I'm reading Nick Lane's book The Vital Question right now and he discusses this in some ways. Life escapes entropy at the local level, but increases entropy in its environment. At least this is what I think he is saying, I'm about 1/3 of the way through and it's pretty dense for a popular science book.
>Life escapes entropy at the local level, but increases entropy in its environment.
Yep, it _allows_ for increasing localized complexity due to a temperature gradient - without a temperature gradient, no (useful) work can be done. Complexity can then exhibit emergent behaviors/properties that further reduce the flow of entropy (locally).
This tight feedback loop can (but not necessarily must) result in higher and higher orders of complexity, which eventually produce specialized systems that resemble proto-life. Once a reproducible mechanism exists (either directly reproducible or through a few sub-steps), one notable emergent property is self-selection due to limited resources, which adds to the exponential acceleration of excellence.
But it's all local, as the 2nd law of thermodynamics applies to the whole system - Earth isn't a closed system, it is a gradient, as we bask in the sunlight.
Gravity is simultaneously the reason entropy increases globally, and the reason it can decrease locally; pulling us (for 'free') diagonally into the fourth dimension of space-time.
> But it's all local, as the 2nd law of thermodynamics applies to the whole system - Earth isn't a closed system, it is a gradient, as we bask in the sunlight.
Sunlight is one thing, but I feel the key point is, Earth with life on it increases entropy faster than the one without, even with the same sunlight flux.
The way I've been imagining for some years now is a bit "bottom-up": life is electrochemical nanotech; every tick of any piece has to increase entropy or keep it the same - but as those pieces assemble to form increasingly complex life forms, at every level of complexity you can find loops that do the simple job of "let's take this excess entropy and move it over there". Out of the protein bundle. Out of the cell. Out of the body. Into water, or air.
> Gravity is simultaneously the reason entropy increases globally, and the reason it can decrease locally; pulling us (for 'free') diagonally into the fourth dimension of space-time.
For that I'll need an ELI5 one of these days; I still can't make it click in my head just how is it that gravity (and static magnets) can pull stuff seemingly "for free".
Life is not an accelerator. It takes energy and produces order from it, inefficiantly but order still. If earth never had any life, it would simply be a warmer soup. Instead look around at what photosynthesis and energy storage has accomplished. Without it there would not be hundred story buildings, roads, olympic competitions, taxes, karaoke, or anything thay exists around us. Certainly without life all energy from the sun would have simply blasted a the wet space rock that we call earth all the same. I posit that life is a way to slow the trend towards entropy. It is ultimately unstoppable, but the protest of life is beautiful in its epemeral spite in the face of that truth.
> It takes energy and produces order from it, inefficiantly but order still. If earth never had any life, it would simply be a warmer soup.
The point is, that warmer soup would be a net lower entropy state if you take the entire Earth and/or the Solar System into the consideration. Life takes energy and produces order, which means it excretes even more disorder somewhere else.
Life exists as a way to release trapped energy that simpler processes weren't able to. Look at us, releasing fission ennergy trapped in heavy atoms by supernovae.
Thermodynamics says that you can't decrease entropy in a closed system. Whatever life does, however it does, like any process, will not decrease entropy - and generally, will increase it over time. That life seems to generate and maintain order locally only tells you that it shoves the entropy it produces somewhere else, out of sight (ultimately it becomes thermal radiation).
It's like with a heat pump: it does not generate cold, it merely transports heat against a gradient, and in doing so, adds more heat of its own. It may seem like it creates cold, but that's only because you're sitting in front of the cold end, while the hot end goes to ground or atmosphere - i.e. a thermal sink so large that your contribution to it is almost unmeasurable.
Life, like any other physical process, provides additional pathways to increase entropy. Otherwise that process wouldn't have a gradient to go through.
That is correct, but not for the "two pipe approach" I outlined in my post.
There is a form of geothermal energy generation that is being used here, that injects water into the ground and taps into the heated water. This is somewhat similar to the way fracking is performed to extract oil and gas from the ground, but it's not the only method.
But to your point - to me it is surprising that these issues aren't being "worked on more".
In this comparative study from New Zealand: https://www.nzta.govt.nz/assets/resources/research/reports/4... you can find a Comparative evaluation of transport modes where maritime shipping is cheaper than train, but this depends on the number of containers (you can put much more on a vessel). If we can increase the number of containers on trains, this could change. Also right now the China-Belgium trip can take 20 days by train (cf. https://www.train-chain.com/) and usually around 30 days by sea.
> If we can increase the number of containers on trains, this could change
This increases wear on the train and tracks. We might have materials breakthroughs that change the balance. But such materials would make (a) shipping more efficient and (b) large fractions of the existing Belt and Road obsolete.
> right now the China-Belgium trip can take 20 days by train (cf. https://www.train-chain.com/) and usually around 30 days by sea
Emphasis on can. In any case, there is a reason the world's commercial shippers are all focussing on Arctic maritime routes.
Rail is a neat way of controlling territory. It's better than trucking or flying, when it comes to cost. But water beats it at scale.
I am currently working on a project that lets you paste any chinese text coming from any source (for me it's mostly from news media and wechat moments), and provides you the translation, automated reading, word-by-word translation, and allows you to select words to memorize by a spaced repetition system.
For me the real deal is in the memorize function that gives you a word plus a sentence coming from your collection of text to get some context. You get the same word-by-word translation on the sentence, you can play it out, you are not only working on your words but discovering new words from the sentences and improving your listening comprehension.
