00311 Entropy and Affinity

Left to themselves, things go from bad to worse. — A corollary to Murphy’s Law.

If someone remade the Star Trek franchise using permaculture principles, there would probably be an episode — “The trouble with entropies and affinities.”

Gravity is an attractive force that holds everything together and in place. It is a force of affinity (the drawing together).

Entropy is the opposite “dispersive force” that funnels energy and resources into sinks where it disperses and becomes useless to us. Entropy is “scattering apart.”

When you pour hot water down the drain, the heat and the energy of the flowing water disperse and dissipate and can be of no further use to the household.

When the wind blows, its disperses and dissipates its energy.

When the rain falls on a roof, and runs off onto the ground and down into the storm sewer, the householders who built the roof lose the potential energy and value of the rainwater.

In other words — everything falls apart. Often apparently spontaneously. Get used to it. And you might as well take advantage of the process since it can’t be stopped.

But everything somehow comes together.

The sun slowly deconstructs itself as it sends energy radiating out into the universe, demonstrating entropy on a large scale,

Some of that energy comes together on planet Earth and makes life possible thus demonstrating the affinity of solar energy and biological life.

The solar energy falling upon open waters causes evaporation. The water rises into the atmosphere and disperses — entropy at work. Affinity draws part of the vapor back together around bits of dust or pollen and the water falls back to earth as rain, causing the process to begin again. Each aspect of the hydrological cycle is entropy and affinity at work, fueled by a much larger process centered on the Sun and the affinity of solar energy with biological life.

Entropy and Affinity are not physical entities. You can’t see them, feel them, smell them, or touch them.

But we can certainly observe their effects and actions. We can take advantage of the energies that dissipate and disperse by imposing patterns we create into the entropy flows in order to use affinity to harvest energy and use or store it.

Energy always follows the pattern. So we build windmills, which have an affinity for wind, and put them where entropy sends particularly strong winds on regular intervals. Maybe we charge some batteries with the electricity, since electricity has an affinity with batteries, or use the electricity to manufacture something.

We build dams to hold water at higher elevations so we can take advantage of the energy of it falling to a lower level. We use rainwater run-off to grow vegetables and thus store some solar energy that way. Rainwater, like solar energy, has an affinity with biological life.

We can make big mistakes with entropy.

Our dams may break and the sudden release of the energy of the stored water can be enormously destructive. We build social and political hierarchies that concentrate large amounts of energy and wealth at ever-higher levels, so much so that the rest of the system becomes dysfunctional due to lack of energy and resources. Then you get something like the French or Russian revolutions, and a lot of people get killed and wealth is both destroyed and dissipated.

So you have to be careful with any affinity pattern you place in a flow of entropy.

Consider the difference between peacefully watering your garden with rainwater and the impact of a raging flood crashing onto your garden caused by a break in the dam pattern inserted into a river upstream of your house. When subjected to stress/energy it wasn’t designed to withstand, the dam failed. This flood destroyed your house, garden, and maybe your life and the lives of other people.

Since everything falls apart, and this is going to happen, always and everywhere, often seemingly spontaneously, you might as well plan for that and use affinity patterns in your life to use/direct/store the energy being dissipated by entropy into as much useful work as you can get so that it hangs around for a while and helps you get stuff done and/or store some of the energy by using patterns to convert it to form.

For example, capture the energy of rain with a rainwater harvesting system (which is a “pattern”), and use it to grow vegetables. Or purify it and drink it. Etc.

While this wonderful design work happens, be careful that the patterns you create to use/store the energy are strong enough to resist the expected flows plus potential surges.

In other words, don’t ever attempt to urinate into the wind.

As we learn permaculture design, we carefully observe “what falls apart around us.” Where are the energies/resources flowing? Into what sinks do these energies and resources disappear, never to be seen again?

Hot water down the drain is a literal example of an energy/resource sink.

So is a landfill.

A sink is a place or situation where energies and resources go to dissipate/disappear/disaggregate so they are no longer useful to us.

How strong are the flows to these sinks? What is the quantity over a given time?

If your rainwater harvest system, which waters your garden, holds 5,000 gallons, and the tanks are full, what happens if a sudden heavy cloudburst creates more rain than your system of gutters and trunk pipes that feed your tanks can handle? Where does that water/energy go? Will it go there destructively, or productively?

Energy comes at you from all directions and generally we just let it dissipate wherever “it” wills. We don’t even notice the sinks where energy disappear.

In the winter, free sun hits our south-facing windows. We may not even bother opening the curtains so the sun doesn't shine in and we get no free passive solar heat to make our homes comfortable. Much of our modern construction has been completed without even a single thought about using the sun to heat and cool the building. We just hook ourselves up to a fossil-fueled energy system and spend a lot of money to achieve what good design and the sun can give us for free.

In modern capitalistic terminology — the universe throws money at us all the time and we don't even stop to pick up the hundred dollar bills that rain down around us before the wind blows them or they decay in the leaf clutter. We don’t even notice the piles where they slowly decompose. Thus, we harvest none of them and gain no yield or advantage or work from the situation.

We are able to do this, unlike previous generations who had to pay attention to such things, because of the cheap and easy and seemingly abundant availability of fossil fuels. It doesn’t matter if you pour hot water down the drain in the winter, thereby wasting the BTUs that you spent money to put into the water (either by cooking or by heating a hot water tank), because we all think — even me, Mr. Wannabee Energy Conservation Man — on a subconscious level that there are plenty more BTUs out there that I can get just by flipping a switch so I don’t have to seriously conserve.

Alas for that idea . . . the days of abundant and cheap and reliable fossil fuels are history. Our Ascent Years are past, now come the Decline Years, and the Ascent strategies which seemingly served us so well will be positively toxic to us as individuals and as a species in the future.

Winter is coming . . .

If you always do what you always do, you will always get what you always get.

If we continue to ignore entropy and pretend that we can somehow fool Mother Nature with our fossil fuel addiction, we will get what we always get, which is entropy-driven waste and destruction. Only there won’t be abundant fossil fuels to pull our chestnuts out of the fire, and so it could come to pass that “the center cannot hold.”

We need to do something different to yield a different result. In other words, “do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”

"What you have" includes all the energy that flows into your life.

Do what you can" with it.

"Where you are" — always remember where you are, in place and time.

We'll never get all of it, the laws of thermodynamics will always intervene, especially the 2nd — "You can't break even.” Every time energy changes there is a net loss.