The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that in an isolated system (one that is not interacting with its environment), entropy never decreases. ... Closed systems inexorably become less structured, less organized, less able to accomplish interesting and useful outcomes, until they slide into an equilibrium of gray, tepid, homogeneous monotony and stay there.
Entropy Tax
Import order constantly or dissolve into disorder.
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No, he said: the organism feeds upon negative entropy. “To put it less paradoxically,” he added paradoxically, “the essential thing in metabolism is that the organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help producing while alive.” In other words, the organism sucks orderliness from its surroundings.
This inevitable waste is so harsh and unavoidable that it is astounding that any organization can persist for long without rapidly dissolving to cold equilibrium. Everything we find interesting and good in the cosmos—living organisms, civilization, communities, intelligence, evolution itself—somehow maintains a persistent difference in the face of entropy’s empty indifference.
The presence of free energy is what enables a complex adaptive system such as an ant colony to stay away from equilibrium, create order, and be dynamic over time. If you remove that energy, then entropy takes over and the system decays and eventually reaches a state of stasis or equilibrium. As one of the participants at the SFI meeting, University of Michigan theorist John Holland, once put it, “in fact, if the system ever does reach equilibrium, it isn’t just stable. It’s dead.”
From this law it follows that entropy must increase in any closed system—or, for that matter, in any system that cannot communicate in an ordered fashion with other systems or environments external to itself. Accordingly, whenever we attempt to do work or take action inside such a system—a concept and its match-up with reality—we should anticipate an increase in entropy hence an increase in confusion and disorder. Naturally, this means we cannot determine the character or nature (consistency) of such a system within itself, since the system is moving irreversibly toward a higher, yet unknown, state of confusion and disorder.
There are always limits to resilience. ... Resilience is something that may be very hard to see, unless you exceed its limits, overwhelm and damage the balancing loops, and the system structure breaks down. Because resilience may not be obvious without a whole-system view, people often sacrifice resilience for stability, or for productivity, or for some other more immediately recognizable system property.
In one sense a structure is a device which exists in order to delay some event which is energetically favoured. ... Sooner or later the weight will fall to the ground and the strain energy will be released; but it is the business of a structure to delay such events for a season, for a lifetime or for thousands of years. All structures will be broken or destroyed in the end - just as all people will die in the end.
Even the pyramids in the land of the Sphinx, whose riddle reminds us that we all must crawl before we walk and that we will not walk forever, have been eroded by the sand and the wind. Nothing on this earth is inviolate on the scale of geological time, and nothing we create will last at full strength forever. Steel corrodes and diamonds can be split.
Food, clothes, medicines, machinery, and other technology inexorably decompose, decay, deteriorate, and degrade over time. ... With the collapse of civilization and the sudden arrest of key processes—gathering raw materials, refining and manufacturing, transportation and distribution—the hourglass is inverted and the sand steadily drains away.