this post was submitted on 09 May 2024
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That analogy makes more sense. Thanks for sticking with me.
I still don't get the online people who talk about Entropy as if it is some force that dooms things, but I do better understand the basic physics I think. Thanks.
But... Also while I get it was an analogy, human action like launching probes into space is pretty entropic. All that stuff was ordered in a solid glove orbiting a star, and now it's been all jumbled up into a bizzare state and flung way away from it's place of order. So life itself is a high entropy way of generating low entropy?
The reason entropy is a "force" that dooms things is that once maximum entropy is achieved, there is no energy differential, and with no energy differential you can't perform any work, life cannot exist, electricity cannot be generated, etc.
The idea that entropy unstoppably increases predicts that, eventually, all energy will be "spent" and no life can exist - a timer for all sentience in the universe.
Also, launching probes into space doesn't increase entropy (to be precise, the act of launching probes uses energy with some inefficiency, so it does increase entropy, just not through the fact that a probe is now in space), because pulling matter away from other matter increases potential gravitational energy. Maximum entropy in this sense would be all matter in the universe clumped together into an inert, uniformly mixed... Clump?
Also, I'm not a physicist, so I probably got some things wrong, especially terminology, so take this with a grain of salt.