War as Entropy : its permanent costs

Pure - useless - ENTROPY

"Think about Germany and Japan : smashed to pieces in the last war, but look at them now." "So, no real - permanent - harm in a little war now and then is there ?" " Boys must be boys, etc."
(Sample conversations of conventional economists ...in their cups.)

In my last SVE post "Artillery Shells : Entropy for Economists" , I tried to put a difficult term from physical science into the everyday language of voters and consumers, into language that even conventional economists should be able to understand.

I focussed on the purest and quickest form of entropy most of us will ever personally experience , when we learn that the very expensive, very well made 105 mm artillery shell our taxes just paid for, has been blown to the tiniest of bits.

In that post, I neglected the entropy inherent in the fates of the three victims of our 105 mm shell : the soldier, the civilian car and the civilian building , as all three were also blown to pieces.

They are blown into much bigger pieces, physically , than the shell and the explosives that propelled it and blew it up, so does the concept of entropy really apply to them ?

Let me argue why it does.

It costs a lot of money to feed, clothe, shelter and above all educate a 20 year old man : his parents and society pay it hopeful his 45 years of labour as an adult will pay it back --- in particular taxes on his employment will help pay the health costs of his parents when they are old.

Blown into four or five big chunks by the shell, he is not really recyclable : at best he is about 15 cents worth of plant fertilizer when he is buried.

All that money in raising him, all that future return via his employment income ----- gone, gone, gone, in an instant.

Ignore scientists' bafflegab : entropy is war, end of story

The car, used daily as a taxi, also is blown into a few big pieces, but is "recyclable" --- albeit as scrap steel. $15,000 car to $100 in scrap metal --- in an instant.

The building, home to a dentist's clinic is worth say $100,000, independent of the land it sits on, which we will claim ins undiminished in value, despite being used as a battlefield.

Badly damaged, it will cost another $5,000 just to tear it down, before we can even think of rebuilding on the same site. The value of the carted away rubble, minus cost of cartage and disposal/sale is a negative $1000 dollars.

Surprisingly perhaps, much of the heavily built and very valuable dentistry equipment inside the building is virtually undamaged and can be easily returned to a useful long life ----- but only if it is got to, before the elements rust it to bits. And that is iffy : depending on the state of the war raging around it - and the weather.

I call these real life examples, taken from WWII,  pure entropy (useful to useless) , won't you ?

Artillery Shells : Entropy for Economists

ENTROPY MK I

Politically and economically, entropy simply means that today's concentrated, useful, work-able, matter and energy invariably  becomes tomorrow's "useless-to-humans because too-finely dispersed" matter and energy. All we can hope to do, is slow the process as best we can.


(Note that microbes like bacteria can often make useful, work-able materials out of atoms and molecules too finely dispersed for humans to make economic use of them : in fact long dead bacteria  created many of the highly concentrated ore bodies we humans use to create our industrial world.)

Politically and economically, concentrated matter and energy is useful and dispersed matter and energy is not : despite the fact that neither total mass or energy has changed one iota in the process.

It takes much energy and matter to assemble an ordinary 105 mm High Explosive artillery shell, the kind that are fired off in the millions and millions in every war for the last century.

A chunk of high grade of steel is carefully bored to the microscopically exact dimensions before an artful blend of chemical explosives is poured into it. This is then attached to a carefully made brass cartridge also filled with a different blend of explosive chemicals.

Warfare is entropy at its purest....

Each shell and cartridge is made by highly skilled machinists with a careful inspection process weeding out any one a little imperfect.

Even with a hundred years of world wide experience in making these shells, and their mass production economy of scales, each shell costs at least a thousand dollars, when all the disguised development costs are factored in.

Now it is fired, hitting a human soldier , a civilian and a civilian building and destroying all three in the process of blowing itself to pieces.

(The brass cartridge is recyclable, by the army that fired it or by the other side, depending on how the course of the war goes.)

How does conventional economics (versus physical economics) explain the economics of this process int terms of equilibrium theory ?

Taxes, some of them from the people in the armament plant and the men firing the gun, will pay to make the shell  and pay the pensions of the soon-to-be veterans who fired it.

Since the shell was blown into tiny pieces, along with its explosive solids which were turned into heat and kinetic energy and lots of very rapidly expanding gases, none of this will ever be recycled, in fact can't be recycled.

For hundreds of metres around the shell blast, the earth will hold tiny rusting pieces of metal hardly visible to the eye.

Soon they will rust back into the soil around them.

 The winds will carry the rapidly expanding explosives' gases into the air for miles around.

On the other side, the side actually hit by the shell's force, economic activities will also be generated.

(Just listen and read how Wall Street sees an economic upside to Hurricane Sandy's death and destruction.)

 A pension will go to the soldier's family, government assistance will help pay carpenters to rebuild the building - the loss of the car will probably never be recovered by its owner from the government or the enemy, but another car will be built to replace it, employing people at a car plant.

The GDP on both sides sees an "upside" from the explosion of that 105 mm shell.

But physical economists say a shell is not like a tractor : the tractor consumes resources in being built but then helps harvest resources and at the end of its life is melted down and recycled in new metal products.

But a fired shell, like a ship filled with warplanes sunk by a sub in deep waters, is pure entropy : concentrated useful matter and energy is blown (dispersed) to the winds and the waters and is totally useless to mankind from then on.

 Rather like the valuable metals, from scarce concentrated ore bodies, that we build into thin food container foils and then wastefully disperse into huge landfills : the exact civilian equivalent of blowing up metal shells to the high winds....

Thermodynamics laws for laypeople (the Entropy of War)

First Law : Fool's GOLD !

I am frequently called upon to explain the two main laws of thermodynamics that are my two lead characters in SVE and I generally try to explain them in a pared down sort of way.

 I begin by saying that the First law deals exclusively with the quantity of mass and energy in the universe : that quantity can never get bigger or smaller --- it can merely change its state ( ie character).

By contrast, the Second law deals exclusively in quality not quantity : it says that the quality (ie the character) of mass and energy becomes steadily less useful (to K-selected creatures like humans) as parts of it become more and more widely dispersed.

"Useful" for giant K-selected beings like humanity, is really code for "concentrated" : being giant in size and hunger and few in number, one molecule of sucrose every few miles along a trail won't keep us alive.

(Thus the concept of "lack of physical concentration as an biological limiting factor" is anathema to classical economists ,who have bathed exclusively in the Kool-aid of the First Law of Thermodynamics.)

Tell us, about ALL the gold in seawater...

Glad you asked, because 'Gold molecules in seawater 'is the classic 'dividing' example.

 People of the First law always proudly *deny* that we can be running out of gold - 'gosh, the amount in the oceans alone will last us folks for, oh say, billions of years at least.'

True, predictably sigh the folks of the Second law sardonically : only too true - if we but had the trillions of trillions in dollars needed to recover those molecules of gold scattered ocean wide!

But bacteria, being widely dispersed themselves (and thus being the ultimate in r-selected lifeforms) can profitably recover those widely dispersed gold molecules : they may only need a few dozen atoms of gold to make enough copies of a vital enzyme to survive and reproduce.

We humans demonstrate the superiority of the fundamental second law to the  derived first law every time we go to war.

The embodied energy in the artillery shell and gunpowder used to propel it along and blow it up, along with the embodied energy in the building it destroys , will never cease to exist as a quantity.

But as a quality, we can never usefully use them ever again : the energy has gone off to heat up the air and ultimately the Universe.

And the tiny fragments of shell body? They are now widely scattered and rusting in the soil. The building fragments have been used as rubble to fill holes in the ground.

That ,my friends, is a very uniquely human form of entropy : a wide - and useless - dispersing of once-usefully concentrated energy and matter.....

South Mountain BATHOLITH debated by skygods and earthlings

hunka,hunka burnin' lava

One reason why Nova Scotia has such an unique lobster like shape is that its backbone is one immense chunk of highly-erosion-resistant granite, by far the largest chunk on the entire east coast of North America : the famous South Mountain batholith.

A batholith is an giant upwelling of granite-like magma, from deep down below melting its way through the surface rocks.

The South Mountain batholith, which is hundreds of kilometres long is indeed big, but not the biggest in the world - ones on the west coast of North America can be thousands of kilometres long.

Batholiths and thermodynamic laws

Basically batholiths are one enormous rock that erodes about as slow as anything does on earth ; this one in Nova Scotia is about 350 million years old and hardly changed since its birth.

Skygods are People of the First Law (of thermodynamics) and in their understanding of the South Mountain, its surface impression of solidity is in fact just that, an impression.

In fact, they are argue, its solidity is all an illusion. Matter and energy can't be created or destroyed only changed from one form to another ----- and change is easy, even for granite.

Granite can be easily reduced to its constitute atoms and then reduced no further : atoms are the simple, small, easily controllable, harmless "solid" fundamentals of reality : mix and match them and turn granite's atoms into the atoms of silicon oven gloves or concrete or whatever.

Earthlings , as People of the Second Law (of thermodynamics)see the South Mountain totally differently.

They think that its granite is surpassingly solid - one of the most solid objects in the Universe in fact.

But once they divide it into its atoms, they find they are not solid but rather dividable and in fact,  "a waste of space" : tiny busy electrons swirling around the vast distance between them and a tiny heavy nucleus.

But that nucleus isn't solid either : it breaks down into ever smaller sets of Russian dolls and ends up feeling like nothing more than whirling bits of energy.

So mass, it turns out, isn't just convertible into energy : it IS energy , bits of energy whirling about so fast that it gives us mega-sized humans the illusion of weight and solidity.

Energy popping in and out of existence constantly, but always moving slowly,ever slowly, to a totally dispersed state where they will slow down into the Universe's death at near absolute zero temperatures.

(Aka : Entropy).

Skygods: big is dynamic and complex and small is solid, stable and knowable-controllable. Optimism as high as the blue skies themselves.

Earthlings: big is solid and while dynamic is at least a bit knowable-controllable. The small ? mercurial, unknowable, non-solid. Cautious (grounded in what we do know, not what we might know) and skeptical we will ever begin to 'control' reality.

Which side are you on ? Is granite more solid-seeming than atoms or vice versa ........

MATTHEW 7:3 to Josh Floyd & Frank L. Lambert : Lighten up !

Science's uncivil War : Part XXXCCCVIII

OCEANS of GOLD !

Not a second goes by, but without some hard scientist bristling at the (mis)use of the term of entropy by someone without a PhD in , and a career, in the hard sciences. The usual depressing "science turf war while the world burns"  poop -- or so it must seem.

By way of complete contrast, not an Eternity goes by without all the world's hard scientists all ignoring the far more egregious (mis)use of the First Law of Thermodynamics in areas like geology (shout out to Sir Charles Lyell) or in economics (shout out to almost everyone with tenure).

Ignoring beams to focus on moles usually signifies a much deeper mental issue, as my old shrink Dr Jesus would say .

I would suggest this is because the First Law of Thermodynamics paints quite a rosy picture of Man's ability - particularly Scientific Man - to profitably manipulate the Universe, while the Second Law of Thermodynamics  is much less hopeful in this respect.

The Constant - conscious - touting of the First Law of Thermodynamics, by scientists, as the fundamental law of all human activity is what convinced gullible lay people all those years back to pay basic scientists to just sit about and think,  rather than to put themselves out to work as traditional ,Non-U, hands-on inventors.

Replacing the First with the Second threatens paycheques, pensions and (above all)  prestige and this why I believe the Second Law is always attacked when used as a metaphor while the first law's foundational use in, of all things, the science of human behavior cum economics is ignored .

Here is how I describe entropy to friends and foes alike : in the form of a joke.

In fact, a classic good news / bad news joke.

See, a feller walks into the bar and tells all the patrons that "There is trillions of dollars worth of gold just lying about in the sea".

That's the good news, he says.

The patrons ask - in one voice : well what then is the bad news ?

But the silly feller just repeats what he told them.

"There is trillions of dollars worth of gold just lying about in the sea."

Yes indeed. There is lots of gold in the sea but unlike in a miner's mother lode, it is so finely and widely dispersed over such immense distances and depths that it effectively worthless --- actually worth far less than zero .

This is because it will cost more ( money=energy) to collect it than it is worth (gold=money=energy),  when it is sold to pay back the energy used to collect it.

Now entropy as useless because dispersed energy versus concentrated and hence useful energy is not strictly a case of "order versus disorder", at least to the 70,000 or so hard scientists who object strongly every time lay people use this metaphor to describe entropy to other lay people.

But unfortunately the 7 billion rest of us find it works - as a metaphor - just fine.

Why ? I blame Mom.

A Iraqi college inside a brick building is nice and orderly, till a big smart bomb enters and blows all those bricks into a fine powder and the desert winds scatter that dust all over the Middle East.

Dispersed and useless and messy and dirty : disorderly, as my Mom would say.

Hard scientists  - like Floyd and Lambert - apparently never had a Mom - or at least not one like mine.

 My Mom had a acute sense of "disorder" being defined as me scattering (dispersing as people with PhDs say) all my clothes all over the floor,  instead of hanging them up neatly and "orderly" in one corner of my closet.

My advice to Josh Floyd and Frank Lambert ?

Get some Metamucil , loosen up, have a beer, watch some TV and think back again to whatever metaphors that their Moms did use whenever little Frankie and Joshie's rooms were messy .....

Like race relations before King, like the Gold Standard, in deniers' minds the climate was supposed to be eternally stable and unchangable

heat death of the DENIERS' certitudes

"The climate can't be changing - it just can't," all the blue rinsed ladies cry. "Its not fair - everything in life is changing - and now the climate - it just isn't fair !"

After living a long life safe inside the nice warm milk and cookies of certitudes, to now - in their declining years - to face yet another lose of certitudes is all a little too much for the average - aging - climate denier.

Life used to be so stable : the negro, hebrew, homosexual or career woman used to know their place and knew how to mind their manners.

Money was stable, based on the solid gold standard.

Economists and scientists assured them that matter and energy was stable, indestructible and eternal: it could be changed but never destroyed.

Droughts came ,yes, in a few small areas and for only a short time, replaced by floods also in just a few areas and for just a short time.

Like the rise of volcanoes and the fall of earthquakes, recessions and booms / war and peace came and went, came and went : moderated oscillations but always around a strictly defined - and maintained - norm.

In the Victorian mindset, there could be no science of climate CHANGE

Weather was ceaseless in its oscillations but the climate - the climate was eternal , as eternal as God and the Sun and the Universe.

As Spencer Weart points out, the idea of climate change literally didn't exist and couldn't exist : there were no departments of Climate Change at universities, no Society for the Study of Climate Change, no Journal of Climate Change.

Deniers thought they hadn't asked much out of life, only a level playing field to play out their life upon.

And  modernity's science - for its own selfish, greedy reasons - appeared to give that to them.

Until recently, until the rise of post-modernity science  : the new young whippersnappers.

Because, in fact, there is no such thing as a level playing field, never was and never will be : all fields, like it or not, must tilt subtly but inevitably downward, tracking the great arrow of time's long slow plunge into Heat Death.

Because the one thing the deniers were never taught in school was that the First Law of Thermodynamics (the claim that neither mass or energy can ever be created or destroyed but merely altered) was to the Second law of Thermodynamics as Einstein's Special Law of Relativity was to Einstein's General Law of Relativity.

Which is to say, very much the junior partner in this particular law firm.

The Second Law's Entropy ensures nothing ever really stays the same but rather is always changing : energy and matter are not destroyed true, but their utility to us became steadily degraded - and to us, that is as good as destroyed.

The centre of the Earth is very hot, just as it was 4 billion years ago - but it is less hot today than back then : day by day, millennium by millennium, it is steadily getting colder and colder - and this will one day mean less magnetic fields, less atmosphere and less Life on Earth.

The deniers'  Victorian credo (Lyell's Uniformitarianism) is nothing more than errant nonsense : the present is a guide to nothing more than the present and presents no certitudes as to the past or our future.

Shat happens : suck it up....