tag:dreamwidth.org,2017-04-16:3093168ravingsstormsewerstormsewer2019-01-14T00:25:55Ztag:dreamwidth.org,2017-04-16:3093168:144523Thank Your Enzymes2019-01-14T00:23:23Z2019-01-14T00:25:55Zpublic0Enzymes are cool. There's lots of reasons why. Strings of amino acids that fold up automagically <abbr title="I'm already fed up with people using that word, but it is unfortunately overwhelmingly appropriate to the present use.">[<a href="#n1">1</a>]</abbr> into nanomachines that carry out plethorae of crazy amazing chemical reactions in water at room temperature, it's hard for me to imagine a more astounding piece of tech. We've still only scratched the surface in figuring out how that happens <abbr title="Though Google's black box neural networks seem to be digging a little deeper, it remains to be seen how much of that digital wisdom will ever be translated into human understanding.">[<a href="#n2">2</a>]</abbr>; biology is over the river and through the woods beyond us in terms of technical chops.<br /><br />But today (as on many days), I'm thinking about thermodynamics, particularly the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that whatever happens, the disorder of the universe must increase. Sooner or later the stars will poop out, the planets will 'splode, everything you love and cherish will be torn into its smallest constituent pieces <abbr title="And yet (Tangent Warning), there is reason to think that's just one part of a larger story. Like, think about the infinite future. On an infinite timeline, in the short term (meaning in the next 100 trillion years or so) everything will burn out and turn into nothingness, sure. But over infinite time everything that has a non-zero probability of happening will happen, and will in fact happen infinite times. Suns and solar systems will randomly coalesce and allow life to happen, and even the Big Bang will happen over and over again infinite times. An infinite number of times, you will stochastically appear out of the void only to immediately suffocate and freeze to death. The Cubs will win the World Series, hell will freeze over, pigs will fly, and we'll all live our same lives all over and over again, except sometimes everyone will have a solid gold toilet. But the chances of a Big Bang randomly happening are infinitesimally small compared to the chances of, say, just our solar system randomly assembling itself, meaning the chances that we would happen to live here and now, a mere 14 billion years after a Big Bang in galaxy of 100 billion stars in a universe of at least 100 billion such galaxies, instead of on some small planet alone in an otherwise infinitely dead universe, are essentially zero. All that would seem to suggest that entropy won't increase forever, that something will rewind the clock, or hit the reset button on the computer, or just erase the entire document and start over again, or whatever. Though of course at the moment there's not much sign of that ever happening, the statistical improbability of the alternative suggests otherwise. (These thoughts were inspired by some YouTube video I watched a few years ago and can't find now, though Sean Carroll's TedTalk 'Distant time and the hint of a multiverse' covers similar ground. See also 'The Last Question' by Isaac Asimov.)">[<a href="#n3">3</a>]</abbr>.<br /><span class="cut-wrapper"><span style="display: none;" id="span-cuttag___1" class="cuttag"></span><b class="cut-open">( </b><b class="cut-text"><a href="https://stormsewer.dreamwidth.org/144523.html#cutid1">Click to see where I'm going with this.</a></b><b class="cut-close"> )</b></span><div style="display: none;" id="div-cuttag___1" aria-live="assertive"></div><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=stormsewer&ditemid=144523" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments