[shrimp_emoji]

>A fun thought experiment is someone "encrypting" chemical energy into heat, putting the key in a box, only to later go back and decrypt it back into chemical energy.

Unfortunately, I think it's less like encryption and more like compression. And it's actually less like compression and more like deletion. It's impossible to compress information past a certain point (right?), and the amount left in heat seems like it's just been outright deleted.

The Universe wants to debloat its codebase of information: https://youtu.be/8N1BxHgsoOw?t=119

[im3w1l]

You have a common misunderstanding. Heat contains a lot of information. Chemical energy contains almost none. That's a problem because you can't destroy information, so you can't go back to (much more useful) chemical energy.

But if you have "illusory heat" that seems to contain a lot of information, but it's actually just a tiny amount of information (say 128 bit) that has been used stretched into a lot (say 1gig), then with the right key you can see that it actually is not a lot of information. And then you should, in theory, be able to go back to chemical energy.