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Comment by ithkuil | Hacker News Reader

This mechanism of increasing entropy faster than normal already exists. It's called life.

The purpose of life is to hydrogenate carbon dioxide.

Left to its own devices, carbon dioxide won't get hydrogenated, although that's it's lowest energy level. By creating a chemical pathways towards the lowest energy levels of this (and other) molecules, life is indeed helping us to reach the heat death of the universe sooner.

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Sorry, but this is utterly false. CO2 is a very low energy state for carbon, and "hydrogenating" carbon (CO2 -> HCOOH/formic acid -> CH2O/formaldehyde -> CH2OH/methanol -> CH4/methane) climbs a ladder towards higher energy states. The life that does this (green plants) use the incoming energy from the sun (outside the system) to do it in a stable fashion and capture the energy into biologically useful (e.g. low-entropy) molecules.

Setting fire to these things is a fast way to increase entropy (locally on this planet, anyway; not sure it would make any material difference on a galactic scale). Fire is a short circuit of electrons flowing from the source (e.g. methane) to the sink (oxygen in the atmosphere). Life is effectively a resistor in the middle of that circuit that can use the energy slowly and to do "useful work" first, before it is released as heat.

So, the exact opposite of what you wrote.

I think they meant it as a trade off between local and isolated low entropy regions with high entropy regions long term. We, the low entropy regions, reduce the universe’s capacity to do useful work by , well, using it, and thus increasing entropy.

Thanks. Yeah I had to ruin the Michael Russel quote and thr (otherwise correct, I think) general point about entropy increase by adding some detail about the energy of that particular reaction that I have no idea about.

But on HN "the best way to get the right answer [..] is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer" so let's call it a win

If anything life is an organizing principle of chaos. Life is akin to negentropy.

That's true but it is exceedingly temporary organizing principle. It's almost a humorous joke that there is negentropy. Kind of like our lives. They are exceedingly temporarily organized before we're dirt.

It seems that the universe creates geometries that organize other geometries into self-similar procreations. I don't know, maybe it is a cosmic joke, but it seems everything is making itself out there one way or another; and that begets a certain level of organizing.

Life is quite the opposite it decreases entropy inside of itself.

But it increases the total entropy of the system (the universe). Doing everything increases the entropy.

I think I read/heard somewhere (cannot recall where) that complex systems in general (and Life in particular) are processes that are more efficient at increasing entropy. Perhaps the very same effort to to maintain their internal entropy low, drives the overall entropy to increase faster than if there wasn't any complex system in the first place.

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