Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

To add, life just speeds up the chaos by orders of magnitude, it's a perfect entropy catalyst.



"there is 10 million times more entropy in that radiation [cosmic microwave radiation] than there is in all of the mass of the universe"

https://news.berkeley.edu/2016/09/20/new-book-links-flow-of-...


But then, this is just entropy from a one-off event long ago. Meanwhile, life is an entropy producing reaction with a strong exponential factor.

To butcher an insightful quote by (IIRC) Hamming, any positive slope will eventually make up for y-intercept of a constant function.


It underlines the idea that the entropy-time connection is pretty shaky though.


I’d be shocked if that were the case, even only considering the Earth. The oceans and the atmosphere are full of entropy. So is the liquid outer core. And even if the mantle is not quite liquid, and even if the crust is mostly solid, these are huge in terms of volume and mass, much larger than the sliver of dirt we inhabit on top of them. So yeah, I really doubt we (collectively, all human beings) are changing the Earth’s entropy in any meaningful way.


Life reduces local entropy.


At the expense of increased global entropy, which I suppose is GPs point.




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: