Agree that free energy in many ways seems like a good resource to use as a measuring stick. But matter is too available and takes too much energy to make, so you can’t spend it on matter in practice. So it’s non-obvious why we wouldn’t have a matter-thermodynamics as well as an energy-thermodynamics. I guess especially with oxygen, since it is so reactive.
I guess one limitation with considering a system where oxygen serves an analogous role to sunlight (beyond such systems being intrinsically rare) is that as the oxygen reacts, it takes up elements, and so you cannot have the “used-up” oxygen leave the system again without diminishing the system. Whereas you can have photons leave again. Maybe this is just the fungibility property again, which to some extent seems like the inverse of the “breaking a system down into smaller components primarily requires energy” property (though your statements of fungibility is more general because it also considers kinetic energy).
Agree that free energy in many ways seems like a good resource to use as a measuring stick. But matter is too available and takes too much energy to make, so you can’t spend it on matter in practice. So it’s non-obvious why we wouldn’t have a matter-thermodynamics as well as an energy-thermodynamics. I guess especially with oxygen, since it is so reactive.
I guess one limitation with considering a system where oxygen serves an analogous role to sunlight (beyond such systems being intrinsically rare) is that as the oxygen reacts, it takes up elements, and so you cannot have the “used-up” oxygen leave the system again without diminishing the system. Whereas you can have photons leave again. Maybe this is just the fungibility property again, which to some extent seems like the inverse of the “breaking a system down into smaller components primarily requires energy” property (though your statements of fungibility is more general because it also considers kinetic energy).
Thinking further, a key part of it is that temperature has a tendency to mix stuff together, due to the associated microscopic kinetic energy.