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Kinexity t1_iv3agtf wrote

"computronium" is bullshit. What we are spreading everywhere is order. If you think about it before life emerged everything was just growing in entropy. Life keeps the local entropy low. Intially it was singular cells, later evolved into multicell organism, animals and finally humans. Compared to other species humans not only are ordered as organisms but started spreading order everywhere in form of buildings and products of our civilizations. We gotten increasingly good at that up to a point where we can arrange a limited number of atoms the way we want. The problem is that we cannot just change anything into a useful computer. One could say that a rock is a computer which computes itself but it doesn't mean it can do anything useful. It can only compute itself as there is no order to start off of. We will increase number of computers even more and start infusing them in wierder and weirder places but computronium belongs on the shelf with other sci-fi concepts which cannot exist in reality.

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KidKilobyte t1_iv3mfb4 wrote

I actually heard an in person lecture by Freeman Dyson on this very issue and the only reason we build up order on earth is because there is an outflow of energy from the Sun that goes through the Earth and then is re-radiated the space. With out an incoming source of energy that flows to a lower lower place of order there is no building of order. Our gains in order are because the Earth is not a closed system entropy wise. Our order here is offset by disordered elsewhere. Eventually the suns will burn out and disorder will only increase — the heat death of the Universe.

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Kinexity t1_iv3ytgf wrote

That is true that we need the energy from the sun for that order to appear. Idk if it's called like this in English but I know it as "energy stream" (after translation) from thermodynamics lecture I attended. We are limited by the amount of energy there is but from our perspective the energy is "endless" so it doesn't make sense to bother yourself with heat death of the Universe.

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