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Thought experiment - you could look at life itself as a form of heat management. Consider oil: crudely speaking, it's energy that could have heated some bit of
by bitcurious 3y ago
Thought experiment - you could look at life itself as a form of heat management. Consider oil: crudely speaking, it's energy that could have heated some bit of the ocean, but instead was captured by a cell via photosynthesis which died and got buried underground.
- PheonixPharts 3y agoYou can take it further and even argue that complex life is ultimately just a tool for increasing entropy (which the universe seems to enjoy doing). Digging that oil up from the ground and the burning it does a tremendous amount to free up all that energy stored in a low-entropy system. The book Into the Cool makes an interesting case regarding this overall concept.