MY ADVENTURE WITH ENTROPY
Entropy: a measure of uncertainty or randomness; lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder.
Intergalactic Polemic
We know from NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope that there are more exoplanets (planets outside our Solar System) than stars in our Milky Way galaxy, which contains about 400 billion stars, our Sun among them. Many of them are located in habitable zones, also known as Goldilocks’ zones, where conditions might be just right, neither too hot nor too cold, for life. And there are no evidence that almost 200 billions of galaxies, identified by Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (XDF), could be different. One of them, a majestic spiral galaxy UGC 2885, located 232 million light-years away in the northern constellation Perseus, is shown below on a Hubble Space Telescope photograph. The galaxy is 2.5 times wider than our Milky Way and contains 10 times as many stars.
Interestingly many of these remote galaxies are emitting the random FAST RADIO BURSTS (FRBs), radio pulses ranging from a fraction of a millisecond to a few milliseconds, caused by some high-energy astrophysical process not yet understood. Astronomers estimate that the average FRB releases as much energy in a millisecond as the Sun puts out in days. Most FRBs are extragalactic, but the first Milky Way FRB was detected by the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) radio telescope in April 2020.
Many inventive models exist, ranging from alien spacecraft to cosmic strings, but those concerning compact objects and supermassive black holes have gained the most attention. Clearly, an advanced civilization would not attempt to communicate across cosmological distances using FRBs, because waiting for a reply would require billions of years. Instead, a powerful radio beam could be used for military purposes or might be generated to push a light sail and launch a massive cargo close to the speed of light.
Now, let’s make a simple imaginable presumption: one of the highly intelligent civilization in UGC 2885 developed a very innovative technology of space traveling. Some thousands years ago they had broadcasted their individual genome codes all over the Universe in such a way that they can appear in any distant galactic by executing their genome in a few seconds. Recently I have received a few creative comments on my ADVENTURE WITH ENTROPY pages from one of their travelers just crossing the Milky Way.
Homo Sapiens have a distinct tendency to personify natural processes, especially related to evolution. From tremendous knowledge already compiled, we know that the evolution has no purpose, and it is a blind, chaotic and illogical designer. But still we believe that the life resulted from evolution is a strong example of a negative entropy, ie. less chaotic than all processes in surrounding Universe. Specifically associated with the higher form of intelligence culminating in heightened sense of self-consciousness.
However, by observing the homo sapiens activity on the planet Earth over extended period of time, it is impossible not to ask the following question: are we really achieving the higher level of order or rather gradual decline into destructive disorder and chaos? There are a number of books written on entropy, and how it is a primary reason for cancer. Nonetheless, are we extending the meaning of entropy much too far outside physics and specifically thermodynamics into evolution and anthropology? Is entropy, and resulting cancer, so malicious to knowingly do the harm to living organisms?
CANCER is not an organized and homogenous army that is collectively set on our destruction. Instead, it is a disorganized and heterogeneous population of cells that is dynamically responding to our treatments. When we fight cancer, we are fighting against an inevitable process: the process of evolution. Cancer is literal embodiment of evolution. It is evolution in the flesh. We are susceptible to cancer because we are made of a population of cells that evolves over lifetime. Cancer will be here for as long as multicellular life endures on our planet. The sooner we can accept that, the sooner we can use our knowledge to effectively keep cancer under control. > (10.p.11)
CANCER-LIKE PHENOMENA play an essential role in many important fitness-enhancing traits and cellular activities, like wound healing, which requires rapid cell proliferation, cell migration, and recruitment of blood vessels to feed and rebuild a healing tissue - all characteristic that we see in cancer cells. Some of our susceptibility to cancer is a trade-off for having traits that allow us to develop normally, survive, and reproduce.
> (10.p.83)
Even if we don’t die of cancer, we almost certainly die with cancer - or at least cancer-like growths.
> (10.p.83)
HOMO SAPIENS is a uniquely dangerous species. We hunted wooly mammoths, ground sloths and moas to extinction. We destroyed plains and forests for farming, modifying over half the planet’s land area. We altered the planet’s climate. But we are most dangerous to other human populations, as well. History is full of examples of people warring, displacing and wiping out other groups, from Rome’s destruction of Carthage, to the American conquest of the West and the British colonisation of Australia. There have been recent genocides and ethnic cleansing: First World War, Russian Revolution, Second World War, Holocaust, Bosnia, Rwanda, Iraq, Darfur and Myanmar, ...
Nine human species walked the Earth 300,000 years ago. Now there is just one. The disappearance of these other species resembles a mass extinction. But there’s no obvious environmental catastrophe – volcanic eruptions, climate change, asteroid impact – driving it. Instead, the extinctions’ timing suggests they were caused by the spread of a new species, evolving 260,000-350,000 years ago in Southern Africa: Homo sapiens.
> (Nicholas R. Longrich)
The sixth mass extinction is happening faster than expected. Humans have already wiped out hundreds of species and pushed many more to the brink of extinction through wildlife trade, pollution, habitat loss and the use of toxic substances. But the findings published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) show that the rate at which species are dying out has accelerated in recent decades.
Gerardo Ceballos González, a professor of ecology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and one of the authors of the study, said approximately 173 species went extinct between 2001 and 2014.
Mass extinctions are just as severe as their name suggests. There have been five mass extinction events in the Earth's history, each wiping out between 70% and 95% of the species of plants, animals and microorganisms. The most recent, 66 million years ago, saw dinosaurs disappear.
The past events were caused by catastrophic alterations of the environment, including massive volcanic eruptions or collision with an asteroid. The sixth mass extinction -- the one happening now -- is different: Scientists say it's caused by humans.
"It is entirely our fault," Ceballos González said.
> (Ivana Kottasová)
COSMIC CONUNDRUM The Cosmological Constant, the physics' most embarrassing problem (represented by the Greek letter lambda) is a major mystery in physics: the value of the constant, part of Albert Einstein’s general relativity equations (below), seems to be much, much smaller than theories predict it should be.
At the heart of this puzzle are three intertwined concepts:
vacuum energy (the energy in
empty space), dark energy (the cause
of the accelerating universe) and the
cosmological constant itself. > MORE
> Clara Moskovitz, Scientific American, Feb 2021
The scientific journey we’ve taken suggests strongly that the universe does not exist to provide an arena for life and mind to flourish. Life and mind are simply a couple of things that happen to happen. Studying the universe, by peeling it apart figuratively and literally, we would imagine to be able to answer enough of the how questions to catch a glimpse of the answers to why’s. But the more we learn, the more that stance seems to face in wrong direction. Looking for universe to hug us, its transient conscious squatters, is understandable, but that’s just not what the universe does. > 70.p.323
Physics provides the foundation for all natural sciences. Without space, matter, energy and time - components that make up the universe - living organisms would not exist. So, we should be concerned about conundrum the modern physics is facing today. Specifically about the concept of accelerating expansion of the universe, at which a distant galaxies are receding with continuously increasing velocities. In such a scenario, the current understanding is that all matter will ionize and disintegrate into isolated stable particles such as electrons and neutrinos, with all complex structures dissipating away, leading to the end of cosmology as we know it as the distant universe turns dark. This scenario is known as "heat death of the universe", or in other words this is when the universe reaches thermodynamic equilibrium, i.e.
> MAXIMUM ENTROPY
Although, we already know today that black holes have a monopoly on maximum disorder … so we can say that they have maximum entropy. > 60.p.478
✤ Origin
✤ Why Entropy?
✤ Entropy Arguments
✤ Survival of the Friendliest
✤ Recent Therapies
✤ Bibliography
