Homeostasis

 Homeostasis


At the most atavistic level, life entails reliable metabolism, maintenance of structural integrity and reproductive predictability.

Without the input of energy, in the broadest sense, everything will crumble into constituent elements until state of equilibrium is achieved, at a temperature of absolute zero. The word entropy was introduced into our vocabulary about 150 years ago to depict this process. Life is enthalpic, a term coined about 50 years later, to describe a system in which order is increasing and heat rising.

Entropy is the bow which propels the arrow of time in the direction we experience it in the macroscopic world. 

In the beginning, life is massively enthalpic, but soon aligns with entropy, so organisms live first and die later.

Energy must be added to the system continuously over time to balance the vital equation that enables life in the biosphere in the long now.

The star at the core of all of the life we know is the sun, which we expect to be gentle with creatures on this planet for a few more billion years.

There is a great deal of energy buried deep in the earth, the stars in the galaxies, and mostly in the space between the objects we can see, but capturing that energy is, to say the least, too cumbersome for now.

Homeostasis is a word synonymous with the word life. It means that, against all odds, the internal environment of a living cell, or of a multicellular organism, is maintained in a state of reasonable stability. It is not an overstatement to say that we spend all of our time in a tenuous equilibrium, entirely opposed to the indifferent outcome, the stable equilibrium resulting from entropy. On one side the equilibrium is alive, on the other side, at the end of entropy, the equilibrium is dead. On one side there is everything, on the other nothing.

We are lucky to be alive, and to make our own luck in the niche in which we currently survive. We have a hand in creating it and a hand in destroying it, and options for managing it better.

We can do much more to mitigate climate change, build more effectively and live in safer places, and deliberate to the greatest extent humanly possible, to promote planetary homeostasis. We can monitor and deflect asteroids threatening the earth, predict and plan for, or prevent,  pandemics and potential extinction events as a result.

We can run, but we cannot hide.

Seismic activity may be increased to a minor extent as a consequence of global warming, fracking, and other subterranean human enterprises, the effects of which we can mitigate. We can work to minimize the risks of nuclear power plant accidents, and avoid nuclear war, but there is little we can do, aside from attempting to predict, to prevent the next major earthquake or volcanic eruption. We are merely onlookers in the face of continental drift, shifting tectonic plates, subduction zones and rifts, and resulting tsunamis.

We the people have not yet learned or acknowledged, that all of us share a common home, share a very special place in the cosmos, a pale blue dot in an endless sky. 

Life on earth is our common cause. Human beings are the only animals capable of learning how to promote planetary homeostasis, how to combat entropy, how to save ourselves, and all others, and everything else in this precious world, perhaps in our galaxy, possibly in the entire universe. We have a lot to lose but do not seem capable enough of thinking big, of imagining that we could all just get along. We are profoundly political, myopic and selfish. It is likely that we are doomed as a result. Now is the time to cry for our beloved countries, to weep for our beloved planet, and to sob and shudder for a universe potentially bereft of intelligent life, or any life at all.

Despite all of this, I hope that you and I are foolishly optimistic, are bidding against all odds, that humanity will find a way, and that together, we will ultimately turn the tide.


Aubrey lieberman

So noted on 2/11/23 in my journal I call Notes on quarter of a page.

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