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How is life an accelerator of entropy when it literally exists to centralize/condense energy and create ordered feedback systems?
by packetlost 4y ago
How is life an accelerator of entropy when it literally exists to centralize/condense energy and create ordered feedback systems?
- keyme 4y agoLife exists as a way to release trapped energy that simpler processes weren't able to. Look at us, releasing fission ennergy trapped in heavy atoms by supernovae.
- packetlost 4y agooh that makes sense
- water-your-self 4y agoWhat about photosynthesis?
- TeMPOraL 4y agoPhotons go in, stuff gets rearranged, waste heats gets produced and expelled to the atmosphere.
- LASR 4y agoLife, like any other physical process, provides additional pathways to increase entropy. Otherwise that process wouldn't have a gradient to go through.
- nh23423fefe 4y agoEvery living thing radiates black body radiation which is higher entropy than sunlight.
- TeMPOraL 4y agoThermodynamics says that you can't decrease entropy in a closed system. Whatever life does, however it does, like any process, will not decrease entropy - and generally, will increase it over time. That life seems to generate and maintain order locally only tells you that it shoves the entropy it produces somewhere else, out of sight (ultimately it becomes thermal radiation). It's like with a heat pump: it does not generate cold, it merely transports heat against a gradient, and in doing so, adds more heat of its own. It may seem like it creates cold, but that's only because you're sitting in front of the cold end, while the hot end goes to ground or atmosphere - i.e. a thermal sink so large that your contribution to it is almost unmeasurable.