The living, or the invention of active persistence

THE LIVING, OR THE INVENTION
OF ACTIVE PERSISTENCE

From stable forms to matter able to rebuild and anticipate its own continuity

« The living is not matter become invulnerable. It is matter become able to continue otherwise. »

Daloze Didier
ORI-C — A framework of coherence and viability of the living
July 2026

Abstract

Matter can last in several ways. An atom persists through physical stability, a crystal through the cohesion of its structure, a flame or a cyclone through the maintenance of a flow. The living crosses a different threshold: it mobilises energy and matter to sustain its organisation, repair its components, reproduce and transmit a memory liable to evolve. This article therefore defends neither a hierarchy of substances nor an obligatory progression toward complexity. It reconstructs a succession of transitions in modes of persistence, from the stability of constituents to the human capacity to represent the conditions of one's own continuity. It examines evidence from physics, synthetic biology, evolution, ecology, astrobiology and network theory, then distinguishes established results from still speculative extensions.

Keywords: persistence, organisation, the living, thermodynamics, evolution, resilience, information, technosphere, astrobiology.

Status of the propositions Claims qualified as « established » are supported by reproducible observations or experiments. « Plausible » propositions connect several results without yet constituting a general law. « Speculative » perspectives explore possibilities compatible with certain theories but not demonstrated. This distinction avoids turning a philosophical intuition into a premature scientific conclusion.

Scope of the article This article synthesises the transformations of the modes of persistence. It does not present the whole ORI-C framework: the models of capacity, margin, debt, recovery, threshold, pre-rupture and cumulative transmission are developed in complementary work. It constitutes the conceptual layer of a wider programme, not its sole demonstration.

Contents

• 1. The problem: several ways of lasting

• 2. From constituents to organisations: a history of possibilities

• 3. Thermodynamics: maintaining a form through flows

• 4. A threshold characteristic of known cellular life: taking part in one's own reconstruction

• 5. Evolution: making a lineage persist by changing

• 6. Cooperation, symbiosis and major transitions

• 7. Resilience: what the living achieves, and what it does not guarantee

• 8. Translating the principles of the living into human systems

• 9. Consciousness and meta-persistence

• 10. The technosphere: emergent level or fragile extension?

• 11. Astrobiology: a single example does not allow a conclusion about rarity

• 12. The cosmic limits of all persistence

• 13. What science allows us to assert

• 14. What remains open or speculative

• 15. Conclusion: learning to continue

1. The problem: several ways of lasting

The living is often presented as fragile. An organism can die rapidly when its temperature, its energy supply or its environment leaves a relatively narrow range. A rock, a crystal or an atom seem more resistant. Yet Earth's history reveals another continuity: individuals disappear, species go extinct and ecosystems are transformed, while life has pursued its history for at least 3.4 to 3.5 billion years. The deposits of the Dresser Formation in Australia contain some of the oldest convincing biosignatures, dated at about 3.48 billion years. Still older structures, between 3.77 and 4.28 billion years, have been proposed in Quebec, but their interpretation remains debated. ^[1][2]

This antiquity does not mean that a living being lasts longer than an atom. It shows that life has developed a particular way of continuing: it does not preserve the same components indefinitely, it renews the organisation that links them. The molecules of an organism circulate, degrade and are replaced. The individual eventually dies, but a related organisation can be rebuilt in its descendants. Biological persistence therefore lies less in the conservation of a substance than in the continuity of a set of relations, constraints, functions and memories.

The question is no longer: which matter is superior? It becomes: what persists, by what mechanism, at what scale and at the price of what dependencies? This reformulation avoids confusing duration, complexity, stability and resilience. A system may be very durable but unable to adapt; very adaptable but dependent on a narrow environment; very complex but vulnerable to a local rupture.

1.1 Five forms of persistence

Five forms of persistence may be distinguished, according to what continues and the mechanism ensuring that continuity:

• Persistence of a constituent. A stable nucleus or atom lasts thanks to physical interactions, without any activity of upkeep.

• Persistence of a structure. A molecule or a crystal preserves an arrangement maintained by bonds, but has only very limited capacities of repair.

• Persistence of a process. A flame or a vortex maintains a dynamic form despite the renewal of the matter passing through it, as long as the necessary flows subsist.

• Persistence of a living organisation. To the dependence on flows is added an internal self-maintenance: the system uses energy and matter to preserve the conditions of its own functioning.

• Persistence of a lineage. Continuity exceeds the individual's duration thanks to reproduction, heredity and variation.

Central thesis The living is not the matter that best resists without changing. It is a material organisation able to change, to rebuild itself and to transmit some of its transformations in order to continue.

2. From constituents to organisations: a history of possibilities

The primordial Universe did not immediately contain all the chemical diversity necessary for terrestrial life. Primordial nucleosynthesis mainly produced light nuclei. Generations of stars then synthesised many heavier elements before dispersing them into the interstellar medium. The founding work of Alpher, Bethe and Gamow on the cosmological origin of the light elements, and then of Burbidge, Burbidge, Fowler and Hoyle on stellar nucleosynthesis, established the foundations of this material history. ^[3][4]

This succession does not describe an intentional march toward life. It describes the progressive opening of new spaces of possibility. When new elements become available, new bonds, new minerals and new chemistries become possible. When differentiated planets appear, they offer surfaces, oceans, atmospheres, thermal and chemical gradients. Nothing guarantees that these possibilities lead to life, but some organisations can appear only once their material conditions have been assembled.

Levels of organisation are not simply stacked boxes. The properties of a whole depend on the constituents, but also on their relations, their configuration and their environment. Philip Anderson summarised this problem with the formula « More is different »: when the number and organisation of components change, collective properties appear and require their own level of description. ^[5] A molecule does not violate the laws of atomic physics, but its chemical properties are not deduced from a simple list of atoms. A membrane remains an assembly of molecules, but it creates a boundary that radically transforms the possible reactions.

There is therefore no simple scale on which each level would be better than the previous one. Each transition adds capacities and dependencies. A cell can repair certain damage, but it requires a continuous energy supply. A multicellular organism can coordinate billions of cells, but it must control internal conflicts. A society can accumulate an external memory, but it depends on infrastructures and supply chains capable of propagating failures.

3. Thermodynamics: maintaining a form through flows

The second law of thermodynamics is often summarised by the idea that everything moves toward disorder. That formula is too vague. Total entropy cannot decrease in an isolated system, but a local region can maintain or increase its organisation when it receives energy and rejects heat or degraded products into its environment. A star, a flame, a cyclone and an organism are open systems traversed by flows.

A dissipative structure demonstrates that a form can persist without preserving its constituents. In a vortex the water changes continuously, yet an organisation of the motion is maintained. In a flame the reactive molecules are consumed and replaced. The form depends on precise conditions: fuel supply, gradients, geometry of the medium. When those conditions disappear, the process ceases.

The living belongs to this general family, but dissipation does not suffice to define it. A flame transforms energy without producing a hereditary memory able to guide its reconstruction. A cell couples dissipation to a boundary, a metabolism, mechanisms of regulation, a production of components and transmissible information. Reproduction itself remains subject to thermodynamics: Jeremy England showed that a process of physical replication imposes a minimal dissipation bound up notably with growth rate and the stability of the replicator. This result does not prove that matter is inevitably driven toward life; it shows that replication remains an irreversible material transformation. ^[6]

The singularity of the living therefore does not lie in an opposition to entropy. It lies in the way a system uses irreversible flows to sustain an organisation that contributes to the continuation of those same flows. Persistence becomes a loop: the organisation channels energy in order to rebuild the conditions that allow it to go on channelling it.

4. A threshold characteristic of known cellular life: taking part in one's own reconstruction

A cell combines several dimensions that separately do not suffice: a compartmentation, a network of transformations, a regulation, and information able to orient the production of functional components. An empty membrane is not alive. Reactions without a boundary disperse. A molecule carrying information produces nothing without reading mechanisms, raw material and energy. The living appears in the coupling of these functions.

The cellular boundary does not serve only to isolate. It controls exchanges, maintains differences of concentration and allows gradients to exist. Metabolism does not supply only energy: it produces the building blocks needed for upkeep. Repair mechanisms do not make the cell invulnerable, but they slow the accumulation of damage. Genetic information does not constitute a plan independent of the milieu; it functions within a molecular network that interprets, regulates and transforms its expression.

Experiments in synthetic biology make this articulation observable. In 2018, a team reconstituted in liposomes a system in which a DNA molecule encoded the proteins necessary for its own replication. The experiment did not produce an autonomous cell, but it closed an essential part of the loop: the information served to build machinery that copied that information. ^[7] In 2024, a system of synthetic protocells sustained several cycles of replication and accumulated, over ten cycles of evolution, mutations conferring a selective advantage. ^[8]

These results reproduce neither the origin of life nor an entire cell. They nevertheless supply experimental proof of a central mechanism: when materially inscribed information influences its own reproduction, when variations appear and when their effects modify their frequency, a chemical organisation acquires an evolutionary history. Memory becomes causally active : it does not merely describe the system, it takes part in its future reconstruction.

5. Evolution: making a lineage persist by changing

Evolution does not protect every individual and does not seek the best absolute solution. Variations appear, some are heritable, and the environment modifies the probabilities of survival and reproduction. Selection statistically preserves the variants that leave more descendants in a given context. An adaptation is therefore always relative to particular constraints and may become unfavourable when those change.

Biological continuity thus shifts from the individual to the lineage. The organisation persists not by preserving an identical form, but by rebuilding related forms. Variation prevents the whole lineage from depending on a single response. Selection accumulates certain modifications without having a global objective. This dynamic gives the living a particular capacity: turning perturbations and errors into differences on which a history can act.

This capacity must not be confused with « antifragility » in the sense of an automatic strengthening through shocks. A perturbation can eliminate an entire population. A mutation may be neutral or deleterious. Evolution guarantees the continuity of no species. It only allows some lineages to change when compatible variations exist and a sufficiently large population survives the shock.

Nor does it necessarily lead toward greater complexity. Maynard Smith and Szathmáry stressed that there is neither theoretical reason nor empirical proof of a continuous increase of complexity in all lineages. ^[9] Bacteria have not been replaced by multicellular organisms; they remain extremely diverse and occupy almost every environment. Simplification can itself become advantageous, notably in parasites that delegate functions to their host.

6. Cooperation, symbiosis and major transitions

Some major evolutionary transitions occur when previously autonomous units form an organisation able to function and reproduce as a new whole. Molecules are grouped into chromosomes, cells associate within multicellular organisms, individuals form societies. These transitions do not abolish competition: they build mechanisms that displace or limit conflicts between components.

The mitochondrion constitutes a major example. The mitochondria of eukaryotic cells descend from a bacterial lineage integrated into an ancestral host. Phylogenomic analyses strongly support an origin within the Alphaproteobacteria, even if the exact position of the ancestor remains debated. ^[10] In the course of this integration, part of the genes were transferred or lost, and the partners acquired an interdependence. An association between distinct organisms produced a new functional unit.

Durable cooperation generally requires a division of labour, a coordinated transmission and arrangements limiting conflicts. In a multicellular organism, apoptosis, the regulation of proliferation and the separation between germ line and somatic cells help prevent a cell from pursuing its reproduction at the expense of the whole. When these controls fail, cancer reveals that cooperation remains an active construction, never definitively secured.

Symbiosis therefore does not replace competition. It can transform the level at which selection operates. When the success of the components depends sufficiently on that of the collective and internal conflicts are contained, a new whole can acquire its own continuity. Persistence then gains in integration, but also in requirements of coordination.

7. Resilience: what the living achieves, and what it does not guarantee

Ecological stability has no single measure. It may designate immediate resistance to a perturbation, speed of recovery, variability over time, maintenance of a function, or the capacity to avoid a shift to another regime. C. S. Holling profoundly changed the study of ecosystems by distinguishing stability around a state from a system's capacity to absorb changes while maintaining its essential relations. ^[11]

Diversity can improve certain dimensions of stability because species do not all react in the same way. A grassland experiment conducted over ten years showed that communities containing more species displayed a globally more stable plant production over the years. ^[12] But this relation is not a simple law. An experiment on 690 aquatic microecosystems showed that greater species richness could increase temporal stability while decreasing immediate resistance to warming. ^[13]

Functional redundancy likewise needs to be made precise. Two species may fulfil a similar function under normal conditions while reacting differently to a drought, a disease or a rise in temperature. What matters is not exact repetition, but the diversity of responses. A resilient system keeps several paths able to maintain a function when one of them becomes unavailable.

7.1 Mass extinctions: continuity of life, rupture of biological worlds

Mass extinctions demonstrate both the tenacity and the brutality of biological continuity. The Chicxulub impact, 66 million years ago, caused a rapid collapse of many ecosystems. Life did not emerge intact from that crisis: entire lineages disappeared and ecological functions followed different trajectories of recovery.

A data series on marine nannoplankton shows that after the end-Cretaceous extinction, communities went through about 1.8 million years of strong volatility before a more stable state appeared. The restoration of certain functions of the carbon cycle preceded the full return of taxonomic richness. ^[14] Resilience therefore did not consist in rebuilding the same ecosystem, but in establishing new communities able to restore certain functions.

To say that « life survived » thus masks a reality: the biosphere often persists through replacement, reorganisation and irreversible loss. Its continuity does not guarantee that of species, of ecosystems, or of the conditions to which a civilisation is adapted. The resilience of life at the planetary scale must never serve to minimise the fragility of the habitable world on which we depend.

Table 1 — A succession of modes of persistence

Mode or level	Typical examples	What persists	Dominant mechanism	Capacity added	Principal limit
Stable constituent	Stable nucleus, stable atom	The constituent	Physical interactions and energetic stability	Intrinsic long-term stability	No regulation or adaptation
Chemical structure	Molecule, quartz or salt crystal	A configuration	Bonds, self-assembly, conditional growth	Cohesion and local self-organisation	Very limited repair and memory
Dissipative structure	Flame, vortex, cyclone	A process	Continuous flow of matter and energy	Dynamic maintenance despite the renewal of matter	Disappears when the flow or the conditions cease
Cell	Bacterium, yeast, animal cell	A functional organisation	Boundary, metabolism, regulation, repair	Active upkeep and reconstruction of its components	Permanent dependence on flows and on the medium
Biological lineage	Bacterial population, plant lineage	A reproductive continuity	Heredity, variation and selection	Transmissible memory and cumulative adaptation	Extinction possible if no variant fits
Multicellular organism	Tree, fungus, animal	A coordinated unit	Division of labour and control of conflicts	Specialisation and coordination between units	Complexity of coordination, systemic diseases
Ecosystem	Forest, coral reef, living soil	Functions and relations	Diversity, networks, renewal, cycles	Distribution and redundancy of certain functions	Regime shifts, irreversible losses, context dependence
Human society	City, institution, scientific community	A cultural organisation	External memory, anticipation, institutions	Conscious representation and symbolic transmission	Gap between knowledge, decision and action

The examples are indicative. The « Capacity added » column designates the new function made possible by the coupling proper to each level; it does not mean that the level becomes superior in absolute terms. A single temporal scale would be misleading: duration depends on the system considered, its environment, the perturbation studied and the level at which continuity is measured.

8. Translating the principles of the living into human systems

The study of the living does not directly supply a moral or political programme. Nature contains as much predation, parasitism and extinction as cooperation. A behaviour is not desirable simply because it exists in nature. The interest of the living is functional: it offers a library of mechanisms that have maintained organisations in variable environments.

This caution is essential. On the scale of evolution, the continuity of life may be obtained at the price of the disappearance of individuals, species and entire ecosystems. A human society therefore cannot simply « do as the living does ». Its task is precisely to use anticipation, symbolic memory and collective action to prevent a long-term continuity from passing through a systemic collapse at its own level. The transposition sought bears on mechanisms of regulation, diversification, repair and reconstruction, not on a Darwinian acceptance of losses.

The proposals that follow are not directly deduced from biology and presuppose no identity between an organism, an ecosystem and a society. They constitute hypotheses of functional transposition: materially different mechanisms may contribute to comparable functions of maintenance, regulation, recovery or transmission. Their effectiveness must be assessed in each domain according to its constraints, its indicators and the perturbations considered.

The transpositions proposed here do not constitute a general demonstration of their effectiveness in human societies. They formulate hypotheses that can be confronted with case studies, historical comparisons and the analysis of concrete sociotechnical systems. The complementary work of the ORI-C framework develops the variables and protocols needed for that examination, notably available margin, critical dependence, capacity for recovery, accumulation of debt and threshold crossing. The present article sets out the general logic without claiming to render the whole of those analyses.

8.1 Diversify responses, not only components

For certain critical functions, reducing dependence on a single solution can improve continuity. Useful diversity does not consist in multiplying identical copies, but in preserving responses that do not all share the same vulnerabilities. In a society, this may correspond to several energy sources, several logistical routes, distributed competences or technologies founded on different principles.

8.2 Preserve margins and redundancies

Extreme optimisation tends to remove what appears useless in normal operation: stocks, surplus capacity, reserve staff, diversity of suppliers. It can increase immediate efficiency while reducing the capacity to absorb certain shocks. Redundancy is therefore not necessarily waste; depending on the context, it may constitute a reserve of continuity.

8.3 Limit critical dependencies

Interconnection facilitates the circulation of resources and information, but it can also propagate failures. Models of interdependent networks show that a limited failure in one network can trigger cascades when a large number of components depend on one another. ^[15] Spatially embedded networks can display thresholds beyond which a local perturbation abruptly fragments the whole. ^[16] Useful decentralisation therefore does not mean the absence of coordination; it means that no single component should be able to cause the loss of all essential functions.

8.4 Organise genuine feedback loops

An organism detects certain deviations and mobilises responses that modify its state. A society likewise has measurements, models and institutions of control. But information that cannot modify any decision does not constitute a regulatory loop. An organisation becomes blind when the damage appears in indicators that do not act on the mechanisms responsible.

8.5 Repair before replacing

Biological persistence rests on continuous upkeep. Proteins are renewed, damaged components eliminated and tissues repaired. An organisation that devotes most of its resources to expansion can accumulate a maintenance debt. Its durability therefore depends not only on the quantity produced, but also on its capacity to detect wear and rebuild functions before rupture.

8.6 Transmit a memory able to act

Human societies store an unprecedented quantity of information in languages, sciences, institutions, software and infrastructures. This memory favours persistence only if it remains accessible, verifiable and able to modify action. An accumulation of information without mechanisms of sorting, integration and decision can produce saturation rather than learning.

The decisive shift The living does not teach us to prevent all transformation. It shows how to preserve certain functions and continuities through the replacement of components, the appearance of variants and the reorganisation of relations.

9. Consciousness and meta-persistence

The living can evolve without understanding evolution. A bacterial population becomes resistant because the variants able to reproduce under a constraint increase in frequency. With cognition come faster adjustments: an organism can memorise an experience and modify its behaviour during its lifetime. Anticipation, social learning and certain forms of culture are not exclusively human.

A recent hypothesis situates one of the major particularities of human culture in the coupling between language, external memory, large-scale cooperation and an exceptional openness of the domain of transmissible variations. Human culture would be unique not because it is the only cumulative one, but because humans can transform their institutions, techniques and representations in directions not limited to a narrow repertoire. [19]

This combination makes possible what we call here a meta-persistence: the capacity of an organisation to represent the mechanisms of its own continuity, to compare several trajectories and deliberately to design certain conditions of its future. A cell regulates its concentrations without a theory of homeostasis. A society can model its climate, assess its resources and identify systemic risks. The term is a conceptual proposal of the ORI-C framework; it does not designate a property already recognised as an autonomous scientific category.

Meta-persistence thus introduces an informational and cognitive feedback loop that does not exist in classical Darwinian selection. The latter acts mainly after the fact: variants appear, and then their consequences for survival and reproduction modify their frequency. A reflexive organisation can, by contrast, represent certain consequences before they occur, compare scenarios, modify its rules or its infrastructures and try to reduce the cost of real elimination. It does not abolish trial and error, but it can shift part of it toward simulation, learning and decision.

Meta-persistence is nevertheless no guarantee. A civilisation can observe a threat without translating it into a decision. It can decide without having the means to act, or act too slowly relative to the dynamics of the problem. It can optimise local objectives that sabotage global continuity. To become effective, meta-persistence must couple five operations: observing, representing and comparing, deciding, acting, and then revising the models when their forecasts are contradicted by the real.

It can be put to the test through the quality of detection, the reliability of models, the coupling between information and decision, the material capacity for action, and the correction of representations after error. These dimensions do not measure an abstract « collective consciousness »; they assess whether the knowledge produced actually modifies the system's trajectory.

A specific risk appears when representations designed to guide action cease to be corrected by the real. A simulation, a totalising ideology or an optimisation indicator may become so structuring that the system ends up protecting the coherence of its model rather than the effective conditions of its continuity. Meta-persistence then turns against itself: the organisation improves what it measures while degrading what it claims to preserve.

Humanity thus constitutes a paradox: it can anticipate its own rupture and simultaneously build mechanisms capable of provoking it. Consciousness opens a new mode of persistence, but also a new mode of failure: the destruction of conditions recognised as indispensable.

10. The technosphere: emergent level or fragile extension?

The technosphere gathers the buildings, roads, machines, electrical networks, digital systems, technical institutions and material flows produced by human societies. Its extent has become planetary. An estimate published in 2020 concluded that the dry mass of manufactured objects had reached and then exceeded that of all terrestrial biomass around 2020, with an uncertainty of a few years. ^[17]

This mass does not suffice to constitute a new autonomous level of persistence. An abandoned city does not spontaneously repair its networks. A factory does not search for its ores alone, and a data centre does not reproduce its physical components without workers, energy, logistics and institutions. The technosphere stores information and imposes constraints, but it remains dependent on human metabolism, on the biosphere, on climate stability and on the resources of the geosphere.

Work devoted to the technosphere moreover stresses a dynamic of coevolution between technical, social and biophysical processes rather than a separate sphere. ^[18] The term « parasitic » may express its present dependence, but it oversimplifies the problem. A more accurate description is that of an organisation that is non-autonomous, largely extractive and insufficiently regenerative.

The present technosphere demonstrates no complete operational autonomy: it does not by itself reproduce the whole of its components, its infrastructures and its supply chains. Nothing, however, allows us to conclude that a far more advanced technical autonomy would be physically impossible. The immediately relevant question concerns less its absolute independence than its capacity to become compatible with the cycles and limits of the terrestrial systems on which it still depends. That presupposes moving from linear extraction to reuse, from replacement to repair, and from local optimisation to the regulation of global consequences.

11. Astrobiology: a single example does not allow a conclusion about rarity

Earth remains the only world where the existence of life is confirmed. Despite the exploration of the Solar System and the study of thousands of exoplanets, no proof of life beyond Earth has been established. ^[20] This situation does not demonstrate that life is rare: it means that we have only a single example. A single sample does not allow the probability of the appearance of life in the Universe to be estimated.

Terrestrial life nevertheless supplies a distinct piece of information. Once it appeared, it maintained a continuity for several billion years despite major geological, atmospheric and climatic transformations. It therefore constitutes the only known example of an active, reproductive and evolutive persistence on a geological scale. The observed uniqueness does not measure cosmic rarity, but it reveals the tenacity of this mode of organisation once established.

Astrobiology seeks to determine whether the principles identified on Earth are general. All known organisms use a carbon chemistry and water as the principal solvent. These characteristics may reflect universal constraints or the particular history of our planet. A 2024 study assessed several candidate solvents according to their abundance, their solvating capacity, the stability of solutes and their chemical functions. It concludes that water remains exceptionally favourable and that concentrated sulphuric acid also deserves experimental exploration; liquid carbon dioxide is identified as a case to study despite significant limits. ^[21]

The possibility of non-carbon life remains more speculative. Analyses of silicon chemistry show that it can form a great variety of compounds, but that it has strong limitations depending on the solvent, the temperature and the availability of the reactions necessary to an evolutive biochemistry. ^[22] No non-carbon organisation capable of metabolism, heredity and Darwinian evolution is known.

The discovery of a second independent origin of life would constitute a decisive test. If an alien biosphere likewise used boundaries, flows, a memory and selection, these mechanisms would appear as general convergences of active persistence. If it rested on a radically different architecture, it would show that terrestrial life is only one solution among several. Astrobiology is thus the genuine external test of our grid.

12. The cosmic limits of all persistence

No known material organisation is eternal. Stars exhaust their fuels, energy gradients are transformed and astrophysical structures evolve over durations that immensely exceed Earth's history. Classical scenarios of the cosmic future predict the progressive extinction of conventional star formation and, in the very long term, the dominance of stellar remnants. The exact scales depend on the cosmological model and the processes taken into account. ^[24]

The ultimate fate of atoms remains partly unknown. Some grand unified theories predict proton decay, but no decay has been observed. Recent searches by Super-Kamiokande have established, depending on the channels studied, lower limits of the order of 10³⁴ years for the partial lifetime of the proton. ^[25] It is therefore incorrect to assert that all atoms will necessarily end up decaying: that possibility depends on physics not yet confirmed.

The idea of a « purely informational » persistence requires another correction. In all known physical realisations, information is inscribed in the state of a material or energetic support: molecular configuration, charge, magnetic orientation, radiation or quantum state. Landauer's principle establishes more precisely that a logically irreversible operation, such as erasing a bit under certain conditions, imposes a minimal thermodynamic dissipation. [23] It does not by itself fix a maximum duration of conservation and does not forbid the repeated transfer of information between several supports. Such continuity nevertheless remains dependent on available supports, energy, mechanisms of copying and error correction.

Even a post-biological civilisation able to transfer its cognitive processes to artificial supports would remain subject to physical constraints. It would have to power its computations, dissipate heat, correct errors, renew its supports and access exploitable energy gradients. Changing substrate would displace the thermodynamic and informational constraints; it would not abolish them. [23]

The cosmic question then becomes: how far can an organisation displace, renew and protect its support in order to prolong its continuity despite the transformation of its environment? DNA does not traverse billions of years as one and the same molecule; it is copied. A culture does not last in the same brains; it is transmitted and externalised. Any cosmic persistence would probably rest on the same general principle: not making a support eternal, but organising the transfer of continuity between successive supports.

Nothing demonstrates that such a process could survive the ultimate limits of the Universe. This prospect remains speculative. It does, however, reveal a property common to the modes of active persistence: the more continuity detaches itself from the conservation of a particular object, the more it depends on reliable mechanisms of reconstruction, copying and correction.

13. What science allows us to assert

• The real presents nested levels of organisation in which collective relations bring new properties into being.

• These levels do not form a universal scale of superiority, value or stability.

• Living systems maintain their organisation thanks to flows of matter and energy and remain entirely subject to thermodynamics.

• Known cellular life is characterised by the coupling between boundary, metabolism, regulation, repair, reproduction, memory, variation and selection.

• The continuity of the living depends less on the conservation of individuals than on the reconstruction of organisations and the continuation of lineages.

• Evolution does not necessarily lead toward greater complexity.

• Diversity, redundancy and the distribution of functions can improve certain dimensions of resilience, without guaranteeing invulnerability.

• Societies can functionally translate certain principles of the living, but that translation is a design choice and not a biological law.

14. What remains open or speculative

• Science does not demonstrate that the Universe tends toward life, consciousness or increasing complexity.

• A single example of a biosphere does not allow the cosmic frequency of life to be estimated.

• No life founded on another solvent or another central element than carbon has been observed.

• The technosphere has not demonstrated a reproductive and regenerative autonomy comparable to that of the living.

• No information can, within known physics, persist independently of a material or energetic support.

• Scenarios of persistence on the cosmic scale remain dependent on unverified assumptions about the future of the Universe and the stability of matter.

14.1 Conditions of testing

Persistence through reconstruction — The central thesis would be strongly weakened by the discovery of a durable evolutive organisation resting on no form of reconstruction, copying or transmissible memory.

Transposition to societies — The functional hypothesis would be weakened if repeated comparisons showed that margins, response diversity, feedback loops or the distribution of functions improve no relevant dimension of continuity in comparable situations.

Meta-persistence — The concept would lose its explanatory value if the quality of anticipation, the coupling between knowledge and decision, the capacity for action and learning after error showed no reproducible link with the adaptation or transformation of organisations.

Technosphere — The finding of present non-autonomy would be refuted by the appearance of a technical chain able to acquire its energy and materials, manufacture all of its components, repair itself, reproduce and pursue its adaptation without external biological intervention.

Cosmic persistence — No definitive conclusion is proposed. The feasibility of an indefinite transfer between supports depends on the cosmological future, on accessible resources and on the physical limits of copying, computation and error correction.

15. Conclusion: learning to continue

The living did not traverse Earth's history by remaining identical. It persisted because its organisations were able to renew themselves, reproduce, diversify, cooperate, come into conflict, disappear locally and reappear in other forms. Its fundamental lesson is not the search for a motionless equilibrium. It is the construction of a continuity able to integrate transformations.

A durable system does not necessarily preserve every component. It preserves the relations, functions and memories that allow its reconstruction. It maintains margins, distributes certain functions, detects deviations, limits internal conflicts, transmits what has worked and produces enough diversity not to depend on a single response.

The living does not constitute the summit of a hierarchy of matter. It represents the only currently known example of a persistence durably coupling active upkeep, reconstruction, reproduction, hereditary memory, variation and historical transformation. It lasts not because it would be stronger than every catastrophe, but because its continuity is never entirely attached to a single form.

With humanity comes the possibility of rendering that continuity partly conscious. We can study the mechanisms that make an organisation robust, anticipate certain ruptures and design systems that incorporate their own maintenance. This capacity opens an unprecedented possibility, but guarantees no success. A civilisation can understand the conditions of its persistence while organising their destruction.

The true lesson of the living is therefore not to refuse change. It is to learn to change without destroying all the conditions that make it possible to continue.

Final formulation The living is not matter become more resistant. It is matter become able to take part in its own persistence, by sustaining its organisation, rebuilding it on new supports and integrating certain transformations into its history.

References

The following references support the article's principal factual claims. The notions of « active persistence » and « meta-persistence » constitute a conceptual synthesis articulated with the ORI-C framework; they are not presented as already stabilised scientific categories. The associated models, indicators and protocols are developed in complementary work.

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Version consolidée finale — juillet 2026