The Thermodynamics of Life as a Speculative Model for Planetary Technology
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Originating from nineteenth century physics, the concept of entropy—a measure of disorder, randomness, and/or the dissipation of useful energy—underlay a cosmology where order and complexity were seen as highly improbable phenomena in a universe tending toward chaos and disorganisation. Nearly a century later, theoretical frameworks were developed for understanding the production of entropy as an enabling feature of self-organized complexity in the natural world. These ideas would contribute to establishing connections between the origins, development, and evolution of life and the principles of a thermodynamic universe. For some, they also supplied the conceptual foundations for theorizing about a universal natural tendency driving the development of increasingly complex and ordered systems which amplify processes of entropy production and energy dissipation and dispersal. In this paper I chart a path through the aforementioned ideas and present their relevance in framing a relationship between our technological civilization and the Earth system. I then speculate about the prospect of a technosphere whose constitution and activity are aligned with thermodynamic principles of dissipation and entropy-production, drawing on theoretical biology and recent developments in bioengineering to envision a paradigm where technology becomes living matter itself.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".