entropy

[Guest guest]

I don't think it is necessary to consider that earth is an open system to

disprove 's friend's belief about life extension and entropy.

While it certainly shows a clear oversight in the idea, even discounting this

fact it is still fundamentally wrong-headed.

Life on earth is NOT any indication whatsoever of decreasing entropy within

the system of the earth. Life could easily flourish and proliferate while

entropy on earth increases. The increasing organization of a living and growing

organism only indicates a decrease of entropy WITHIN the system of the single

organism, which clearly contributes to increases in entropy of it's

surroundings.

In fact, one could easily argue that the longer the life of a consuming

organism, the greater the increase in entropy of its surroundings. Think about

it. For most of your life, you don't grow. What do you do? You take probably

thousands of pounds of organized molecules of food and digest them, vastly

increasing their entropy, then you further break down fundamental units such as

glucose into smaller molecules, about half or a little more of which is lost in

heat in the simple breaking down of the glucose. What's left over for

cellular energy is largely transferred to kinetic energy, much of which

dissipates

as heat, sound, etc.

I think it would be quite reasonable to propose that even in rapid growth

stages a human contributes to a significantly greater increase in the entropy of

her surroundings than to any decrease of her own system, but certainly and to

me quite obviously a human in the latter stages almost wholly contributes to

increase in entropy of the surroundings, while the entropy of the system (the

human) is stable.

Therefore, if the Second Law of Thermodynamics were to have any relation to

the possibility of eternal life (it doesn't whatsoever in my view, but

hypothetically...) it would INCREASE the liklihood of eternal life because such

would

INCREASE the entropy of the universe.

But even more fundamentally, if life were a contradiction of entropy, then

just as surely as eternal life would be impossible, life itself would be

impossible, and since life exists, that would call into question the theory of

entropy, or in this case call the person's interpretation of entropy into

question.

Chris