The Origin of Digital Information

This article considers the relationship between life and digital information. First, from a thermodynamic perspective, life uses Gibbs free energy to store information. Animals obtain Gibbs free energy from food and plants from sunlight. Second, Genetic information does not deteriorate after repeated copying because natural selection irreversibly eliminates lethal mutations. Third, even the synthetic minimal cell, JCVI-syn3A, has a 543 kb genome (Pelletier, 2021). The probability of forming the same base sequence as the minimal cell by chance is about one in 3.8x10 32691 . Then, considering the estimated age of the universe and the total number of particles in the universe, the probability of this base sequence occurring by chance is almost zero (Anderson, 2011). Therefore, the death of life is irreversible. Finally, Digital information containing DNA bases has properties close to Platonic one: indivisibility, invariability, and equality. Life uses these properties to stretch the DNA sequence with simple, repetitive operations. As a result, the amount of information in the DNA sequence exponentially increases.

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The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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The datasets used in this study are openly available at [repository link] and the source code is available on GitHub at [GitHub link].

This work did not receive any external funding.