The Price Of Life
We are here, we were born, we have lived, and we (you) are still around to read these words. We exist only because the faint, shadowed echoes of probability willed it to be so. Our collective Kismet has deemed us for whatever reason worthy to awake on the morrow and read the words penned in the daily news, to see whatever atrocities make up the headlines of “the morning edition” of whatever paper you might be perusing at the moment.
Life, like all other things follows a simple rule … that rule is this, (every ordered system seeks a return to entropy), every ordered state seeks a return to disorder. Life is in and of itself an act of consumption, for all of us to continue our existence we must, even at our most basic fundamental level consume … or absorb energy.
The “Price of Life” is this, and if energy is by Einstein’s calculations found to be unbreakable (meaning that it cannot be destroyed or created, it can only be transformed) then it is absolute. Then every action you take, every movement you make. Every apple you eat, every breath you take, every step you walk. Every lover’s cheek you have caressed, every single flection of muscle no matter how miniscule since the day you were conceived (not born but conceived) has inexorably added up to a loss (or disorder) of energy, therefore you have taken an ordered state of energy and brought it to a less ordered state, ill give you an example.
At any moment the sun emits about 3.86x10 to the 26th watts of energy, so add 24 zeroes to the end of that number and you’ll get an idea of how unimaginably large an amount of energy that is, most of that energy goes off into space. But about 1.74 x 10 to the 17th watts strike the earth (i.e.: 174,000,000,000,000,000, or 174 quadrillion watts.
If there are no clouds in the way, then one square meter of the earth will receive one kilowatt of that energy, so for the six hours in the middle of a sunny day, an area the size of a small backyard swimming pool (48m2) will receive about 288 kilowatts of energy, that’s nearly ten times what the average us household uses in a day. Keeping these numbers in mind I would like to bring you to a beach, any beach.
So were at a beach in midday, with no clouds. We know from the previous calculations just how much energy is hitting every square inch of that beach … all day long, its absorbing the energy from the sun, we know that the energy that it is absorbing is going from an ordered state to a disordered one because if it weren’t we could fall asleep on that beach and wake up the next day to an altogether hotter one.
But we don’t, the temperature of the sand beneath out feet has cooled, it has absorbed the more ordered state of energy from the sun and through the night has reemitted all of that energy into a more disorder one, the key word there is “all”. It has re radiated all of that energy back out into the universe into a more disordered state. If it didn’t then day by day the sand on that beach would inevitably climb in temperature until it melted into glass and no one, not you or I could sit on that beach and think about these questions.
We are here, we were born, without energy transferring states from order to disorder we would never have been, if it hadn’t been for that disorder in the underlying nature of all that is we might not even be around to ask these questions … think on that for a moment!