Entropy & Society
A while back, I read Stephen Hawking's Brief History of Time. I became excited about entropy, and spent a while wrapping my head around it. Then, I started looking at how things behave in terms of it. When I'm finding is that almost everything I come into contact with -- scientific things like biology & physics and seemingly unrelated things like relationships -- behave as entropic systems. Maybe, as one giant entropic system composed of smaller and smaller entropic systems.As the sun burns off its potential energy, a small fraction is collected by the Earth. Some goes to just heat the atmosphere or the ground, but some is collected by plants via photosynthesis and stored again as potential energy, this time in the chemical bonds of sugars inside the plant. Some of the energy is used by the plant to drive other processes, such as producing new growth.
Then, humans come along and use the plant. We either burn it to make heat, we feed it to other animals, or we eat it. In the process of doing this, we use energy to harvest, transport, and prepare the plant. And there's one of entropy's rules, that it always takes its tithe. There is never a net gain of energy.
Heating a house by burning wood is a perfect example of entropy. You have this plant with stored kinetic energy in chemical bonds. As the plant burns, the heat comes out and we trap as much as possible in our houses. Still, some goes up the chimney, and the heat we trap will still leak out and the house will cool down.
Really, entropy is about chaos and a state of non-entropy is about organization. That I've got the heat trapped in my house is a sign of organization; as the heat leaks out and disperses into the atmosphere its organization is lost, or that is to say it has become more entropic.
The same thing with eating the plants as food. Sugars are made of highly organized atoms, which are broken down by glycolysis and the Krebs cycle to form adenosine triphosphate (ATP). The the potential energy in sugar drives a kinetic process to make the ATP, which then stores the potential energy -- but some is lost along the way as heat, which is stored in our body but still gradually lost to the environment.
Anyhow, the ATP is in turn used to drive muscles and chemical reactions. In the process, it is degraded into adenosine diphosphate (ADP), a smaller molecule -- the atoms have become less organized -- but the potential energy is harvested to do various other things, like establishing electrochemical gradients. The gradients create force that can cause things, but if left alone they will tend to degrade over time, just like heat leaking from a house. And, of course, a bunch is just lost to making heat because we're all entropy's bitch.
Everything requires a power source. A chemical gradient is created by a molecular pump running on ATP, which is generated by the Krebs cycle powered by sugars, whose generation happens in photosynthesis using solar energy... which comes from the sun, which is slowly running down.
In the end, everything degrades into making the atmosphere warmer, before being lost as radiative energy back into space at a rate that balances the arrival of new, fresh energy from the sun that keeps the cycle alive.
And every bit of all that, was powered by the miniscule fragment of the sun's output that actually hits the Earth -- approximately 0.000 000 01%, by my reckoning. Bloody amazing.
I exist because of this. The sun powered the earth, and it created creatures that procreated and evolved and eventually made humans, made me. And humans, being sentient, created governments and cities: macro-level non-entropic systems. These exist because we put our energy into shaping the world into a shape we want, a more organized shape where we live together with order and justice and rules instead of all living in caves and fighting over food and beating the crap out of anyone threatening our territory.
The thing is, everything requires a source of less-entropic energy to "burn" to make things happen, and a force to direct the choice of how they will use the energy. When we have a problem, we study up on the issue and how to solve it. If we study in the same area a lot, our knowledge of that field grows. But, the knowledge we don't use suffers both going out of date, and also loss from our memory. On more biology-related level, when penicillin was discontinued as a treatment of gonorrhoea, the bacteria focused its efforts on developing resistance to the new medicines we applied... and as time goes by, it's losing resistance to penicillin1 because it doesn't invest in its resistance, because it doesn't need to, because there is no incentive provided by us to do so.
If we stop investing effort, investing energy, organization we've created will naturally degrade into chaos. So if we don't invest in society, in our cities, in teaching the next generation, they will degrade into increasingly entropic forms. What's a more entropic building? A pile of rubble. A more entropic society? A society where fewer people have jobs (everyone having a job is a very organized thing!). A more entropic relationship? A relationship where knowing and understanding each-other is decaying, to eventually break up. A more entropic state of life? Death. A more entropic government? Corrupt, or dissolving.
Things will not just stay the way you left them when you stop investing; they will decay. They will lose properties, abilities that were assigned to them.
And this is why the culture of apathy that exists today is a problem. Apathy prevents people from investing to hold off decay. If we don't invest effort in keeping order and justice in society, things will decay toward the territorial, survival-oriented motif that existed before we all got together and created these things.
What we need to realize is that nature is inherently reactive.
Nature doesn't think, Hmmm, the humans might introduce
penicillin, so I'd better crank out some gonorrhoea with a beta
lactamase.
Instead, it waits until we introduce penicillin,
then works on distributing a better gonorrhoea that's
resistant. That process of evolution is driven by both organisms
trying to find better ways to survive, and selecting the most
well-equipped members of each species for survival.
The question is, what about us? Do we, as sentient creatures, override the reactive behaviour of nature on a macro level?
Creation of society and working together initially improved chances of surviving for all of us. Distances between cities limited disease exchange. But now, we exchange stuff all the time. Diseases spread much further than their natural boundaries would have allowed -- this is a force against society.
We've developed medicines to give us an upper-hand against disease, but we use them irresponsibly and provide incentive for bacteria to evolve. Will the bacteria one day catch up, after exhausting every medication we can invent, and then slaughter us in numbers unimaginable?
Is our failure to address these problems because there is inadequate need to? Will we ever be proactive about it? Will we wait until the time when a disease is poised to whip our tiny pink asses, when we realize our species is about to be decimated, then feel angry at our scientists for not finding a cure, angry at politicians for allowing the situation to get so out-of-control, denying the responsibility for our own contributions to the problem?
Somewhere along the lines, we've been distracted from what's important. We're too taken in by the virtual lives of characters on television and in games as both become increasingly complex and provide an alternative to reality. We're crazed by collecting beanie babies or all the Doctor Who and Blakes 7 episodes, and knowing the cannon of reality of those series. When we do interact with the real world, all too often it's about who some celebrity is boinking, what trouble they're in, what team won a sporting event. In the sense that they have nothing to do with our day to day lives, they might as well be virtual reality too.
What really matters, we're not invested in. How many thousands of people has my country slain in a foreign country, and how many years of hatred and world problems are going to come out of us having done that? What's happening to my civil rights? Even things like what's going on with my friends, neighbours, lovers. Somehow, though, the world as presented via the media is often more appealing than actually being a part of the real world -- there are things that need attention around here, now, but instead the news programming tells me about some people stuck in a spelunking incident in Goddess knows where. I sympathize, it's sad, but there is nothing that me or 300 million other Americans can do if they hear about it. But nevertheless we get that story and follow it closely, instead of being concerned about what the legislature is up to, a matter in which we could have some say by writing.
No wonder the foundations of our society are creaking at the seams.
How do we get out of this rut? It saps our limited energy, preventing us investing in places where it could do some good. In the mean time, things are going to hell as entropy degrades the structures we're ignoring.
