If as modernists claimed, all matter and energy is fully convertable but eternal and indestructible, we could, in effect 'freeze' Time itself.
Time would continue to unfold but its effects would be invisible : our minds would live forever and nothing else outside the human mind what last long enough to show signs of aging - it would be constantly and aggressively broken down and transmutated into something ever newer, ever bigger, ever better.
We would live in the world of the First Law.
The first law of thermodynamics.
But in fact, there are at least two laws of thermodynamics and the second says Time's Arrow means that while energy and matter do live on forever and ever, they become less and less useful to us or themselves.
Eventually all matter and energy will be spread out evenly throughout the Universe as a form of tepid pudding, almost totally incapable of stirring.
The human mind whether it is trapped inside five pounds of porridgy brain or trapped inside some lines etched on a silicon chip, will be part of this long slow slide down to entropy.
In fact, life gives every appearance of being a highly fagile - hence rare - form of matter and energy.
That it continues to flourish - at least on this tiny blue-green planet - is a wonder.
Take away all the bacteria, as an example, and ALL life above them would cease.
Take away all the animals, and leave us humans together with all the other life forms and Life would go on, but it ways that might make our human life on earth very short matter.
get rid of all humans - just like that - overnite and a whole host of species, bacteria and others would vanish forthwith and many others would have to struggle hard to adapt without us.
WWII put into actions the then universal belief that we don't need most forms of life, not really.
Not all agreed - Dawson's tiny Vita Cum mensa project set out to prove this idea wrong.
Did he succeed ?
I think he did ...
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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