We like to picture evolution as a climb. At the wide base: matter, heavy and chaotic. At the apex: photons, light, intelligence — the refinement of all that weight into clarity. It’s a triangle of becoming, a geometry of ascent. But triangles wobble. If you straighten that climb, the story changes. The apex collapses into a thread. You no longer have a pyramid — you have a line.
That line is the law of persistence. Identity is not static; it survives because loss is matched by replacement. Written simply:
I(t+Δt) = I(t) − ΔC + ΔR.
As long as ΔR ≥ ΔC, the pattern holds. Cells die, new ones divide. Generations vanish, new ones step in. Flesh changes, but the thread is not cut. At 99.9% certainty, the invariants that keep the line taut are always the same: energy exchange (E), a medium to move through (S), mortality with continuity (D), and the encoding of information (I). Bundle them, and you get continuity itself:
E + S + D + I = Ω.
But here’s the catch: a line is already an abstraction. Beneath it, there’s rhythm. A line is just what you see when oscillations cohere. Photons pulse, atoms spin, cells divide in cycles, cultures breathe across generations. Continuity is never flat; it’s re-knit every moment out of fluctuation. The line holds because of oscillatory tension. Survival is not just straight persistence — it’s resonance across scales.
So maybe the truth isn’t just that we rise from matter toward light. Maybe it’s that the triangle deforms, the line extends, and beneath it all is rhythm — the hidden music of persistence. That’s the geometry of life, and the likely shape of what’s coming: not stillness, not collapse, but a thread humming with oscillations, drawn taut across time.
Conclusion
If the triangle is the mythology of ascent, the line is the mathematics of survival. The story is less about reaching the apex and more about preserving invariants along the path. In 100 years, we may no longer breathe oxygen or die as individuals in the same way — but at 99.9% certainty, the straight line holds: intelligence will still manage energy, store information, and use death as the mechanism of persistence. The rest is ornament.