Biocosmology: Towards the birth of a new science
  Cosmologists wish to explain how our Universe, in all its complexity, could
ever have come about. For that, we assess the number of states in our Universe
now. This plays the role of entropy in thermodynamics of the Universe, and
reveals the magnitude of the problem of initial conditions to be solved. The
usual budgeting accounts for gravity, thermal motions, and finally the vacuum
energy whose entropy, given by the Bekenstein bound, dominates the entropy
budget today. There is however one number which we have not accounted for: the
number of states in our complex biosphere. What is the entropy of life and is
it sizeable enough to need to be accounted for at the Big Bang? Building on
emerging ideas within theoretical biology, we show that the configuration space
of living systems, unlike that of their fundamental physics counterparts, can
grow rapidly in response to emerging biological complexity. A model for this
expansion is provided through combinatorial innovation by the Theory of the
Adjacent Possible (TAP) and its corresponding TAP equation, whose solutions we
investigate, confirming the possibility of rapid state-pace growth. While the
results of this work remain far from being firmly established, the evidence we
provide is many-fold and strong. The implications are far-reaching, and open a
variety of lines for future investigation, a new scientific field we term
biocosmology. In particular the relationship between the information content in
life and the information content in the Universe may need to be rebuilt from
scratch.
