This store of order is a surprise. Earth's great heap of structure, complexity
and knowledge does not seem to be contained "in" the physics that govern
non-extropic stuff. Where do you hide 10^29 bytes of organization? The rules
behind the fundamental behavior of the elemental particles and energies that
make up our reality are very spare, almost naked. It might take books and
books to explain them in words, but the laws themselves can be compressed into a
very small amount of information. If you were to take all the known laws of
physics, formulas such as f=ma, E=mc^2, S= K log W, and more complicated ones
that describe how liquids flow, or objects spin, or electrons jump, and write
them all down in one file, they would fit onto a single gigabyte CD disk.
Amazingly, one plastic plate could contain the operating code for the entire
universe. Even if we currently know only 0.1% of the actual number of laws
guiding universal processes, many of which we are undoubtedly still unaware of,
and the ultimate file of physical laws was 1,000 times bigger, it would fit onto
one high-density "disk" in a few years from now. The total code for
matter/energy is an infinitesimal fraction compared to mountain of extropic
information that has accumulated on this planet. In fact the genome of a single
living organism contains more information than required by all the laws of
physics