is extended, what is its meaning? If someone lives to be eighty, their life has meaning. If they are extended to a hundred, is their life more meaningful? What if they are extended to two hundred, five hundred, one thousand years? What of immortality? Is there a proportional relationship between the length of life and the meaning of life? If there isn’t, then what is the ultimate purpose of extending life?

Yang Ping stood by the window, his thoughts diffusing like the mist after rain, without direction, without boundaries. He thought of a word: infinity. If the repair program is fully activated, theoretically human life can be extended indefinitely. But what is infinity? Infinity is not "very, very long," infinity is without end, without terminal point, without conclusion. Is a life without an end still a "life"?

He recalled a course he had studied before, about the relationship between entropy and life. Life is a low entropy system; it needs to constantly obtain energy from the outside to maintain its low entropy state. Once the energy supply stops, life tends toward a state of high entropy equilibrium, which is death. This is the second law of thermodynamics, one of the fundamental laws of the universe. No life can escape this law.

But if the repair program is fully activated, the situation would be different. A system that can infinitely self-repair can delay entropy increase indefinitely. It can continuously acquire energy from the environment to offset internal entropy increase, theoretically maintaining a low entropy state indefinitely long. This is feasible in physics, also feasible biologically. But is a system that maintains a low entropy state indefinitely still "life"?

He slowly closed the window, turned around and walked back to his desk, sat down again, and opened the experiment notebook, picking up his pen. This time the tip of his pen fell on the paper and began to move. He wrote slowly, as if walking a road never traveled before: "The essence of life might not be maintaining a low entropy state. The essence of life is finiteness. Finite time, finite energy, finite possibilities. Precisely because of finiteness, every choice has meaning. If time is infinite, choices are meaningless, because you have infinite time to try all possibilities. If life is infinite, then life itself has no meaning, because an infinite life needs no meaning, it just exists, endlessly exists."

He paused for a moment, then continued writing: "So, perhaps the significance of the seal lies here. Sealing is not to limit repair capability, sealing is to maintain the finiteness of life. Finiteness is the source of life’s meaning."

After finishing these lines, he put down his pen, and looked at them for a long time. These lines lack data support, experimental verification, and peer review. They are just some thoughts, some ideas he had never thought of before, now slowly taking shape. But he felt these lines were more important than any paper.

He picked up his phone and sent a message to Sisi: "You asked me before why the human body would seal its repair capabilities. I think I’ve found part of the answer: because of finiteness. Finiteness is the source of meaning. If life is infinite, it has no meaning."

After a long time, Sisi replied: "Then if sealing is to protect meaning, is our work destroying meaning?"

Yang Ping looked at this message without replying immediately. He thought for a long time, then typed a line: "It’s not destruction, it’s expansion. We’ve expanded the boundaries of life but haven’t crossed them. We’re still within the boundaries. The seal remains. We’ve just lightly touched the edge of the seal, and then we stopped, because it is deeper than we imagined. We discovered its existence, its meaning. We need to first understand it, respect it, and then decide whether to touch it."

After sending this, he put down his phone, leaned back in his chair, and closed his eyes. The sky after the rain was slowly brightening, a gap opened in the clouds, and sunlight seeped through the gap.