| > 'Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of "Have you read a work of Shakespare's?"' It's right there in Yeats, which the author also references: > "Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold /" Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot image (14 February 1990) is rather deceptive when it comes to understanding the story of life on earth in the context of the fundamental laws of thermodynamics, but here it is: https://www.planetary.org/worlds/pale-blue-dot Let's say we took that planet and dropped it out to the orbit of Pluto, which we also now have some great imagery of. Pluto is indeed chemically active, it turns out, in the subzero real of nitrogen ices and so on. Hence a better picture would be a transit of Earth across the Sun from say, the perspective of Mars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_of_Earth_from_Mars > "No one has ever seen a transit of Earth from Mars, but the next transit will take place on November 10, 2084. The last such transit took place on May 11, 1984." The only reason life developed on the 'pale blue dot' was that it was at a fairly optimal distance from our local star, which is pouring energy out into space at a ridiculous level relative to the amount captured by this tiny planet. That huge flood of energy is what allows life to swim upstream against the tide of entropy, aka the Second Law, by using that energy to create complex structures of only fleeting permanence, but eventually humans learned to use excess plant production to feed the literary geniuses who created the great works of imagination. Genetic information transfer was the imperfect mechanism (note all species go extinct over time) behind this story. In literary-vs-science 'two-culture' terms, a return to sun-worship is a nice way of closing the gap. The Egyptians seem to have adopted the concept for ~150 human generations, maybe they were smarter than we are? |