This is also my question. I just don’t see the significance of what the OP is saying. It’s either just plain basic fact that life is dependent on all kinds of mechanisms that will eventually deplete the available energy in the universe (as is almost everything else in the universe), and if so all that’s there to discuss is why the OP thinks nobody knows that, or the OP is under the impression there’s a lot more to it than that but hasn’t got a clue how to express it.
But the deaths of most stars don’t make any contribution to life in this way. It is true that a supernova even contributes to heat death, but so does the normal life of a smaller star. In our universe the heat death is correlated to life (in a very rough way,) it is not a cause of life or even a requirement of it.
Wow. This is really still going?
I’m sorry; I’ve been following this for a couple of days now and hoping someone would be able to get a straight answer out of this guy as to what the hell he’s trying to say, but frankly every time he posts something he’s just spinning his wheels, insisting that he’s made his point very clearly then adding on a couple of more incoherent layers, followed by a dozen posts by the rest of us going “WHAT?!” I’m continuing to have the same reaction every time he writes something; you guys remember on that show “In Living Color” they had a recurring sketch with the character “Oswald Bates,” the guy in prison played by Damon Wayans who would ramble on in endless malapropisms without any conceivable point? That’s what I equate this thread to.
Those of you with a lot more patience for difficult people than I, I wish you all luck in eventually getting to the bottom of this, but I’m not going to hold my breath.
I’d be surprised if he or anybody else did, because, phrased like that, it’s flat wrong. This universe might not suffer heat death – it probably won’t, as far as I’m aware – and yet, life exists; certainly, nothing currently known excludes the possibility of life arising in a universe that does not end in heat death. Similarly, in universes that certainly will end in heat death, it is by no means a given that life arises. So, taken literally, there is nothing to the statement that heat death makes life possible, which is why most everybody has taken you to be talking about the second law, whose relationship to life has been well covered in the past 150 years or so, some examples of which I linked you to, though you appear to have missed those links.
You seem to put a lot of weight on the idea that the death of stars (which is really just a shifting around of mass-energy that during some phase of its existence had a configuration termed ‘star’ by humans, however, that’s certainly less anthropocentrically poetic) creates the seeds of life in the form of heavy elements – and of course, that’s true, in and of itself. However, it’s neither a process facilitated solely by entropy increase, nor something related to the heat death anymore than pretty much any other process occurring anywhere in the universe, like for instance those in the combustion engine inside your car. And most importantly, it’s definitely not a process that creates order from disorder, in either a metaphorical or a literal way; what order is locally accumulated always comes at the expense of greater (or at least equal) disorder somewhere else, as I’ve tried to outline in my last post, that again you apparently missed. In total, the disorder in the universe increases in the process, and the local ordering doesn’t come thanks to, but in spite of that increase in disorder, from the order present at the beginning of the universe.
This was also my point in the topsoil example: if, somehow, it became more nutrient-rich each cycle, then you would have a point; however, it depends solely on the nutrients that were there from the start, even if some of them can be re-used. Entropy does not act to create new, nutrient-rich topsoil; it acts to dissipate the nutrients already present in the topsoil. Self-organizing processes – by which is meant: processes that apply work in order to in crease their internal order, at the cost of creating disorder elsewhere, that, in a way, import pre-existing order into themselves – may act against this tendency, if only locally, but they can never overcome it. This is not a despairing or hopeless view of the universe, it’s simply the way things are, without any value statement or sentiment attached.
(As for the cyclic universe, just a side note: if you choose to believe physical law as it’s currently known, entropy will increase and the cyclicity will come to an end; if you want to introduce a mechanism to reset entropy, you ‘break’ the 2nd law, and don’t have a universe that ends in heat death anymore, undermining your own point.)
I do see what you’re saying and I leaped to conclusions. To some degree my defense would be that I refer to the heat death as a hypothesis, but I was a pomp-ass for which I apologize.
Hey, Half Man Half Wit. Again I refer to the heat death as a hypothesis. If there is no heat death then you’re right.
You’re so rugged! =)
Well, what I think is spelled out pretty clearly is that I am saying that things classified as disorder facilitate evolution, apparently right up to the hypothetical heat death of the universe, as the death of stars has resulted in the existence of earth and life, and is expected to result in the heat death if that hypothesis is correct. There are people who think it is not true and there are people who think it is interesting. If all of this is beneath you because it is so elementary for your comprehension of nature, is it permissible for others among us to muddle along examining it? If to you this whole concept is truly redundant and pointless then I would think that your continued participation in this thread is equally redundant and pointless? Are you being held in this thread against your will?
Can you elaborate on this statement of yours?
You seem to be implying there’s something other than random chance that is driving, in your thinking, entropy—>abiogenesis/life—>evolution. What could that possibly be, if not a “higher power”?
Hi, Cmyk. Well, my thinking in that regard is that, you may be an exception, but there are a lot of people who view the universe as disordered, evolution taking route as an extremely rare exception by chance. What I am looking at is that if you realize the extent to which processes considered by definition to be disorder itself move evolution along, which you may or may not have already seen, you come to see that disorder itself makes for a universe friendlier to life than if you just see complexity arising in spite of entropy. In fact coming about because of it. Ultimately I am tying that in to the heat death hypothesis. That even this thing, if it is true, rather dreary from a human perspective, makes life possible. Does that make any sense to you?
One thing I think I am getting out of all this is that I will do some rewriting and expanding on the idea. I hope to submit some version of it, possibly more than one take on it, for possible publication somewhere. I sometimes get published here and there with fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
It will probably work better if I do not direct that paragraph at science although it may apply to varying degrees, but simply toward any of the many people who see complexity arising in spite of entropy, rather than, both, in spite of it and because of it.
I think you’d do better to stop referring to entropy as heat death, as although the latter sounds cool, it’s not the same thing. Heat death is not a process, it refers to the ultimate fate of the universe in the far far future. You can think of it as the death of the entire universe. Clearly, if life is to be dependent on an event, it has to occur after it, and by definition heat death is the ultimate end.
If you simply want to say that disorder, or the 2nd law of thermodynamics, makes life possible, that’s another thing entirely. “Disorder” has a negative connotation in common speech, but in science it just means randomness. There’s nothing good or bad about randomness, it just is. To most people saying chaos is necessary for life might seem shocking or depressing, but to a scientist, all of nature is like that, so it’s not really that big a deal.
Hello, Yumblie. Well my point is that the death of a star is considered to be the heat death in progress, and without the death of stars as is already known certainly by scientists if not by everyone out there, there would also be no earth or life. I mean, the death of stars relates to both evolution and the eventual proposed end of the universe.
I have seen that there are a lot of people who see evolution taking place by chance in a disordered universe, which of course it is, yet what many of them don’t see is that life occurs both in spite of the finite nature of all forms and because of it. Viewed this way, I think its somewhat less depressing. Like they realize that stars form the elements that support life but what many of them, perhaps other than scientists, don’t seem to connect is that within the context of that star and in the context of the hypothetically expendable universe, in producing elements that support life, stars are also the aging and death of the universe in progress.
So I think that the proposed heat death and the processes that facilitate life are related and that a lot of people don’t see this connection? To me that means that at least if that hypothesis is correct it also makes life possible? Within the context of the heat death scenario, the alternative would be that the proposed heat death is separate from stars aging and dying, which I don’t think is true.
Your car runs out of gas but does so by taking you where you’re going kind of thing.
I want to officially apologize for any dorky behavior I have exhibited here, and I realize that I have exhibited some. I would say that I freaked out and felt under siege and would add that I have not been entirely alone in the behavior, but I do apologize.
- As has been stated before, heat death is an end result, not a process. Please use this term correctly.
- You are not entitled the science that depresses you the least.
Are you saying then that the heat death is not related to entropy? That it is something that happens separate from the ongoing expenditure of energy in the universe?
Is a car not in the process of running out of gas as you drive it?
I am not choosing less depressing science but making a less depressing observation based on the scientific hypothesis of the heat death.
The heat death is a possible final thermodynamic state of the universe, in which it has “run down” to a state of no thermodynamic free energy to sustain motion or life. In physical terms, it has reached maximum entropy.
But the thing is, it would have made just as much sense to title the thread “does ‘death’ make life possible?” Because death is an almost-inevitable final result of life. Similarly, heat death is the terminal condition of entropy under certain circumstances, but cannot be substituted willy-nilly for the term “entropy”.
Hello, Ludovic. I agree with you, essentially, except that it seems as if you’re saying the heat death is not related to entropy which it is. It is maximum entropy.
In my original post I connect the death of stars and the death of cells in complex organisms and the death of the larger organisms themselves and the rise and fall of species, and the hypothetically finite nature of the universe as a whole with our existence. The death of each reflects the finite nature of all forms, including the proposed death of the universe as a whole. If stars didn’t die, the universe would presumably not end in the hypothetical heat death, but our existence is a result of dead stars, too.
Before I attempt to wrap my brain around your post, just how does heat death comply with the law of the conservation of energy ?
Look at it this way. A quarter tank of gas lost from your tank was lost because you drove the car. An empty gas tank means that you did even more driving with the car, so if a quarter tank took you somewhere, a fully expended tank took you somewhere as well.
The death of some stars results in our existence, and the death of all of them spells the hypothetical heat death.