this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
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Science Memes

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

and then downvotes it

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

I hate that this is popular. This is a creationist level understanding of the big bang.

You ever use a spray can for a while and the can gets cold? It's more like that.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago (2 children)

The buddha explained this 2500 years ago

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

According to the Lotus Sutra the Earth is also a sentient being.

The Chan School of Buddhism says that all phenomena are mind. There is nothing that is not mind. We, as humans, are a mind in a mind.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

No that’s not exactly right. It’s not that everything is only mind. Our subjective experience is only mind, you don’t actually see experience as it is but instead your experience of life is only mind in the sense it gets filtered by your sensory apparatus and hence it isn’t real as you don’t really sense reality as you are capable of. Doesn’t mean reality doesn’t exist if you’re not looking

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

The paragraphing has gone all the way through readable back to "I'm not reading this".

[–] [email protected] 32 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The cosmos is within us. We are made of star stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.

Carl Sagan.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

This Carl guy sounds pretty smart. Maybe he should study physics or something.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Maybe he should try his hand at teaching too, it seems like he's got a unique skill for simplifying complicated concepts.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

If he had a TV show, I bet it could reach many people and we might all learn from him.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)
[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 months ago (5 children)

An explosion is pure entropy. It's high energy releasing to a low energy state in an uncontrolled manner

We climb down the energy slope very slowly to reverse entropy and create order

The universe is like us - temporary order emerges as it slides towards entropy

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

A single human may look organized, but collectively we are chaos

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

(apparent deadlink BTW). In answer to the question: slow and steady Hawking radiation from all the black holes, perhaps?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

If only this was a response AI could give. I think it would solve a lot of the problems

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

But are we actually creating order? To maintain life's order, we are creating much more disorder somewhere else.

Life is but an entropy maximization machine.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

On the overall scale of the universe? No, not even remotely close. On the local scale of the Earth, generally yes.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Well, as much as possible anyway. When considering mass alone, life is quite efficient.

According to Wolfram Alpha:

The sun produces 3.8 * 10^28^ watts.

A single human produces 104 watts (calculated through the average caloric intake assuming that intake ≈ energy consumption) through heat radiation.

Therefore:

1 kg of human converts 1.5 watt into heat.

1 kg of the sun converts 0.0002 watt into (heat) radiation.

And while I have nearly no understanding how entropy is calculated, from those values alone it seems like humans produce more entropy per kg than the sun. I'm pretty sure entropy is somewhat related to energy production though.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yes, if you consider just a human-mass equivalent portion of the Sun then it's not doing much, but that's not really a useful comparison. We're talking about total net entropy here, not entropy per unit mass.

But yes, if it makes you feel any better, I'll concede that if you had octillions of people our total metabolic energy output would, in fact, be significantly higher than that of the Sun.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

This raises the question of how many kg of human mass is required to start fusion and create a human star? How does fusion even work if you have a mix of different elements? Would the human star pulse in a cycle of collapsing until hydrogen fusion starts, exploding out until it stops and then collapsing again? Or would any fusion ignite enough to stop it from collapsing into a neutron star or black hole?

And if I've asked this question, does it mean xkcd has already attempted an answer? Or at least a comic that mentions it?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Perhaps another way to think of it is that we're a patch of localised order in an overall disordered universe

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Or perhaps more eloquently:

we're the standing part of a harmonic fart

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I don't understand this, but it sounds cool.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

We're the fixed red dot in the superposition of the green and blue waves interfering with one other

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

...just ripples in the carbon cycle, momentary standing waves until we lose coherence...

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