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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RedWick" data-source="post: 2517349" data-attributes="member: 29119">Life dissipates energy.  You need to give it some kind of incentive in order to get it to develop into highly complex forms (or even mildly complex forms).  Otherwise, it just kinda settles down into a comfortable routine and won't move out of it's parent's basement.  Having your house fall down around your ears gives you a pretty good incentive to rebuild everything, and now you don't have an excuse to put in all of those things you've always wanted to add but could never find a reason *to* add.  Of course, once you start adding those things, your neighbors start getting ideas and before you know it, *everybody* is playing "Keeping up with the Joneses".I think there have been upwards of five or six worldwide mass extinctions.  In each case, life had reached a point of relative complacency and afterwards, life just underwent a *massive* shift in approach.  One of those extinctions happened after a type of microbe started farting out oxygen as waste and ended up poisioning the atmosphere and killed off most of the other types of life at that point (humans aren't the first species on this planet to cause environmental pollution).I could probably babble on about the subject and all kinds of other technical bits of information I've picked up for hours on end.  I keep trying to figure out how I can turn it into a career of some kind.</blockquote>