Absolutely not! machines are a poor analogy for life - at least at this stage. I expect the line between machines and life to blur ever more, but at this stage the machine analogy ignores the internality.Nick_A wrote: ↑June 17th, 2021, 11:15 pm Sy
Do you mean that each person is a machine. A car is a machine and we can know what a car does and what its purpose is for Man. But if each person is a pattern - a way of doing things like a machine, what is the purpose of this machine?Each life is a pattern - a way of doing things. If one falls by the wayside, another takes its place.
Still, life is eminently expendable. We all come and in the blink of a cosmic eye. Larger structures - the form of things - are more durable. In each community of humans (or other entities) there will always be dominants, prey/food, catalysts, entropic agents, and so forth. Such hierarchies were even present in the protoplanetary disc (the Sun is the monarch, planets are dominants, moons are subordinates, etc). Our "eternal" aspect lies in the type we represent rather than the temporal physical self.
The purpose of life on Earth? That's rather open to speculation.
Not sure if it is a purpose, but I note the planet's, or biosphere's, growth to what some would call consider to be random outcomes, others would call certain doom, but I would suggest that the biosphere is moving into maturity. The biosphere as a whole is restructuring itself (via humans) into a reproductive phase, where packets of Earthly information are sent out into space (as per the Genesis Project). When the minibots land on other worlds, they can follow pre-programmed instructions to convert local materials into useful Earthlike structures.
One could say that that earth is going to seed. After all, in a relatively short time, by geographical standards, the ageing Sun will have expanded and rendered the Earth's surface uninhabitable.