Abstract
The Anthropocene crisis is frequently described as the rarefaction of resources or resources per capita. However, both energy and minerals correspond to fundamentally conserved quantities from the perspective of physics. A specific concept is required to understand the rarefaction of available resources. This concept, entropy, pertains to energy and matter configurations and not just to their sheer amount. However, the physics concept of entropy is insufficient to understand biological and social organizations. Biological phenomena display both historicity and systemic properties. A biological organization, the ability of a specific living being to last over time, results from history, expresses itself by systemic properties, and may require generating novelties The concept of anti-entropy stems from the combination of these features. We propose that Anthropocene changes disrupt biological organizations by randomizing them, that is, decreasing anti-entropy. Moreover, second-order disruptions correspond to the decline of the ability to produce functional novelties, that is, to produce anti-entropy.
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Notes
This efficiency is defined as the work produced divided by the heat taken from the warm source.
The concept of a time arrow is somewhat abstract. Intuitively, there is a time arrow if we can tell whether a movie is played forward or backward by fundamental principles (Gayon and Montévil 2017).
We put radioactive elements aside, because radioactivity leads to the fission of atoms, thus their destruction.
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This work has received funding from the MSCA-RISE programme under Grant agreement No. 777707 and the Cogito Foundation, Grant 19-111-R. We thank Giuseppe Longo, Jean-Claude Englebert, Alejandro Merlo Ote, and the IRI Team for comments on previous versions of this manuscript.
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Montévil, M. Entropies and the Anthropocene crisis. AI & Soc 38, 2451–2471 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-021-01221-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-021-01221-0