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Comment by sergiotapia | Hacker News Reader

I think about this a lot. Entropy is a bitch, every single resource is consumed. A piece of wood is burned and it's gone forever. You can't put that heat back in. Makes my head hurt, what's the end-game? Nothingness?

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But it's not a closed system. You have essentially free energy from the sun, waves, wind, geothermal etc. and and a whole natural energy conversion apparatus, which offsets the resource limitations that do exist. It's not like we inhabit a cold dark cave with only a limited supply of combustible fuel.

While this is true and a very important part of understanding life on Earth, our current situation as a species is the consequence of high energy density, non-renewable fossil fuels.

Solar, geothermal, wave and other forms of energy will surely continue to allow complex systems to thrive on this planet, but our particular system arose out of access to an abundant, but ultimately limited source of high energy density fuels. We could essentially view our civilizations work as assisting in breaking down the energy gradient caused by having very rich stores of energy locked in the bonds of hydro carbons beneath the surface. As this source of energy is exploited and depleted too will our civilization and possibly species begin to break down.

Oh, I agree with that, and think it's extremely necessary that we transition away fossil fuels prior to the onset of an energy famine, which seems imminent on a decadal timescale. Of course we are not going to run out of stuff to burn in only a few decades, but insofar as burning stuff requires additional air conditioning we are at or close to a tipping point.

Suns go out. And like in The Last Question, let's say we can somehow combine 50 dead stars to make one working star. Eventually there are no more stars. And then?

I don't care. Worrying about such long timescales induces a sort of paralysis. The solution to uncertainty about truly fundamental questions of existence is to work on fundamental math and physics, to figure out where matter comes from, whether other dimensions exist and are accessible etc. If you just feel discouraged by the pointlessness of existence, that's just a sort of vertigo or cognitive overload. It's better to pick something you like and scurry around exploring it rather than being stuck in intellectual catatonia. The best cure for this is to engage in something you find physically enjoyable; rebooting your sense of physical autonomy helps to shake off the cognitive paralysis. Go for a walk, jump around to loud music, eat some of your favorite food, or amuse yourself with comical imagery so as to alter your mood. The seeming futility of existence doesn't matter because it's on too large of a scale for you to experience or impact; the feeling that it overrides all other considerations is just a feeling.

Comments like this are strange since anyone with eyes can see that the break down of the systems we rely on is not some far off future event, it's happening right now and will likely escalate fairly rapidly in the next few decades.

It's not surprising that people feel stress from this and "walking it off" is not all that effective of a treatment.

I'm responding purely to the cosmic timescale brought up in the grandparent comment. I'm saying it's pointless to obsess over cosmic entropy because it inhibits one from doing anything about current problems. While current problems are stressful, reacting to that by fretting over the ultimate pointlessness or unsustainability of existence over the lifetime of the stars/universe is an unhealthy response to stress. Self-care and activity are more effective and productive, even if those long-term uncertainties remain unresolved.

I remember reading a theory that life itself springs from entropy. Energy finds way to expend more energy.

And yes, it's important to remember our mortality, as individuals and as a species. In fact, I'm increasingly realizing much of what humans do -- and much of what individuals are fundamentally anxious about -- comes down to mortality. Why do we build careers? Civilizations? To create something that lasts beyond us.

But facing that directly leads you to make more rational choices and perhaps find more peace. Knowing that life is temporary, what do you do? How do you make best use of your time on this planet?

Entropy is tricky when it comes to life and other forms of complexity.

The book "Into the Cool" explores this is away you might find very interesting. It spends a lot of time exploring the question of how the complexity of life emerges given the second law of thermodynamics. It argues pretty strongly that the second law still rules everything but we have to look at larger non-equilibrium energy flows to really understand it.

Energy fuels the complexity of our society, species and world. That wood you see burning is a solar battery in which complex life converted energy into hyrdocarbons over the period of many years.

Energy shapes everything about our society and will determine everything about our future. We life in a technical wonderland as a direct consequence of our species discovering extremely high energy density fossil fuels not all that long ago.

But in the end all of this complexity serves the second law in helping reduce energy gradients. All of that stored up potential energy in fossil fuels is being released into the environment, and we are the tools of nature to help. Thing of all of the energy we have spend freeing resources and energy from the grown. When we grow beyond the means of the energy supporting that system, all of it will break down.

We're starting to see this now not just in climate but the ecosystem, our economy etc etc.

The greatest illusion we've had as a species is that we are anything other than an expression of the second law in action.

Eventually, nothingness, no matter what we do - the increase in entropy cannot be stopped. That's an incredibly powerful thing though - if you can redirect the increase in entropy so that it happens in a direction that causes useful order in one particular part of the system, you can use the increase in entropy to create immensely useful things. That's essentially what life is - a clever pump that uses the universe's inevitable increase in entropy to organise a small part of a small planet into copies of itself and increasingly complex systems, in much the same way as a ram pump uses the flow of a large amount of water downhill to pump a small amount up. Not forever, of course, only for a few billion years which in cosmic terms is almost nothing. In human terms though that's still a lot.

Ultimately, the entire biosphere serves only to more efficiently reradiate energy absorbed from the sun (plus a bit from older stars in the form of fissiles) into space. All of the energy that originally went into carbon chains to form that wood came from those sources originally, and while the energy released by burning it has been lost forever, there's no shortage of replacement energy.

I don't believe the entropy hypothesis. What are the chances given that time is infinite that this is/was the first "use" of the particles were using?

That being said, That makes MY head hurt.

Relevant quote from SMAC (one of many that struck me years ago when I played it):

"Life is merely an orderly decay of energy states, and survival requires the continual discovery of new energy to pump into the system. He who controls the sources of energy controls the means of survival."

CEO Nwabudike Morgan, "The Centauri Monopoly"

Pretty much sums up the extreme capitalist view for me.

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