The End of Technology : A Means to an Entropic End
Have we unknowingly evolved to destroy our universe and is our quest for energy efficiency actually putting our far future existence in danger?
Background: Evolving Unavailability
It has been considered, for over one hundred years, that there may be a relationship between the evolution of life and the Second Law of Thermodynamics concerning the principle of entropy.
The discussion begain with the German physicist and mathematician Rudolf Clausius’s work “On the Concentration of Rays of Heat and Light, and on the Limits of Its Action” in 1863 and was extended by the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann in 1875.
“The general struggle for existence of animate beings is not a struggle for raw materials — these, for organisms, are air, water and soil, all abundantly available — nor for energy which exists in plenty in any body in the form of heat, but a struggle for entropy, which becomes available through the transition of energy from the hot sun to the cold earth.”
— Ludwig Boltzmann
Boltzmann suggests that lifeforms vie to make use of the “hot sun” to “cold earth” transition, which we can understand in modern parlance as available energy to unavailable energy, or entropy.
