A professor at MIT has just discovered the second law of thermodynamics! Wait, maybe a few people knew about that before. But he also has discovered that various systems, including organisms and ecosystems, evolve to find ways of taking in energy, using some of it to do useful work, then dissipating the rest as heat! Wait, I just remembered that a guy named Howard T. Odum at the University of Florida thought of that before. Okay, I am just teasing my friends from MIT, who are very very smart, just not the only smart people in the world. All teasing aside, the MIT guy does have a novel angle – suggesting that because living systems do a better job of this than non-living systems, the formation of life was more or less inevitable. I like how this article talks about entropy in simple, understandable terms:

Although entropy must increase over time in an isolated or “closed” system, an “open” system can keep its entropy low — that is, divide energy unevenly among its atoms — by greatly increasing the entropy of its surroundings. In his influential 1944 monograph “What Is Life?” the eminent quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger argued that this is what living things must do. A plant, for example, absorbs extremely energetic sunlight, uses it to build sugars, and ejects infrared light, a much less concentrated form of energy. The overall entropy of the universe increases during photosynthesis as the sunlight dissipates, even as the plant prevents itself from decaying by maintaining an orderly internal structure.

So we are selfishly concentrating energy to create orderly, useful systems  – Odum’s core concept of “embodied energy” – here on Earth at the expense of the rest of the universe. Even if Earth is not the only planet with life, there is still a lot of universe out there so I don’t think we need to feel too guilty. The real question is, just how open a system is Earth as a practical matter – as we keep using more energy to create more sophisticated systems here, can we continually improve our ability to keep exporting the consequences (heat being the most obvious)?

One of my few regrets in life is that I studied in close proximity to Odum in the late 1990s, but didn’t actually study with him or even meet him. I just didn’t know who he was at the time, because in the late 1990s I was just a dumb kid. One of my New Years Resolutions is to read more things written by him, and to do more blog posts about him.