Life seems like a very inefficient way to dissipate energy. And that's kind of the point, you need to hang onto the energy long enough to do something with it before it dissipates.

The most efficient way of dissipating energy seems like it would be something like

Photon comes in -> photon reflects off water -> photon goes back out to space

Life is pretty good at entropy. Take for example: humans. We've been digging up vast amounts of fossil fuels to then burn them up. Without us, those reserves would stay in the ground probably forever. Is there another organism that's better entropy as us? (actually I think there are contenders)

Perhaps that's our reason for being.

"Reasons" are human constructs. We don't need a reason to be, we just are.

Eh, but it makes sense we still follow the Second Law of Thermodynamics, right? When people ask themselves, "What's the point of Life?" That's it: We're agents of entropy.

There's nothing that makes that the point of life, though. It's just a fact about it. Just as it is equally a fact about non-life.

We are just a different, temporary state of the same stardust, as everything else around us — as in, a small part of the Universe transformed into us, then started trying to understand the rest of itself. :)

> Life seems like a very inefficient way to dissipate energy

It seems like a good way to dissipate complex energies. Chemicals pouring out of deep sea vents contain lots of chemical potential energy, but it's difficult to unlock without a complex mechanism. Life unlocks those mechanisms. Taking it several steps further, a uranium-powered particle accelerator produces massive amounts of complex entropy.

As a layperson, I've no opinion on this – just sharing the article because it seemed amenable to your idea that life emerged non-acutely as a natural consequence of physical laws.