Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to "this need for nature to frustrate entropy"

re: "this need for nature to frustrate entropy"

Yes, I recall we had an interesting discussion here on this topic not too long ago.

On strictly energetic grounds, this proposal makes perfect sense, but how does the universe "know" it has to maximize entropy and that it can do so by maintaining localized small-scale reversals of it. A stochastic process similar to natural selection might lead to this, but natural selection's payoff (the selection mechanism) is survival. Extinction prunes off unsuccessful variations, on the average, but I find it difficult to see how this logic could be applied to the mandate to maximize entropy. If a local entropic reversal manages to maximize total total entropy, it's failure will not mean entropy is reversed, only that it will proceed a bit slower.

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