The part about wasting energy seems quite silly. The universe has a fixed amount of mass-energy, so presumably when he talks about wasting energy, what he means is taking advantage of energy gradients. Energy gradients will always and everywhere eventually wind down toward entropy on their own without help, so life isn’t even doing anything novel here. It’s not like the sun stops radiating out energy if life isn’t there to absorb photons.
The observation that life takes advantage of concentration pockets of energy and thus this is the “purpose” of life is just sophistry. It deserves to be taken about as seriously as George Carlin’s joke that humans were created because Mother Nature wanted plastic and didn’t know how to make it.
I thought it was clear even to them that “wasting” energy meant using up usable energy into useless forms.
It is not just sophistry. If it turns out to be the fundamental feature of life (like how the laws of thermodynamics are for heat machines), then it would be predictive of the future activities of life. In particular, the aestivation hypothesis would be seriously threatened.
This is analogous to prediction that population would always go Malthulsian except in non-equilibrium situations. It’s not a value/moral judgment, but an attempt to find general laws of life that can be used to predict the future.
Perhaps tautology is a better word than sophistry. Of course turning usable energy into unusable forms is a fundamental feature of life; it’s a fundamental feature of everything to which the laws of thermodynamics apply. It’d be equally meaningless to say that using up useful energy is a fundamental property of stars, and that the purpose of stars is to waste energy. It’s just something that stars do, because of the way the universe is set up. It’s a descriptive observation. It’s only predictive insofar as you would predict that life will probably only continue to exist where there are energy gradients.
Stars follow the laws of thermodynamics. This observation is more predictive than you make it out to be, once it is quantified.
The theory of thermodynamics of life is more than just a statement that life is constrained by thermodynamics in the boring sense. I’m especially interested in this statement:
In short, ecosystems develop in ways which systematically increase their ability to degrade the incoming solar energy.
If this is true, then it can be used to predict what kinds of future life would be like. It would not be any kind of life, but life that can capture more solar energy and convert it into low-temperature heat at a faster rate.
Unfortunately my thermodynamics is not good enough to actually read the papers.
The talk of “purpose” seems to cause great confusion. I don’t mean it for any value judgment (I generally avoid value judgments and use it as a last resort). “Purpose” is just a metaphor, just like talk of the “purpose of evolution”. It helps me understand and predict.
Life in itself most probably had occured in places with heat energy gradient (in termal vents), henceforth catalysis developed by chemical evolution and “life” just began to use those gradients more efficiently and maybe create and utilize its own gradients
The part about wasting energy seems quite silly. The universe has a fixed amount of mass-energy, so presumably when he talks about wasting energy, what he means is taking advantage of energy gradients. Energy gradients will always and everywhere eventually wind down toward entropy on their own without help, so life isn’t even doing anything novel here. It’s not like the sun stops radiating out energy if life isn’t there to absorb photons.
The observation that life takes advantage of concentration pockets of energy and thus this is the “purpose” of life is just sophistry. It deserves to be taken about as seriously as George Carlin’s joke that humans were created because Mother Nature wanted plastic and didn’t know how to make it.
I thought it was clear even to them that “wasting” energy meant using up usable energy into useless forms.
It is not just sophistry. If it turns out to be the fundamental feature of life (like how the laws of thermodynamics are for heat machines), then it would be predictive of the future activities of life. In particular, the aestivation hypothesis would be seriously threatened.
This is analogous to prediction that population would always go Malthulsian except in non-equilibrium situations. It’s not a value/moral judgment, but an attempt to find general laws of life that can be used to predict the future.
Perhaps tautology is a better word than sophistry. Of course turning usable energy into unusable forms is a fundamental feature of life; it’s a fundamental feature of everything to which the laws of thermodynamics apply. It’d be equally meaningless to say that using up useful energy is a fundamental property of stars, and that the purpose of stars is to waste energy. It’s just something that stars do, because of the way the universe is set up. It’s a descriptive observation. It’s only predictive insofar as you would predict that life will probably only continue to exist where there are energy gradients.
Stars follow the laws of thermodynamics. This observation is more predictive than you make it out to be, once it is quantified.
The theory of thermodynamics of life is more than just a statement that life is constrained by thermodynamics in the boring sense. I’m especially interested in this statement:
If this is true, then it can be used to predict what kinds of future life would be like. It would not be any kind of life, but life that can capture more solar energy and convert it into low-temperature heat at a faster rate.
Unfortunately my thermodynamics is not good enough to actually read the papers.
The talk of “purpose” seems to cause great confusion. I don’t mean it for any value judgment (I generally avoid value judgments and use it as a last resort). “Purpose” is just a metaphor, just like talk of the “purpose of evolution”. It helps me understand and predict.
Life in itself most probably had occured in places with heat energy gradient (in termal vents), henceforth catalysis developed by chemical evolution and “life” just began to use those gradients more efficiently and maybe create and utilize its own gradients