Some folks think life and technology and mind can keep expanding forever. Others say it can't. We are still not clear on that.

Another feature that everybody notices about the universe is that it's complex.

There are considerable advantages to using many degrees of freedom to store information, stability and controllability being perhaps the most important.

Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics. All three are processes in which useful or accessible forms of some quantity, such as energy or money, are transformed into useless, inaccessible forms of the same quantity. That is not to say that these three processes don't have fringe benefits: taxes pay for roads and schools; the second law of thermodynamics drives cars, computers and metabolism; and death, at the very least, opens up tenured faculty positions.

I have not proved that the universe is, in fact, a digital computer and that it's capable of performing universal computation, but it's plausible that it is.

One of the things that I've been doing recently in my scientific research is to ask this question: Is the universe actually capable of performing things like digital computations?

The amount of information that can be stored by the ultimate laptop, 10 to the 31st bits, is much higher than the 10 to the 10th bits stored on current laptops.