A thermodynamic universe ends up as a cold, dead cloud
A gravitational one as today's cosmos
This is not about the neo-pagan animism of re-assigning souls to trees,
stones or waters, to ask them for permission, forgiveness and protection,
and certainly not about addressing a ball of glowing liquid rock (or a dead stone like
the Moon), as a living being, by the name of 'Gaia'.
Quite to the contrary
That could be seen a superstitious expression of a free-floating need for a
religious anchor, which 'modern' people once had, but lost, subsequently filling their internal cavernous vacancy with
a belief in their own thermodynamics - which theoretically cannot sustain itself,
an internal contradiction which is so often blissfully ignored:
It is surprising how many people seem to be consciously
unaware that the laws of thermodynamics relentlessly apply to themselves as
well, individually and collectively.
"The LORD giveth, and the LORD taketh away" - "European" man until about 1870.
"The Lord can stay where he is. I can make it all by myself" - "European" man after about 1870.
Luciferian, if not satanic.
To reiterate, "Westeners" of all denominations overlook the fact that they do not "make" anything, but only transform it, so that their work is subject to entropy; the one thing humans can "make" is something immaterial like money, i. e. invoke debt.
[ Money is an expression of debt, one on one; a dollar bill, as legal tender, is a bill of debt; someone owes someone else something for it, or it would be worthless. That is why mountains of money are so dangerous; other than goods, they represent mountains of debt. Anyone can try this out on a “Monopoly” board; play the game, but do not give the people money first. ]
A glance out of the window will show two things:
First, man has not created his surroundings; and secondly, the universe is by no means sinking into chaos, but has blossomed ever since the beginning of time - according to our own timeline around 13.5 billion years ago, and every day anew - in "divine", i. e. not man-made order; an order that we feed upon; it is not subject to entropy.
But how, if not through God, but purely physically, does this vital order arise?
Is that important?
More than that, it is essential for survival. Modern man has put himself in God's place, but cannot meet the requirements: as noted, his work is subject to entropy and is therefore dependent on external sources - a fact he has denied since 1850.
This "new" belief in one's own empowerment, sometimes to the point of hubris, or even delusions of collective omnipotence, displays a central flaw: it lacks the thermodynamically necessary external source (and sink).
Moving that physical source to the center of the Sun, to get it out of the collective mind, simply ignores the necessity of a source for the Sun itself - and for the sink; it also ignores that life on Earth, as is now agreed upon, originated long before it latched onto
photosynthesis as a secondary source of energy.
As someone else put it, something like that could be called 'fear of life', when one paradoxically worships a death cult out of sheer fear, in the hope of living forever; and, in religious terms, such (self-) worship could indeed be termed "satanic".
All the while, on the other hand, the universe as a whole is not 'alive' either; just a tiny fraction of its thermodynamic fringe. And that, for itself, is not a coincidence or a goal, but a consequence.
The miracle (in the original sense of the word) to behold lies
precisely in the fact that it was and is dead matter, which yet (and probably
inevitably) gave, and gives, rise to life - which is a singular consequence of matter's own (self-enhancing) self-organization; and this self-organization takes place before,
during
and after
life.
In fact, it is its prerequisite.
This, by the way, declares God - or al least the divine, i. e. non-human order of things - to be an objective reality rather than a subjective one; which may even express itself in the fact that subjectively imagining God in any shape or form is seen as blasphemy in some religions - especially the monotheistic ones; though it is very difficult for humans to not imagine, i. e. give an image, to something so difficult to abstract, either as a whole or in its different aspects.
Either which way: Life itself does not generate any surplus value; it already is a surplus value, i.e. a result.
What is hallucinated as "added value" through the (thermodynamic!) process of work is debt, which, since ancient times, has to be either exported or destroyed, once per generation, or once every jubilee - the span of which is determined by the average life span of the current generation since the last - taking down with it all the money represented by that debt 1:1, while leaving the physical structures intact; be they primary (gravitational) or secondary (thermodynamic).
Anything else could be termed as 'magical thinking'.
The real added value in the universe lies in the effect of a single, physical, omnipresent, omnipotent, eternally directing force that transforms decay into creation, and lifelessness into potential - and that this power is not available to humans (more precisely: it cannot be influenced by them, only simulated) - but its results and effects are.
They themselves are one, as living beings; but their only contribution to creation lies in the physical mass of their bodies, alive or dead, composed or decomposed, separated from the earth or returned to dust.
Or, as Dr. James Tour put it: "The value of something lies in the arrangement of its atoms."
Or even the arrangement within its atoms:
From chaos to order, from hydrogen to uranium
The less random, the more less likely such an arrangement is, the scarcer it is, the more valuable it probably becomes - at least as a tendency. In other words, the more it defies the assumption of ever growing entropy, randomness, indistinctness and indiscrimination in the material world.
If, as postulated, the result is to be that entropy S should not be calculated as S=Q/T but as S=T/Q, so be it.
A prerequisite it is not; one could simply state that 'gravitational enhancements of cosmic material do not follow the laws of thermodynamics, by virtue of not being thermodynamic in origin, but in result' - and take it or leave it.
The one thing to note, possibly, is that due their nature, gravitational processes precede thermodynamic ones, by building the necessary potential, which in turn provokes a thermodynamic reaction; yet this thermodynamic reaction usually cannot completely equalize the previously gravitationally created potential down to zero, as the degrading process is self-diminishing; and that may be one reason why, over time, the universe becomes more orderly - not less.
First, entropy is gravitationally decreased; then it increases again via thermodynamics; but never (or less likely) to the former level - thus leading to an increasingly overall orderly effect: Over time, entropy decreases - at least where gravity has had an effect.
A simple example:
Once free oxygen and carbohydrates have been created on a planet via indirect gravitational separation, and raised to certain levels of concentrations, they will more or less spontaneously recombine thermodynamically; i. e., forests will burn.
However, before both are again completely destroyed or degraded, their level of concentration will fall below that which is needed to keep the thermodynamic reaction going, leaving some residue of both behind, which over time leads to deposits of both - i. e. a greater level of order and complexity on the planet.
Or even more simply:
Should this planet burst, rocks of uranium ore will be left over from what originally was a cloud of smoke and dust, which in turn was left over from an exploding former hydrogen star.
Hydrogen, on the other hand, is not created from Uranium (though this does decay into a flurry of other materials):
The universe has a direction.
But though the idea that gravity enhances cosmic order is neither new nor revolutionary, to understand its consequences, i. e. to be able to really step into the Cathedral, there would be a bit more needed to accept it:
· Economy may have to accept that it cannot create material values, but requires them
· Religion may have to accept that Creation is an eternal and ubiquitous process
· Science may have to accept that decay is not the primary state of the universe
Fat chance…
all three are vanities.
On the other hand… the acceptance is not really self-deprecating:
· The reason humans cannot create physical, material value is that they already are one themselves. They already are the result of an ongoing creative process, of which they are part.
· The fact that Creation is not over, meaning that the creative process did not begin and end with the construction of this one particular planet, its surroundings and its inhabitants, or even the current universe as the end result, makes it all the greater a process to be the momentary and local result of, and changes nothing in particular to human life.
· The universe is not degrading: Accepting that decay is necessarily a secondary state to creation, and equally (or most probably) Creation - the construction of such order that results in what we may call the cosmos - retains the upper hand (or at least did so as the momentary result of the last dozen billion of years), and therefore prevails, does not refute the laws of the universe as discerned by science - and won't.
These three aspects form a trinity of that which separates humans from animals: religion, science, and (value-based) economy.
They also form a trinity in the way they are interconnected: Humans cannot create physical values, as they themselves are the result of an ongoing creative process, which is being performed by a self-grading universe, bringing forth, among everything else, humans; these do not have to brace themselves against overall decay in their surroundings, as the opposite is taking place, namely creation, of which they are part, a value in themselves… and so on. And talking of trinities: the world, the cosmos, the universe - they all describe the same thing, though not in the same way.
We, as humans, as all animals and machines, even plants, belong to the destructive side of nature - not the constructive. We are creatures, not creators.
And trying to make a win out of it by purposefully "deconstructing" only makes it worse:
It proves this to be so, by being possible and successful.
But to what avail?
And one last thought:
One of the reasons why gravity, of all forces, is rather unique is that it is monopolar; it has no repellent opposite pole, such as is found in the bipolar realms of electricity and magnetism.
Could it be that this is what leads to the unfettered, self-enhancing, directional and asymmetric result of its effect upon matter (more precisely, that of all matter upon all matter), leading to the non- symmetric, time-bound, one- directional, ever evolving, ever more orderly cosmos as perceived today.
So, originating entirely from within the cosmos, gravitation creates, again, entirely therein, its own antagonist - thermodynamics - which promptly increases entropy again, after gravity has decreased it; but perhaps only up to a point, which gravity 'allows' - it being the stronger, primary force.
But this is pure speculation.
To summarize:
What we, in religion, refer to as the Creation of God, is physically achieved by what we refer to as
"gravity" - or is it the other way round?
Never mind:
Even if we may never fully understand either, limited as we are to the physical possibilities of our brains and minds: Whether one is an expression of the other, or simply a means to an end, or the whole idea is just a projection, just an image in the mind of the beholder, is more or less without relevance; as we may never be able to fully grasp the universe, its creation and its trajectory, as a whole, for the simple fact that it is theoretically impossible to transcend a true limitation.
Creatures that are born blind by nature cannot truly perceive color.
But seen in this way, a prayer would, among other things, be a request for spiritual or mental access to the (gravitationally generated) order of this world, in whose thermodynamic decay range we naturally find ourselves as living beings.
Well then:
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