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You wanna get together later and rub our dust together?
Sounds dirty. Will there be cheese?
What, are you crazy? Of course there will be cheese.
I can’t believe you would even ask me that
Delicious spacedust.
It was exploded, then turned onto something green eventually, then something haunted consumed and excreted it, then something WAY MORE HAUNTED did a bunch of weird shit to it like letting little things fart in it.
Such delicious spacedust.
The cosmos is within us. We are made of star stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.
Carl Sagan.
This Carl guy sounds pretty smart. Maybe he should study physics or something.
Maybe he should try his hand at teaching too, it seems like he’s got a unique skill for simplifying complicated concepts.
If he had a TV show, I bet it could reach many people and we might all learn from him.
Holy shit. That was pretty profound.
I love the line “when an explosion explodes hard enough, dust wakes up and thinks about itself”
I’d condense the whole post down to:
The universe is an ongoing explosion. Sometimes the exploded dust becomes haunted.
That’s us.
No u.
An explosion is pure entropy. It’s high energy releasing to a low energy state in an uncontrolled manner
We climb down the energy slope very slowly to reverse entropy and create order
The universe is like us - temporary order emerges as it slides towards entropy
Perhaps another way to think of it is that we’re a patch of localised order in an overall disordered universe
Or perhaps more eloquently:
we’re the standing part of a harmonic fart
I don’t understand this, but it sounds cool.
We’re the fixed red dot in the superposition of the green and blue waves interfering with one other
But are we actually creating order? To maintain life’s order, we are creating much more disorder somewhere else.
Life is but an entropy maximization machine.
On the overall scale of the universe? No, not even remotely close. On the local scale of the Earth, generally yes.
Well, as much as possible anyway. When considering mass alone, life is quite efficient.
According to Wolfram Alpha:
The sun produces 3.8 * 1028 watts.
A single human produces 104 watts (calculated through the average caloric intake assuming that intake ≈ energy consumption) through heat radiation.
Therefore:
1 kg of human converts 1.5 watt into heat.
1 kg of the sun converts 0.0002 watt into (heat) radiation.
And while I have nearly no understanding how entropy is calculated, from those values alone it seems like humans produce more entropy per kg than the sun. I’m pretty sure entropy is somewhat related to energy production though.
Yes, if you consider just a human-mass equivalent portion of the Sun then it’s not doing much, but that’s not really a useful comparison. We’re talking about total net entropy here, not entropy per unit mass.
But yes, if it makes you feel any better, I’ll concede that if you had octillions of people our total metabolic energy output would, in fact, be significantly higher than that of the Sun.
This raises the question of how many kg of human mass is required to start fusion and create a human star? How does fusion even work if you have a mix of different elements? Would the human star pulse in a cycle of collapsing until hydrogen fusion starts, exploding out until it stops and then collapsing again? Or would any fusion ignite enough to stop it from collapsing into a neutron star or black hole?
And if I’ve asked this question, does it mean xkcd has already attempted an answer? Or at least a comic that mentions it?
INSUFFICIENT DATA
If only this was a response AI could give. I think it would solve a lot of the problems
(apparent deadlink BTW). In answer to the question: slow and steady Hawking radiation from all the black holes, perhaps?
…just ripples in the carbon cycle, momentary standing waves until we lose coherence…
A single human may look organized, but collectively we are chaos
Meditate
The buddha explained this 2500 years ago
According to the Lotus Sutra the Earth is also a sentient being.
The Chan School of Buddhism says that all phenomena are mind. There is nothing that is not mind. We, as humans, are a mind in a mind.
No that’s not exactly right. It’s not that everything is only mind. Our subjective experience is only mind, you don’t actually see experience as it is but instead your experience of life is only mind in the sense it gets filtered by your sensory apparatus and hence it isn’t real as you don’t really sense reality as you are capable of. Doesn’t mean reality doesn’t exist if you’re not looking
deleted by creator
Just recently mentioned the conscious universe theory in conversation with a friend.
synchroni-city
If we share this nightmare Then we can dream Spiritus mundi
The paragraphing has gone all the way through readable back to “I’m not reading this”.
I hate that this is popular. This is a creationist level understanding of the big bang.
You ever use a spray can for a while and the can gets cold? It’s more like that.
I heard Bill Wurtz voice while I read this
Even crazier space dust!
But it wasn’t really an explosion, it was more like a spontaneous, insane inflation that found itself suddenly huge and empty, only after it was through with that particular stage did it zap itself full of energy and matter everywhere all at once. Then it continued growing in volume and thinning out via regular ol’ relativistic expansion.
EDIT: looking a little bit closer, there’s the thing about zapping all over itself after Inflation, it was almost perfectly half-and-half matter/antimatter, which then proceeded to join and annihilate into pure energy, but for some reason probably related to the Weak Force, just a little bit more matter was created than antimatter.
And that’s what we are and see today, 1 part out of every 8 million-and-one. For every 4,000,000 parts antimatter, there were 4,000,001 parts matter, only that 1 left over particle of matter, multiplied a bazillion times.
That’s just a whole other level of amazing than just saying “an explosion”.
and then downvotes it
Mind that textbook we did in school?
I’m still tripping
Actually I live in a skip but thanks for the pep talk.
