The universe is not alive. It's more than alive. It contains life. It does all the things that living things do. It processes information. It moves energy from one place to another. The different pieces of it can reproduce each other. But the Universe as a whole can do much more than just what living things can do. The human brain can perform about 10 to the power of 16, or 10 million billion computations in a second. In the same time, Seth believes the universe performs about 10 to the power of 106 computations, which makes the universe impossibly smarter than we can ever imagine. If the universe is behaving like a giant quantum computer, and let's face it, it is, then it's capable of any kind of complex behavior we can imagine.