1) What if you could use the Cosmological Degradation as your entropy sink? What if you could tweak the asteroid sufficiently cleverly to make this work. The law about “entropy always increasing” would not be broken.
2) What if the structure of your setup was your gradient? What if the asteroid and its gravity well, the shell, the atmosphere and the energy conversion equipment would degrade in an edgecase like this in a way that could never be repaired from the energy converted. The law about “entropy always increasing” would not be broken.
Do you see anyting absolutely forbidding those two possibilities? And for 2, I would be interested in your intuition both for the asteroid setup, and in general.
Hey, sorry, I thought I’d responded to this one and apparently hadn’t.
I think my black hole discussion is essentially my answer to (1). I don’t think I could think of a way to make it work with an asteroid or similar setup. I am not entirely sure your discussion of cosmological degradation is well-defined enough to answer more precisely than that.
For (2), my other comments about you can of course do work to create a gradient you then consume, and get some of the work back. But as written, no, that doesn’t mean the setup as described can work.
Ah! I’m glad I asked. So I had two guesses.
1) What if you could use the Cosmological Degradation as your entropy sink? What if you could tweak the asteroid sufficiently cleverly to make this work. The law about “entropy always increasing” would not be broken.
2) What if the structure of your setup was your gradient? What if the asteroid and its gravity well, the shell, the atmosphere and the energy conversion equipment would degrade in an edgecase like this in a way that could never be repaired from the energy converted. The law about “entropy always increasing” would not be broken.
Do you see anyting absolutely forbidding those two possibilities? And for 2, I would be interested in your intuition both for the asteroid setup, and in general.
Hey, sorry, I thought I’d responded to this one and apparently hadn’t.
I think my black hole discussion is essentially my answer to (1). I don’t think I could think of a way to make it work with an asteroid or similar setup. I am not entirely sure your discussion of cosmological degradation is well-defined enough to answer more precisely than that.
For (2), my other comments about you can of course do work to create a gradient you then consume, and get some of the work back. But as written, no, that doesn’t mean the setup as described can work.