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September 22, 2018 - January 24, 2019
Matter appeared within the first second after the big bang. Matter is the stuff that energy pushes around. Until just over a century ago, scientists and philosophers assumed that matter and energy were distinct. We now know that matter is really a highly compressed form of energy. The young Albert Einstein demonstrated this in a famous paper in 1905. That formula—energy (E) is equal to mass (m) times the speed of light (c) squared, or E = mc2—tells us how much energy is compressed inside a given amount of matter. To figure out how much energy is locked up in a bit of matter, multiply the mass
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It’s as if entropy demands more energy from an entity if it tries to get more complex; more complex things have to find and manage larger and more elaborate flows of free energy. No wonder it’s harder to make and maintain more complex things, and no wonder they usually break down faster than simpler things. This is an idea that runs right through the modern origin story and has a lot to tell us about modern human societies.
Paradoxically, the flows of energy that sustain complex things (including you and me) are helping entropy with its bleak task of slowly breaking down all forms of order and structure.
As the English astronomer Arthur Eddington put it, astronomy is like walking through a forest with saplings, mature trees, and ancients close to death.3
A neutron star just twenty kilometers across would weigh twice as much as our sun, and a teaspoon of neutron-star stuff would weigh a billion tons.5
Entropy is rubbing its hands at the thought of the energy taxes and fees it can levy as complexity and information increase.7 Indeed, some have argued that entropy actually likes the idea of life (and may encourage it to appear in many parts of the universe), because life degrades free energy so much more efficiently than nonlife.
Chicxulub crater
As mammals, we human beings share 90 percent of our genes, or about three billion base pairs on our DNA, with other mammals, from rats to raccoons. Somewhere among the other 10 percent of our DNA lie the genes that make us different.
There was one more crisis to be survived before mammals could take over the Earth. That was the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum (PETM, for lovers of acronyms), a short, sharp shock of greenhouse warming at the border between the Paleocene and Eocene epochs, about fifty-six million years ago. It was damaging enough to drive many species to extinction.
Because we humans can share individual maps of our surroundings, we have built up a rich collective understanding of space and time that lies behind all our origin stories. This achievement, apparently unique to our species, means that today, one tiny part of the universe is beginning to understand itself.
Modern chimps and humans still share well over 96 percent of their genomes.
Thinking about such processes in ecological terms reminds us that wealth never really consists of things; it consists of control over the energy flows that make, move, mine, and transform things. Wealth is a sort of compressed sunlight, just as matter is really congealed energy.
This is because wage earners, unlike peasants, cannot survive without governments. Farming villages could exist quite happily beyond the borders of the great agrarian civilizations, but wage earners depend on the existence of laws, markets, employers, shops, and currencies. A specialist wage earner, like a nerve cell, cannot survive alone.
Man has too long forgotten that the Earth was given to him for usufruct alone, not for consumption, still less for profligate waste. —CHARLES PERKINS Marsh, MAN AND NATURE
Perhaps the idea of endless growth is completely wrong. Perhaps the disruptive dynamism of recent centuries is a temporary phenomenon. After all, living life within a framework of social and cultural stability has been the norm for most of human history and for most human societies. And that is why an understanding of what it means to live richly and dynamically in a less changeable world is preserved within the cultures of many modern indigenous communities whose people see themselves primarily as custodians of a world larger and older than themselves.
Though unfashionable at present, the idea of a future without continuous growth has popped up regularly in discussions by philosophically minded economists. Many eighteenth-century economists, including Adam Smith, feared a no-growth future, seeing it as the end of progress.
“the best state for human nature is that in which, while no one is poor, no one desires to be richer, nor has any reason to fear being thrust back, by the efforts of others to push themselves forward.” Growth was still needed, he stated, in many poorer countries, but the richer countries were more in need of a better distribution of wealth. With basic necessities taken care of, the task for them was to live more fully rather than to keep acquiring more material wealth. A stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement. There would be as much
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The Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage …. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl …. Yet the GNP does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or … the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials …. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.
Eventually, as economic growth ceases to become the primary goal of governments, individuals will begin to value quality of life and leisure over increased income. With the support of governments, more and more people will drop out of extreme forms of the rat race.
