Life is not entropy’s enemy, it’s entropy’s shortcut. Starting from quantum fluctuations that imprinted structure in the early universe, I show how stochastic footholds, discreteness, and tunneling let driven chemistry rectify rare events into autocatalytic loops, proto-metabolism that builds memory and prediction. Biological systems then act as adaptive entropy pumps, exporting disorder while locally organizing information. At the far end, as gradients vanish, quantum jitter remains; on immense timescales it can assemble fleeting “Boltzmann brains.” Life is quantum at both bookends: from first sparks to last echoes. How quantum is life? I define life’s “quantumness” as the extent to which its functional dynamics depend on nonclassical correlations—tunneling, discreteness, coherence, or entanglement—rather than being reproducible by a fully classical stochas
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