As you read. As I write. As we live our lives.
We are dying.
Why?
Take a new deck of cards. Spades, hearts, clubs and diamonds, all in pristine order. Now shuffle. They aren't in order any more. Shuffle again. Still not in order. In fact, you can shuffle from now till the stars go out, and you will, in all likelihood, never end up with a perfectly ordered deck again.
Welcome to entropy - the reason you're dying.
Entropy is the observed, inexorable march from order to disorder that seemingly prevails everywhere in nature. Glasses break, they don't spontaneously reform. Your desk will become untidy, and will not become tidy by itself. Water flows downhill, not uphill.
Constantly, things are sliding down toward disorder. Of course, when it happens to us, we don't call it entropy. We call it aging.
We humans are kept alive through the exquisitely structured chemical reactions of metabolism. And yet, metabolism isn't perfect. As it ticks over, it lays down accumulating damage that will eventually cross a threshold and kill us. This is how entropy is written on our soul.
The same thing that keeps us alive is what eventually kills us. The cosmos giveth and the cosmos taketh. Death is just a consequence of being alive in the first place.
Life is a package holiday, and death comes inclusive. So don't let it get you down. It couldn't be any other way.
Instead, dwell on this.
You get to live twice as long as your great, great, great grandparents. Twice as long. Twice as much time to live your life. Twice as much time to love your friends and family. Twice as much time to help your fellow primates. Twice as much time to leave a positive mark on the world.
Very nice, however, I have a quarrel with:
ReplyDelete"Water flows downhill, not uphill."
Water flows into the sea, and the sea is very difficult to equate to disorder: I can see your point with the concept of entropy, but it's awkward to put into these metaphors.
Aging and the cyclical nature of water flow shouldn't be bracketed with the same term, surely? There's no evaporation and condensation for the dead man.
Yes, the metaphor is a little awkward, but I want this writing to be accessible.
ReplyDeleteIt's really just an attempt to state an abstract principle in a familiar form - left to its own devices, energy will always slide down gradients, never up them. On the scale that is relevant, the metaphor holds.