Entropy and Life (2013)
letstalkaboutscience.wordpress.com
letstalkaboutscience.wordpress.com
The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity by Bobby Azarian
> When you empty a bathtub, why does a swirl form? → Because it is the most efficient way to increase entropy.
> The author argues in that life is very likely because it is the most efficient way to increase entropy in the universe.
I fear my words don't do the book justice, I found it very long, but just as illuminating, highly recommended.
I read "Hour of Our Delight: Cosmic Evolution, Order, and Complexity" by Hubert Reeves as a teenager which I can also recommend. That's how I learned about the low entropy sunlight converted to higher entropy IR radiation on earth, allowing complex life to exist without breaking the 2nd law of thermodynamics. So I was happy to see it talked about.
Now, life seen as an entropy-increasing system was a really interesting take on the topic! Until now my understanding was that it's the universe expansion that actually sorta decreased the local "entropy density" and allowed to radiate low entropy IR in the ever colder empty space in the first place.
Computers made of water, wind and wood... may be bubbling, sighing or quietly growing without our suspicion that such activities are tantamount to a turmoil of computation whose best description is itself. -- A. K. Dewdney, Computer Recreations [0]
Shouldn't that be: to /decrease/ entropy locally?
A life form is definitely something I'd consider to be highly organized, i.e. low entropy, but that order is maintained via a greater relative increase of entropy by destroying and consuming other "instances" of low entropy (plants, animals, etc) for nutrition, which are they themselves sustained by disproportionate increases of entropy (consuming of other organisms, the sun doing its thing, etc).
So, as a life form tends to fight for its own survival -- survival being "just" a process of increasing entropy every else but the life form itself -- it is indeed an extremely efficient way of increasing entropy in the universe, in that is requires only a single point of decrease in order to cause a theoretically infinite instances of increase.
I suddenly feel an awful lot like a cow on my way to the slaughter indeed, and have the urge to go play Dark Souls.
In the universe? You could argue life is the most efficient way to increase entropy within a local system ( like ants on a forest floor dissembling an insect carcass ), but I find it hard to believe life is the most efficient way to increase entropy in the entire universe. The assumed expansion of the universe itself increases entropy in a manner no life could ever hope to achieve.
If we actually accept that expansion increase in entropy, I do not know what could possibly compete with this.
Why does the universe favour things that efficiently increase entropy?
living things consume energy to replicate. black holes dont do that.
EDIT
Perhaps I'm downvoted because the linked article states the opposite, that Entropy doesn't lead to life. Because life is 'ordered'
I had veritasium on the brain. The veritasium video more clearly shows that life as 'ordered', is a very rare configuration of atoms, and thus 'higher' entropy.
And because entropy always increases, and life increases entropy, that maybe entropy leads to life.
Others linked it, here again since it is worth watching because it somewhat either contradicts, or highlights the gaps in the linked submittal. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxL2HoqLbyA)
But a specific system can expend energy to locally reduce entropy (or at least to offset decay).
The veritasium video points out that 'ordered' is very hard to define, since at the beginning of the universe, if we assume the big bang, it was very 'un-ordered' and lowest entropy, and also if we assume the end of the universe is the 'heat death' with all particles diffused evenly, it is also 'un-ordered' and highest entropy. And in-between, if we take 'very ordered' as high entropy, then life is very ordered, a very un-likely state, thus very high-entropy arrangement of particles.
Don't think his video came down on clear explanation, just that 'ordered' is a difficult concept.
Life appears in spite of the 2nd law. The context in which it appears means that life orders its context, so 'feeds off' low entropy. But low entropy environment is not sufficient.
You must have pretty specific causal patterns in the 'primordial soup' for the system to self-organize into 'entropy accelerators' such as life.
Those patterns are feedback loops and heterarchy.
Probably not. However, what if that was actually the case? What would the implications be for everyday life?