I suppose the main one is that I’m having trouble figuring out how an autistic (like me; in my case, Asperger’s Syndrome) is supposed to thrive. Constant contact with something on the order of a 80+-member band is not going to be pleasant; all those oscilloscoping demands on one whose inborn desire is for ritual and constancy…trouble draws nigh.

Well, in the first case, I have a suspicion that in a tribal society, incidence of autism, Asperger’s, etc. may drop precipitously, considering the impact of primitive life on so many other conditions like those.

In the second case, I’d note that your condition gives you a unique view of the world. Animist societies greatly honor divergent viewpoints, because the very essence of power lies in a multitude of perspectives. That might ear-mark you as a perfect candidate to become a shaman. If I read you correctly, your desire for ritual and constancy seems to highlight that possibility all the more. As David Abram discusses in Spell of the Sensuous, shamans lived on the periphery of their communities because they served as ambassadors between the human community, and the other-than-human communities that surrounded them. Interestingly, I have seen (but not read) Temple Grandin’s book, Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior. In it, Grandin, herself both autistic and a noted animal behavior researcher, makes the case that autistic people have a unique perspective, more in line with other-than-human animals, and thus have an increased capacity for rapport with them. That, and your message, makes me wonder how much of shamanism developed precisely as a tribal response to autistic individuals, to meet their needs, honor their perspectives, and enrich their societies with their unique point of view.

Indeed, my mother once mentioned that if not for written language, I might never have learned to speak. That doesn’t speak well for my survival potential pre-literacy…)

That might have played out in a literate world, but I highly doubt that that would have held true in a pre-literate, or a post-literate, context.

A static city or town, at least, gives a chance for long stretches of solitude and near-solitude.

A city or town provides an opportunity for solitude? I’ve never heard anyone make that claim before. In the Western imagination, we often think of the “wilderness” as the place to go to find solitude, and the city or town as the very opposite, where we can never find solitude.

More worrisome, though, is that if we remain bound to tribal existence, I’m not sure we’ll be in much of a position to…well…save the cosmos from the omnihatred that is called Entropy.

I could argue here against your characterization of entropy. After all, I could just as easily characterize entropy as winding down towards a state of rest, as I could as an “omnihatred” that defies all sense of justice.

I could argue that we don’t know whether the universe will head towards entropy, or whether the universe will one day begin collapsing in on itself to the “Big Crunch,” perhaps to precede a new “Big Bang,” in an endless cosmic cycle.

I could point out, as Jim already did, that what we do has no impact on entropy whatsoever; we exist as physical beings, inside physical laws, and we cannot alter those laws, civilization or no.

I could point to the concept of Sankofa, and that if we do want to create a civilization advanced enough for the undertaking you propose, we will first need to create a civilization that does not utterly destroy itself, and that will require us to return to the fundamentals of sustainable life, and begin building anew from that foundation.

But instead, I think it would help us more to address the metaphor that underlies your concern here, rather than any of these arguments that only tangentially relate to the specifics of the story you’ve mentioned. Because at its core, your concern over entropy simply echoes in astrophysical terms the ancient fear of death. By “entropy,” you simply mean the notion that the universe will die.

One day, you will die. I will die. Everyone who reads this, one day, will die. Does that defy all possibility of justice? Does that rob our lives of meaning? Do you contend that anything that ends cannot have meaning?

On the contrary, I would not stand alone on the argument that only things that end have meaning. If the universe truly did span on forever, I think that would defy all justice and rob existence of all meaning, just as immortality for a single individual would rob each day of any significance.

And at least give civilization credit for at least *trying* to stop Entropy’s malice

Why should we give civilization credit for something it has never done? Leaving aside the considerable question of whether entropy has malice at all, what has civilization ever done to stop it? Entropy continues, and nothing civilization does or does not do could ever change that.

All things, rendered utterly for naught. What crime could the cosmos have committed to deserve total effacement? But if we don’t/can’t save the cosmos from such atrocity, then who/what is supposed to?

I’d turn your question on its ear. All things, rendered utterly for naught. What did the universe do to deserve such a gift? Thanks to that, and only thanks to that, our lives matter. We have only our time, before it all settles into eternal rest. Today, we live in the dynamic age; in the future, the universe will lock into its final, crystalline perfection. But we, children of dynamic energy, living in the age of dynamic energy, live in a universe of change and relationship. Our actions would have no meaning, except that one day, this dynamic age will end. And because of that, we have an impact, we have meaning. Fortunately, we can’t curse ourselves with immortality, and no one else can, either.

…and nothing deserves that sort of pain.

Entropy is occurring inside your body right now. Do you experience it as pain? Do you experience sleep as pain? Rest? I cannot see equating entropy with pain, even if you do want to cast it as negatively as you seem to, the worst metaphor you could really apply would sound more like falling asleep forever.

I don’t see why the Second Law is utterly unbreachable; what’s getting in the way?

Well, that it forms a physical law, meaning that nothing can breach it.

(Come to think of it, how do matter and energy even know which way lies disorder? It sounds more like a matter of probability than certainty, at least on the surface…)

Remember that “order” and “disorder” have more to do with our perspective than their innate characteristics, but for the most part, it takes energy to maintain order, to keep the constituent elements from all doing their own thing. I don’t fancy myself a physicist, but I’d guess that you have your basic outline right there: over time, everything tends towards those things that require less energy.

In other words, why should the cosmos suffer annihilation? What monstrous thing would transpire if it didn’t? And what gives us the right to ignore this injustice?

What monstrous thing would transpire if the universe went on forever? Well, what monstrous thing would happen to you if you lived forever? We have no end of literary treatments of that question, though we have, of late, seen a new crop of scientific speculation motivated by a pathological fear of our own mortality, with people like Ray Kurzweil or Aubrey de Grey. I, frankly, find the coverage they receive deeply disturbing, and their goals, let alone their theories, utterly insane.

What gives us the right to ignore this injustice? Well, besides the open question of whether we should consider it an injustice at all, or whether we should cherish it as a gift, I think we can only ask that question at all by starting from a foundation of extreme arrogance. It presumes that we can do something about it and that we ought to do something about it. I see absolutely no evidence for either assertion. Humans dwell in the universe; we do not have mastery over it. Questions of entropy exist far beyond anything any physical entity will ever have in their own power.

I can understand your misgivings about civilization, but are the gatherer method and extinction the only other options possible?

Extinction will always stand at the end of humanity’s existence, just like any other species. All things die; individual organisms, species, stars, galaxies, even universes. Without death, life becomes a mockery of justice and meaning. When life stretches on forever, it loses its value and becomes meaningless. Civilization or not, extinction will always remain at the end of our species’ history. The only question we have to answer asks whether we will go extinct now, in our youth, as a kind of species-wide suicide because we could not let go of our inherently unsustainable civilization and instead perished with it, or whether we will prove the value of our vaunted intelligence at long last; as Karl Popper put it, “The survival value of intelligence is that it allows us to extinct a bad idea, before the idea extincts us.”

The question is whether the impending heat death even qualifies as just.

There is no such thing as Justice or Fairness. I’m not saying that “Life isn’t fair”, I’m saying that the concepts of Justice and Fairness are meaningless.

That being said, death is a part of life, for a universe as for a person as for a rock as for a mayfly. Death makes way for what comes next whether we know what that is or not.

I don’t see why the Second Law is utterly unbreachable; what’s getting in the way? Where is entropy getting all its power from?

Entropy is not disorder. Entropy leads to the ultimate order a universe with the same energy everywhere. First, let’s realize what the Second Law of Thermodynamics IS:

“In simple terms, the second law is an expression of the fact that over time, ignoring the effects of self-gravity, differences in temperature, pressure, and density tend to even out in a physical system that is isolated from the outside world.”

Laws of physics are expression of how things have been observed to work. A Law of Physics does not say “Temperature must seek equilibrium” It says “Temperature seeks equilibrium”. There is no imperative, it is the way things have been observed. That doesn’t mean there is a loophole. The second law basically says that if you have an energy rich area of a system then it will disperse its energy throughout the system until the entire system has the same energy. Why is that irreversible? Because cold is not the opposite of heat(energy) it is the lack of heat. Entropy is the measure of that process. The dissipation of heat and light from the Sun is an entropic process but it is also what allows life on earth. It also allows for cold lemonade on a hot day.

(Come to think of it, how do matter and energy even know which way lies disorder? It sounds more like a matter of probability than certainty, at least on the surface…)

They don’t. In a sense they are like a liquid or a gas spreading out to fill as much space as possible. If you spill a glass of water, it doesn’t know where your important papers are, it just spreads out to cover your desk, but in doing so the puddle gets thinner and thinner.

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JimFive

In other words, why should the cosmos suffer annihilation? What monstrous thing would transpire if it didn’t? And what gives us the right to ignore this injustice?

I can understand your misgivings about civilization, but are the gatherer method and extinction the only other options possible? Are we sure a fourth option does not and cannot exist? Neither gathering nor civilization seems to have succeeded at annihilating sorrow and ruin, and extinction defeats the purpose (indeed, extinction would be the ultimate entropy for humanity and other life)…

The only thing that we could do at this far removed time that would affect our ability to fight off the heat death of the universe is to make ourselves extinct and the planet uninhabitable. When you are talking about trillions of years you have moved into that geologic time scale that makes civilization once again possible, or even likely. Maybe they’ll get it right next time, if that is possible. “Modern Humans” won’t be around several trillion years from now. At best, “Modern Humans” will be the long forgotten missing link to whatever then passes for intelligent life on earth.

Civilization doesn’t attempt to stop entropy’s effect on the universe. It tries to remove entropy from our local area, which must move it somewhere else, thereby (theoretically) hastening the ultimate demise of the universe.

Finally, what sort of cosmic giant gods do you think the human race is that we can and should alter the trajectory of the entire universe?
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JimFive

I suppose the main one is that I’m having trouble figuring out how an autistic (like me; in my case, Asperger’s Syndrome) is supposed to thrive. Constant contact with something on the order of a 80+-member band is not going to be pleasant; all those oscilloscoping demands on one whose inborn desire is for ritual and constancy…trouble draws nigh. (Indeed, my mother once mentioned that if not for written language, I might never have learned to speak. That doesn’t speak well for my survival potential pre-literacy…) A static city or town, at least, gives a chance for long stretches of solitude and near-solitude. I know we’re not inferior to normatives, despite the claim of disability—the immunity to peer pressure has to count for something…

More worrisome, though, is that if we remain bound to tribal existence, I’m not sure we’ll be in much of a position to…well…save the cosmos from the omnihatred that is called Entropy. (I’m not sure what else to call a thing that relentlessly shatters, degrades, dissolves, disrupts, collapses, and ultimately annihilates everything it touches…And at least give civilization credit for at least *trying* to stop Entropy’s malice). I cannot bear the thought that in several trillion or quadrillion years, naught will be left of the cosmos but an empty void, obliterated by Entropy’s touch. All things, rendered utterly for naught. What crime could the cosmos have committed to deserve total effacement? But if we don’t/can’t save the cosmos from such atrocity, then who/what is supposed to? (Being bound to stone/glass artificing doesn’t sound like much of a stance to shatter Entropy from…)

{rueful chuckle} I can understand that this sounds grandiose, but I really am fearful that concerning ourselves with just our kin/friends/etc., or even just the Earth or the solar system, is a kind of sloth. If you assumed a stance of total neutrality, then how could you say that one planet is more deserving of attention than the entire cosmos? I fear to be guilty of any kind of pettiness…

It seems more likely to me that the guy just wants to avoid scaring the holy crap out of people, so he’s doing some sugar-coating.

Peter Salonius is a soils microbiologist with the Canadian Forest service. He very much concurs with the idea that agriculture is unsustainable.

Interestingly enough, judging from this and another piece of his I read some months ago, I think what he’s promoting is essentially rewilding minus the assumption that collapse is inevitable. He envisions shrinking the human population over centuries. Not sure how he envisions averting collapse in the meantime.

[Editor’s Note: Fixed link.]