Your point here isn’t clear. Orgainsms stockpile, but they also eat their stockpiles. Escosystems ultimately leave nothing behind, to the best of their ability. Life produces maximal devastation.
At any given time, much of the grasslands and fertile ocean are not engaged in photosynthesis because herbivores have cropped the primary producers, reducing short-term entropy production. You can swallow that problem with a catch-all “best of their ability clause,” but now “ability” needs to talk about the ability of herbivores to compete in a sea of ill-defended plants, selfish genes, and so forth.
The move to biological and social systems is an attempt at empirical generalization with some success, since untapped free energy has the potential to power living creatures’ reproduction, and mutants that tap such sources proliferate. Humans can use free energy to power machinery as well as their own bodies, so they tap available resources. Great, you have a correlate for the proliferation of life.
But this isn’t enough to power accurate predictions about the portion of Earth’s surface performing photosynthesis, or whether humanity (or successors) will use up the available resources in the Solar System as quickly as possible, or as quickly as will maximize interstellar colonization and energy use, or much more slowly to increase the total computation that can be performed, or slowly so as to sustain a smaller population with longer lifespans.
Your point here isn’t clear. Orgainsms stockpile, but they also eat their stockpiles. Escosystems ultimately leave nothing behind, to the best of their ability. Life produces maximal devastation.
At any given time, much of the grasslands and fertile ocean are not engaged in photosynthesis because herbivores have cropped the primary producers, reducing short-term entropy production. You can swallow that problem with a catch-all “best of their ability clause,” but now “ability” needs to talk about the ability of herbivores to compete in a sea of ill-defended plants, selfish genes, and so forth.
Herbivores cause massive devastation and destruction to plant life. The extend life’s reach underground—where plants cannot live. They led to oil drilling, international flights, global warming and nuclear power. If you want to defend the thesis that the planet would be a better dissipator without them, you have quite a challenge on your hands, it seems to me.
But this isn’t enough to power accurate predictions about the portion of Earth’s surface performing photosynthesis, or whether humanity (or successors) will use up the available resources in the Solar System as quickly as possible, or as quickly as will maximize interstellar colonization and energy use, or much more slowly to increase the total computation that can be performed, or slowly so as to sustain a smaller population with longer lifespans.
MEP is a statistical principle. It illuminates these issues, but doesn’t make them trivial. Compare with natural selection—which also illuminates these areas without trivializing them.
At any given time, much of the grasslands and fertile ocean are not engaged in photosynthesis because herbivores have cropped the primary producers, reducing short-term entropy production. You can swallow that problem with a catch-all “best of their ability clause,” but now “ability” needs to talk about the ability of herbivores to compete in a sea of ill-defended plants, selfish genes, and so forth.
The move to biological and social systems is an attempt at empirical generalization with some success, since untapped free energy has the potential to power living creatures’ reproduction, and mutants that tap such sources proliferate. Humans can use free energy to power machinery as well as their own bodies, so they tap available resources. Great, you have a correlate for the proliferation of life.
But this isn’t enough to power accurate predictions about the portion of Earth’s surface performing photosynthesis, or whether humanity (or successors) will use up the available resources in the Solar System as quickly as possible, or as quickly as will maximize interstellar colonization and energy use, or much more slowly to increase the total computation that can be performed, or slowly so as to sustain a smaller population with longer lifespans.
Herbivores cause massive devastation and destruction to plant life. The extend life’s reach underground—where plants cannot live. They led to oil drilling, international flights, global warming and nuclear power. If you want to defend the thesis that the planet would be a better dissipator without them, you have quite a challenge on your hands, it seems to me.
MEP is a statistical principle. It illuminates these issues, but doesn’t make them trivial. Compare with natural selection—which also illuminates these areas without trivializing them.