More on entropy, evolution and energy

Evolution is pretty neat. Garnet has gotten me thinking about it, and my discussion here is similar to hers but takes a slightly different direction.

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Garnet’s professor points out that entropy is not strictly increasing here on Earth. Humans are a highly organized bunch of matter. We are so organized that we go around organizing all sorts of things besides our own bodies. Most of the history of our species has been the story of increasing ability to organize: societies, economies, technologies.

One of the biggest problems we’re facing right now is how to organize energy into more useful forms. This is contrary to its entropic tendency. We’ve spent about 150 years taking somewhat organized bits of energy contained in fossil fuels and converting them to less useful forms, namely heat to run turbines. But now that this is becoming a problem, we are spending more time focusing on how to take fairly disorganized energy like heat from the center of the Earth or light from the Sun and turn it into more useful electricity. Because Earth isn’t a closed system, the letter of the second law of thermodynamics is still upheld when we increase order by using the Sun’s energy (by generating electricity or simply by eating food that ultimately came from the Sun), but it is hard to say that we follow the law in its spirit.

The interesting problem I see here is that we humans demand organization, but the odds are stacked against us. We’ve done pretty well organizing ourselves so far, so can we buck the cosmological trend? The universe may try to spread its energy as far and wide as possible, but our survival depends on making sure we can collect enough of it in one place in a useful form. Since we have the Sun, that gives us a couple billion years, but it’s never too soon to start thinking.

Is there a force driving us to this highly organized model, as Garnet suggests there might be? Humans have carved out a niche as intelligent creatures who can constantly find new advantages, so it seems evolution has created order in its drive for a more effective animal. The "force" driving this order could just be an inherent property of life. It's entirely possible that some "force" created life that works this way, but it's probably not the best model this higher power could have created; life and evolution happen without much regard for the constraints we will eventually face, for the order we create comes at the price of the disorder we create in our environment. Now if God (for example) is pushing us towards the evolutionary outcome, He had better have a good idea that we will be able to sustain it, because it will be pretty poor planning if innovation ends up failing us and we can’t keep organizing. Intelligent designers, here’s your chance to discuss how this is all going to work out in the end.

Whatever the root cause, our organized intelligence seems to be one factor that allows us to make this organization happen. We are confronted with problems of disorganization and can clearly recognize that we need to act to reverse them. In fact, we do it without thinking; creating technology and procreating—two big ways we spread our style of organization—are pretty natural things for humans to do. Because we seem to be smart enough to know that we should reverse entropy, perhaps we have reached a tipping point where order begets further order.

Or perhaps it applies to all plants and animals: while working at NASA, James Lovelock proposed that the ability to reduce entropy is a characteristic of life in general. Maybe we're not as special as we want to think, and we just happen to be good at what we do through random chance making it that way. Something had to get us as far as any tipping point we may have hit.

I’m too new to this topic to draw any conclusions, and I’ve touched on several different topics anyway. If you have had thoughts, have read someone else’s, or have met someone who’d like to talk about it, let us know. Share a link or write something. This is why we have the internet.

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On a different note, here is an excellent example of the sort of organization we can create and what it may allow us to do:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080305.html
I include this mainly because it’s cool and might spark your imagination. Did you know the space station was this established? We can do this now.

On Entropy

In lecture last quarter my professor mildly remarked that the second law of thermodynamics did not always apply. The second law of thermodynamics states that “the entropy of an isolated system never decreases; the entropy either increases, until the system reaches equilibrium, or, if the system began in equilibrium, stays the same.” Entropy is the concept that all things tend toward disorder – a cup breaking, ice melting, perfume smelled from a distance, the choas of your room on a bad day. Imagine you have two bags of marbles – one black and one white. If you cast both bags onto a table, the two colors will not remain separate but will tend toward disorder, scattering randomly. Shake the table a bit and the system starts toward equilibrium, with the marbles scattered relatively uniformly.

And yet, my professor pointed out a key exception: from a chemical soup arose humans – highly complex beings. Through the mechanism of evolution, random, chance events have actually (on our planet, at least) tended towards order. This draws on the concept of “emergent systems,” the idea that highly complex structures can arise from the combination of simply programmed agents. This can apply to the way that a school of fish swim, the way ant colonies operate, or the way neurons fire in your brain.

In addition, it seems doubtful that we are progressing toward equilibrium on the planet. Though we began with a fairly homogenous system of molten, we are now driven by disequilibrium – specifically, by the disequilibrium the sun creates when it warms our equators more than our poles. By this logic, we are tending away from equilibrium and toward some type of order.

I grew up mostly atheist and though the harshness of death and the vastness of the universe often frightened me, I now find myself perhaps more disturbed by the possibility of a meaning beyond our comprehension. The nice thing about entropy and atheism is that if everything is tending toward disorder, you don’t need anyone or anything driving the system. But if we are instead tending toward order, this implies the need for a driving force. At least in human experience, order arises from effort; governments form after many people get together and organize and write documents and choose leaders. This type of human induced order appears to require effort, but also arises from a fundamental attribute of humans – that humans like order and strive toward it. If then, that idea holds in the greater context of the universe, something (a God or force of some type?) is exerting effort toward our planet that is driving the order. If it is instead not the case that order demands effort, then for some unknown unexplained reason, order arises naturally. In either case, order of some type is imposed upon us and yet we do not understand what type of order this is or why it exists.