The Law that can’t be broken
(and that you have probably never heard of)
How would you feel if, in a heated ‘discussion’, someone called you an unreformed “dissipative structure.” That does sound like something you might take offence at, right? (What? me? Dissipative? Dissipated? No way!) But here’s the thing: there’s no escape, no denying the accusation – if you are reading this, you are, in fact, a “dissipative structure.”
The basics
This reality is a consequence of one of the fundamental physical Laws of the universe, the Second Law of Thermodynamics (aka ‘the 2nd Law’). A simple statement of the 2nd Law declares that “every spontaneous change in an isolated system – a system that cannot exchange energy or material with the environment – increases the system’s entropy” (where ‘entropy’ is a measure of the system’s disorder or randomness). Every event in an isolated system uses and degrades energy, reduces material gradients and erodes structure – the system becomes increasingly scrambled. With repeated or continuous change, an isolated system descends inexorably toward ‘thermodynamic equilibrium’, a state of maximum local entropy in which nothing further can happen.
“Well,” you might fairly ask, “what has that got to do with me?”
Quite a lot, actually. It turns out that the workings of the 2nd Law are not confined to isolated systems. Every real activity or process is entropic; with each heartbeat or working movement of the human body for example, there is a corresponding increase in entropy.
At this point you might be moved to protest that your body -- and others you know and love – are demonstrably not downsliding toward entropic equilibrium! And you’d be totally correct.
Living entities can actually gain in structural mass and functional complexity over time – consider a developing fetus or the entire ecosphere for that matter. Living things seem to circumvent the 2nd Law. The paradox dissolves only when we recognize that living systems, from cellular organelles to entire ecosystems, from individual citizens to entire cities, are open systems that freely exchange energy and matter with their host ‘environments’.
Let’s make this personal: consider that to survive and function, you must import concentrated chemical energy and essential elements (aka ‘food’) into your body; you use a portion of these high-quality (low entropy) imports to produce and maintain yourself and to go about your daily activities. Meanwhile, just like an automobile engine, you continuously radiate low-grade waste heat –the harder you work, the more you radiate – and every time you visit the toilet, you ‘export’ degraded waste back into your environment. Like it or not, you are a depleting and polluting dissipative structure.
And, of course, you are not alone. All living systems, from single bacterial cells through blue whales to the entire biosphere, produce and maintain their local organization as ‘far-from-equilibrium’ systems (i.e., they avoid death and decay) at the expense of increasing global disorganization. That is, with the many metabolic processes of self-production they increase total entropy – especially the entropy of their immediate surroundings. Because they survive by continuously consuming, degrading and dispersing these inputs, we refer to living systems as ‘dissipative structures’. [1]
This brief synopsis shows that, because of the continuous drag of the 2nd Law, the existence and behaviour of living things can be sustained only by a similarly continuous, even greater ‘throughput’ of concentrated energy and matter. Without access to reliable supplies of low-entropy resources, death is inevitable and the system will decay in an irreversible slide toward equilibrium.
Don’t bother looking for a way out – there are no exceptions to, and no exemptions from, the 2nd Law. As British Physicist, Sir Arthur Eddington famously asserted:
[Thermodynamics]…holds the supreme position among the laws of nature… If your theory is found to be against the Second Law of Thermodynamics, I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation (Eddington 1929, p.74).
Why it matters
In case you are still wondering, ‘far-from-equilibrium’ thermodynamics has serious implications for humanity’s future prospects. At the top of my list is the fact that the 2nd Law is a necessary, and nearly sufficient, explanation for the physical side of humanity’s contemporary ecological crisis (the cultural and behavioural dimensions are something else altogether!). Humanity is in ecological overshoot. Overshoot means that modern humans are using even self-producing and replenishable resources faster than they regenerate and dumping wastes in excess of nature’s assimilation capacity.
Consider two very large dissipative structures. First, the ecosphere: the ecosphere[2] is a highly-ordered self-organizing integrated system of mind-boggling complexity, multi-layered structure and steep gradients as represented by millions of distinct species, differentiated material concentrations, and accumulated biomass. Over geological time, anabolism (building up) has marginally exceeded catabolism (breaking down) so biodiversity, systemic complexity, and energy/material flows have been increasing — i.e., the ecosphere has been moving ever further from equilibrium. The ecosphere ‘self-produces’ from simple, dispersed compounds – carbon dioxide, water and trace nutrients – using photosynthesis and an a off-the-planet source of energy, sunlight. Photosynthesizers, mostly green plants, convert about 2% of the solar influx into concentrated chemical energy in biomass and this plant biomass powers most all animal life on earth. The rest of the solar input is dissipated off the planet as low-grade heat energy – i.e., the living ecosphere can thrive only by increasing the entropy of the universe.
Now consider modern techno-industrial (MTI) society, particularly the metabolic demands (food requirements and bodily waste output) of eight billion people, combined with the massive energy and material demands of our ever-expanding, mostly fossil-fueled industrial metabolism. Like the ecosphere, the human enterprise is a self-organizing far-from-equilibrium dissipative structure. However, it is also an open, growing, dependent sub-system of the materially closed, non-growing finite ecosphere. Thus, while the ecosphere evolves and maintains itself by feeding on an extra-terrestrial source of energy and by continuously recycling matter, the human enterprise can grow and maintain itself only by feeding on low entropy resources extracted from the ecosphere (including fossil fuels, the product of ancient photosynthesis) and ejecting its entropic wastes back into the ecosphere. In other words, beyond a certain point long-passed, economic activity becomes parasitic; the human enterprise can further expand only by entropically debilitating its host.
This is not idle speculation. Climate change/global heating is entropy-in-your-face: a major driver, carbon dioxide is the greatest dissipative waste product by weight of industrial economies (~38 billion tonnes emitted last year). And global heating is only the best-known co-symptom of entropic overshoot. Plunging biodiversity, ocean acidification, tropical deforestation, rampant land/soil degradation, falling mammalian sperm counts, incipient resources shortages, micro-plastic contamination – indeed the pollution of everything – are all co-symptoms of excess resource consumption and waste production, of the depletion and dissipation of the ecosphere. Humanity has become a rogue species and the greatest geological force changing the face of the planet.
This is a genuine wicked problem; it may well take ‘civilization’ down. Modern humanity is utterly dependent on multiple economic and cultural subsystems whose operation destroys equally essential biophysical subsystems and their myriad life-support functions.
What’s in store… unless?
A school-child could understand the basic physics and biology outlined above, but apparently not economists and other techno-optimists. Mainstream (neo-liberal) economics is built on the frail platform of human exceptionalism, the idea that H. sapiens is not part of nature, that humans are not beholden to the laws of nature and that there are therefore no practical limits to the size of the human enterprise. These fantasies effectively run the world – governments and ordinary people are happy to go along for the ride – so our eco-predicament was inevitable via the 2nd Law.
And it’s not that society hadn’t been warned. More than half a century ago, Rogue economist Nicolas Georgescu-Roegen attempted to reconstruct his discipline on biophysical grounds, particularly the 2nd Law, but died imbittered that his academic and professional colleagues rejected his thesis. One of Georgescu-Roegen’s students, the late Herman Daly did a little better by meticulously describing the workings of a steady-state economy and co-founding the field of ecological economics. But the mainstream remains unimpressed. Major governments everywhere remain committed to the perpetual growth ethic in the face of cascading evidence this is a finite planet. People naturally prefer a fanciful tale held aloft by pixie dust than a restrictive (and now much grimmer) narrative firmly rooted in biophysical reality.
This situation cannot end well. Modern humans have created a mind-numbingly complex, rapidly changing world-system of overlapping cultural and biophysical sub-systems whose unpredictable behaviour constantly challenges our limited cognitive capacities. No one and no human institution is remotely capable of gaining control; we have arguably rendered ourselves functionally obsolete. Meanwhile, yet another biophysical process – Darwinian natural selection – is still in play along with the unbreakable 2nd Law. Our maladapted, growth-addicted MTI culture may well be ‘selected out’ in this century as a failed evolutionary experiment. If global MTI society continues to ignore the growing galaxy of flashing yellow lights in defiance of the 2nd Law, “…there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.”
Where is H. sapiens’ much-vaunted high intelligence when we really need it?
[1] Hurricanes and tornados are examples of non-living dissipative structures.
[2] The ecosphere comprises the living biosphere plus non-living components such as the climate system, the water cycle, dissolved minerals and the rocky substrate (surface of the lithosphere).
Just change “may well” to “will” to apply your analytical powers correctly. Humanity has the intelligence to collectively design and implement ever-more destructive uses of fire, but has only theoretical capacity for enforcing ultrasocial restraint.
Corporations at the helm, humanity is burning its way to civilizational collapse - the evidence is too voluminous and stark to permit hedging or softening.
What a wonderful summary! Essential discussion in the community garden as we grapple to understand the need for an urgent cultural override. The Maximum Power Principle (Lotka, Odum, Pinkerton) has driven evolution and succession - but humans have made it an artform, a Masterclass in Destructive Dissipation and Global Domination. Enabled by language, tool making, high fidelity cultural transmission, flexible large-scale cooperation with belief in global (flawed) Human Stories, “cleverness” (cf. wisdom), imagination and the capacity to ask “why?” and “what if?”, we have harvested energy flux at unprecedented levels to paint ourselves into tighter corners and dig ourselves into deeper holes. Thanks Bill!