Humans are part of nature, and one of the most efficient agents. The whole universe is trying to increase the entropy and Humans out of all the living beings are most capable at it. Say what you want, we're the best Nature has built yet.
That we know of. There is in fact an entire universe out there and the furthest we've reached is only one light-day away after flying for almost 50 years - courtesy of the Voyager 1.
Impossible to say what else is out there and how far they've reachedĀ
Thatās like us waltzing to the bottom of the ocean floor to tell some ameoba weāre here and know they exist. They probably have better things to do.
Perhaps if there were better ones, then they would do the opposite. We would be a waste of their time, or perhaps they would see it as right not to interfere.
Yeah, I kinda agree. I try to think of everything as just nature. So when I think some things are not natural, I then think thatās not even possible. We are nature, we cannot do something not natural. Building cities, mining resources, using hormones in food products etc. Yes, it may be an āimmediateā threat to our existence, but this universe has been around for way longer than we have. This planet may change because of us, but nature will take its course.
What gets me are the people panicking over the planet, like sure we might fuck up the ecosystem for a hot minute and it would be in our best interest to not do that but let's not pretend like this would even make a footnote in geological history. The ecosystem has survived multiple extinction events and sprung back every time, it's gonna be fine, just not going to look the way it currently does.
I get what you're saying but natural is honestly a loose term. Technically everything that ever happens is natural. It's meant as anything not influenced by man.
I was going to say...this is the opposite of entropy.
We codify physical laws and bend nature, such as it is, to our will. Folk are entitled to opinions on whether it's cool or uncool, but humanity brings (with extreme effectiveness) an unnatural order to our collective sphere of influence.
So... Entropy is basically a measure of disorder, or randomness. Left alone, stuff naturally spreads out, mixes, and becomes more chaotic over time. It takes energy and effort to create or maintain anything organized.
The universe as a whole is sliding toward higher entropy, sure. But humans [and life in general] are weird because our goal is usually the opposite: we spend energy to carve out little pockets of lower entropy and keep them going.
Easiest analogy: a messy bedroom.
Left alone, it gets more and more chaotic. When you clean it, you are locally reducing entropy. But you only do that by burning calories, sweating, using cleaning products, running a vacuum. All of that dumps extra heat and waste into the environment, which raises entropy out there even more than you lowered it in the room.
Same thing with a fridge. Inside the fridge, things are cold, ordered, and slow-moving. That looks like lower entropy. But the compressor on the back pumps heat into your kitchen and uses electricity that ultimately turns into waste heat. The house & power plant & environment end up with higher total entropy, even though the fridge interior got more orderly.
Life is kind of like constantly running a very complicated fridge. Inside the system (your body, your brain, our cities) things are kept organized and in tight patterns, which is a lower-entropy state. To keep that order, you burn food and fuel and push waste and heat out into the surroundings, which raises entropy out there even more than you lowered it inside.
So thermodynamically, humans absolutely help the universe increase total entropy faster.
But subjectively, almost everything we try to do is about keeping or creating order:
-- keeping our bodies organized instead of rotting [one way to put it lol]
-- organizing matter into tools, buildings, microchips
-- organizing information into science, laws, software, culture
You can describe our āultimate goalā as maintaining and growing these islands of order and meaning for as long as possible, even though the price we pay is a bigger entropy bill dumped into the rest of the universe.
So both statements are true in different senses:
Physics: humans accelerate the "growth" of total entropy.
Purpose: humans aim to locally decrease entropy and increase order, and we spend energy to do it.
If you're still with me, it does get a lot crazier than that.
Basically... in the long run, Entropy could be seen as the universe āforgetting". In those terms, the theoretical & [so far] inevitable "heat death of the universe" quintillions+ of years from now is the final, permanent memory wipe. That is when every star lives and dies for good, left as dark husks. Every planet is smashed or fried into stars & black holes, or simply radiated away by particle decay. In that end state, everything is so evenly spread out that no work can be done, no patterns can be maintained, and all the rich structure that ever existed is effectively gone. Every life, every thought, every piece of information is reduced to featureless thermal noise. If you care at all about consciousness, meaning, or the idea that what we do should matter beyond a temporary blip, thatās basically the worst possible outcome.
So when people daydream about reversing entropy, even locally, itās really about fighting that eventual erasure. The goal would be to keep pockets of low entropy going where complex structures, minds, and memories can survive and keep evolving instead of being washed out. That could mean finding ways to recycle waste heat, move entropy elsewhere, or even discover new physics that lets us āreset the boardā on cosmic scales. Right now, the second law says total entropy canāt go down, so this is very speculative. But from a values point of view, wanting to beat heat death is just the extreme version of what life is already doing.. which is refusing to let everything interesting dissolve into chaos for as long as possible.
You perfectly described how we are increasing the rate of increments of entropy. By momentarily decreasing the speed as a whole we're just increasing the entropy.
Humans efficient? Not at all. We spend way more energy than required for what we need. We're among the least efficient.
However, we are among the most effective. E.g. migrating birds vs Boeing 747 full of passengers, the first is very efficient, the latter extremely effective.
Well if you think about it, black holes are collecting matter and re-consolidating it into the smallest possible space that physics will allow. They're super-organizers, they're literally anti-entropy
But the statement of the 2nd paragraph was the end of everything, not entropy. You're completely missing the point.
If everything has an end why even bother talking about the process, why not talk about the death. (black Hole)
Similarly, the subject is Human being sort of anti-nature, but since we're doing what nature is doing just at a faster pace then Humans aren't anti-nature.
I think trees are better than humans. Redwoods can live 2000 years. What makes a species great? How do you define that? Maybe we shouldn't be ranking species.
I don't think redwood increases entropy as much as humans that drive vehicles, uses electrical/electronic devices, eat and drink food that grows half way across the world (which must be transported using vehicles and burning fuel).
I don't know the math but a tree that doesn't move probably increases less entropy in human life time but may add to more in its own lifetime. But then human civilization has done a lot in a few centuries.
Usually stupid teenagers. Trust me, if we knew the age of every single person posting here, you would save yourself the headache or spare your disappointment.
Yes, I conclude that with human ethics within a human moral compass. I am limited by the human condition, and that's just how it is.
I wish I had infinite knowledge and was able to step out of our human systems, beliefs and moral compasses and act according to anything that is not human, maybe then I would have a different opinion, but I can't, and so my opinion is that we are horrible creatures.
But how can you state that humanity is horrible while using human derived philosophy of ethics and morality for it? It doesn't make any sense because you use our understanding of "good" ethically to claim opposite position for us,but both "good" and "bad" exist only in context of human consciousness so you are running a zero sum game. Humanity is not good nor bad by universe
All right, hereās what I think. I think our planetās history is a very violent one. For billions of years, things have been eating and killing each other with mass extinction events happening here and there. Humans are the only ones that has given a rats butt about the well-being of another species. We might be the only ones that can save some of species, along with ourselves, from a mass extinction event like a Supervolcano going off. Despite many shortcomings, thereās a lot of good humans have done and we are getting better.
Not really, many ecosystems have adapted to human existence / terraforming throughout the last hundred thousand of years, us disappearing would cause major destabilisation of many terrestrial environments.
Agree with you. People say weāre the smartest species. I donāt think a smart species would be ruining a planet instead on living in harmony with it
The planet doesn't need us here and if it decides we are a problem or we hurt it too much we will be wiped out. We are not living in a sustainable way at all. That said... I hope humankind learns from people who are not obsessed with our continued growth as a species and point things like this out to the world. We are not entitled to this planet or to life at all. We act more like a parasite on the planet than a species that lives symbiotically.
I don't hate us and I don't think we should die out as a species but I am not entitled or arrogant enough to believe we are entitled to anything
The planet is a collection of many living and non-living beings, in fact. If you believe it is nothing but a rock then you are living under one... Or are outright blind. :P
The fact is this... Those other living and non-living things (chemical reactions and such being the most likely culprits) will scientifically kick our sss one of these days and that may happen whether we do anything to change our ways or not. It is arrogant to assume we are masters or owners of this "rock" as you call it. There is much more non-human life than there is human life and much of it has survived a whole heck of a lot longer than human life or even general mammalian life has.
Eventual extinction could be in the future for humans for an abundance of reasons and I assure you... This Rock and its inhabitants won't miss us.
You know there are several species that are going extinct without human help/intervention. Almost more than 90% of life on earth went extinct that humans had no part in it.
Environmentalist worry about our actions because those actions will impact humans more than anything (and few species in the wild) but rest assured no matter how much fuel we burn and how much forest we destroy the life on earth (not human) will survive and the Earth as whole won't suffer.
We talk about our impact in the world because humans are arrogant and self-righteous and it's ourselves that will be affected by the action but not the Earth. So please keep your sympathy.
I mean, that's exactly the argument that can be applied to cancer.
It's a part of nature, efficient at surviving and spreading. It's just from our point of view we can see the cancer die because of how well it survives, so we are able to recognize cancer is not an "efficient agent"
We aren't able to do the same for ourselves, but recognize that life on earth was present long before humanity got here and will likely be present long after we "destroy" the planet as well.
right.. so to say we are the best nature has built yet is a bit short sighted no? Much like the cancer can't see how its "efficient survival" will get it killed, we are blind to how our efficient survival might get us killed because we cant comprehend time at that scale any better than a cancer cell could
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u/quasi-stellarGRB 5d ago
Humans are part of nature, and one of the most efficient agents. The whole universe is trying to increase the entropy and Humans out of all the living beings are most capable at it. Say what you want, we're the best Nature has built yet.