3 ms·
To add, life just speeds up the chaos by orders of magnitude, it's a perfect entropy catalyst.
by ashirviskas 4y ago
To add, life just speeds up the chaos by orders of magnitude, it's a perfect entropy catalyst.
- kergonath 4y agoI’d be shocked if that were the case, even only considering the Earth. The oceans and the atmosphere are full of entropy. So is the liquid outer core. And even if the mantle is not quite liquid, and even if the crust is mostly solid, these are huge in terms of volume and mass, much larger than the sliver of dirt we inhabit on top of them. So yeah, I really doubt we (collectively, all human beings) are changing the Earth’s entropy in any meaningful way.
- zone411 4y agoLife reduces local entropy.
- lxgr 4y agoAt the expense of increased global entropy, which I suppose is GPs point.
- zone411 4y ago"there is 10 million times more entropy in that radiation [cosmic microwave radiation] than there is in all of the mass of the universe" https://news.berkeley.edu/2016/09/20/new-book-links-flow-of-time-with-big-bang/ https://news.berkeley.edu/2016/09/20/new-book-links-flow-of-...
- TeMPOraL 4y agoBut then, this is just entropy from a one-off event long ago. Meanwhile, life is an entropy producing reaction with a strong exponential factor. To butcher an insightful quote by (IIRC) Hamming, any positive slope will eventually make up for y-intercept of a constant function.
- zone411 4y agoIt underlines the idea that the entropy-time connection is pretty shaky though.