Is Life Analog or Digital? Freeman Dyson: “I started thinking about the abstract definition of life twenty years ago,
when I published a paper in Reviews of Modern Physics about the
possibility that life could survive for ever in a cold expanding universe. I
proved to my own satisfaction that survival is possible for a community of
living creatures using only a finite store of matter and energy. Then, two
years ago, Lawrence Krauss and Glenn Starkman, friends of mine at Case
Western Reserve University in Cleveland, sent me a paper with the title
“Life, the Universe, and Nothing”. They say flatly that survival of life for
ever is impossible. They say that everything I claimed to prove in my
Reviews of Modern Physics paper is wrong. I was happy when I read the
Krauss-Starkman paper. It is much more fun to be contradicted than to be
ignored.

In the two years since I read their paper, Krauss and Starkman and I have
been engaged in vigorous arguments, writing back and forth by E-mail,
trying to pokes holes in each others’ calculations.” It appears to Dyson, that the answer to his question depends on how you define life. Dyson uses Moravec’s transhuman condition and Fred Hoyle’s black cloud as contrasting paradigms of what might happen to life in an end-stage universe. The Edge