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Comment by 00098345 | Hacker News Reader

It is interesting that Mr. Landis mentions entropy (in Thermodynamical sense I hope). I have always wondered what it means here, in this solar system. Assuming the solar system has negligible energy flowing in, what does it mean when life on earth is reducing entropy in this system? We are tipping the balance by assimilating atoms in a more orderly fashion with each birth. This means something bad is happening somewhere close-by. ;-(

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What 'balance' are we tipping? There is no balance. Entropy increases globally over time. You do not cause bad things to happen by locally decreasing entropy temporarily. You might interpret this as indicating that life is meaningless over cosmic time scales, but it doesn't mean something 'bad' is happening anywhere.

Our star is slowly dying, and we feed on its remains. Our feeding is not the cause of its death, however. It will die anyway.

The amount of entropy within the solar system, or on the earth is fairly constant. Also, amount of information represented biological order is pretty trivial compared to the whole.

But yes lots of entropy is going somewhere else anyway. The sun is flinging a lot of entropy-bearing photons out into the universe. Its internal heat source then makes more entropy to replace it. For now.

Each act of "assimilation" and order as you put it, by definition requires energy and produces heat.

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