Vs Entropy?

[MeklorIlavator]

I was thinking back on the Sci Fi I have read, and realized that the one real thing that seems absolute is that all are subject to entropy(that I can think of, at least). So, are their any universes that can beat it?

[kpenguin]

Dude, I would love to see someone argue "Space Marines vs. Entropy" in favor of the space marines.

[MeklorIlavator]

Dude, I would love to see someone argue "Space Marines vs. Entropy" in favor of the space marines.

Space Marines are sooo last vs cycle. Real Vs peopel know that Sauron is now on top...

Sauron vs Entophy!
Saron might actually have a shot at this, though its not clear if there is an Armageddon event that will destroy the world, so this might not count.

Oh, further clarification: what universes do it with out completely restarting the universe? In other words, which ones don't have to destroy themselves to win?

[DraPrime]

Space Marines are sooo last vs cycle. Real Vs peopel know that Sauron is now on top...

Actually the Lich King is on top if I'm correct.

[Fri]

There's this short story I've read that I sadly forgot who wrote it or what the title was.

Basically, there's this civilization that made a highly advanced computer with one purpose. They asked it "How to defeat entropy" or something on that purpose. The computer answered with 'insufficient data' or something like that.

As the story progress, we watched how the civilization advanced further and further, and so did the original computer. Once in a while, the civilization asked the computer the same question, but the computer kept answering with same answer.

Finally, the civilization had evolved into powerful energy . But they and their computer (That evolved from the original computer) still can't find the answer.

And finally, there's nothing more. The universe had succumbed, the advanced civilization had extinct for long. The only thing that survived was the computer or what left/evolved from it. And finally, the computer got the answer.

The computer said 'Let there be light' and a new universe was born.

[Talkkno]

Oh, further clarification: what universes do it with out completely restarting the universe? In other words, which ones don't have to destroy themselves to win?

TTGL, nuff said.

[chiasaur11]

TTGL, nuff said.

Indeed.
Other options include DnD, with the easy methods of generating matter in highly ordered forms, and the DCU, where people can, with no large energy expenditure, make Ice Cream out of thin air.

Squirrel Girl could do it too, if she could fight it directly.

[Executor]

Actually the Lich King is on top if I'm correct.

The thread I made pitting them against each other was a draw if I remember. But overall I think Sauron is no. 1 currently.

[Emperor Tippy]

Stargate could make a good run at it, especially the ancients.

[Rollin]

There's this short story I've read that I sadly forgot who wrote it or what the title was.

Basically, there's this civilization that made a highly advanced computer with one purpose. They asked it "How to defeat entropy" or something on that purpose. The computer answered with 'insufficient data' or something like that.

As the story progress, we watched how the civilization advanced further and further, and so did the original computer. Once in a while, the civilization asked the computer the same question, but the computer kept answering with same answer.

Finally, the civilization had evolved into powerful energy . But they and their computer (That evolved from the original computer) still can't find the answer.

And finally, there's nothing more. The universe had succumbed, the advanced civilization had extinct for long. The only thing that survived was the computer or what left/evolved from it. And finally, the computer got the answer.

The computer said 'Let there be light' and a new universe was born.

You remembered the story very well! That's "The Last Question (http://web.archive.org/web/20040815203832/www.ecf.utoronto.ca/~ngn/misc/last.html)" by Isaac Asimov. It's one of my favorites.

[MeklorIlavator]

That's actually one of the things I was thinking of. Great story.

[kpenguin]

Asimov is freakin' awesome. That is all.

[Dervag]

Entropy exists because of the laws of statistics; you can actually calculate the way entropy behaves from first principles.

Anything that can abuse statistics by sheer force of will can and does beat entropy, at least locally.
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Of course, the best answer to the question "what can conquer entropy" is cribbed from one of the first few issues of Neil Gaiman's famous Sandman series:

"Hope."

[kamikasei]

I can think of a couple of settings where it's possible to leave an old universe and colonize a younger one; would this count? You're not overcoming entropy, but you're sidestepping it (in terms of the undesireable end point, if not the day-to-day).

The Xelee Cycle by Stephen Baxter, and Excession by Iain M Banks, are the ones I can think of offhand.

[Blayze]

TTGL, nuff said.

Didn't we already have this debate in the form of TTGL versus the Ideon? I think the result was "The crew of the Ideon hear about Spiral Power, learn how to use it and cause the Spiral Nemesis".

[Fri]

Yea, Iain M Banks' Culture might be able to defeat entropy. It's the second thing that come into my mind after Isaac Asimov's Last Question.

But after some thinking I ruled them out. They might be a technological utopia that can beat Imperium of Man with relative ease, but they're confined to their galaxy. With their technological progress though, they might be able to defeat entropy later.

[Closet_Skeleton]

I'm sure that there's a super hero somewhere who has "reverse entropy" as his power.

[puppyavenger]

I'm sure that there's a super hero somewhere who has "reverse entropy" as his power.

soo, isn't that the same as traveling to the past?
also, Pug from RAymond Feists Riftwar,Serpent war, and conclave of shadows books. He time traveled back to the beginging of creation.

[Mx.Silver]

soo, isn't that the same as traveling to the past?
also, Pug from RAymond Feists Riftwar,Serpent war, and conclave of shadows books. He time traveled back to the beginging of creation.

I don't think so. Isn't entropy the tendency of closed systems to drift towards disorder as the heat (and therefore energy) gets spread out more uniformly in accordance with the laws of thermodynamics?

[WalkingTarget]

A handy definition of the direction that time flows is the direction in which entropy increases.

By that definition time would reverse if entropy did.

Not sure that I buy that, myself.

[Cyclone231]

Any civilization with access to the following technologies can beat entropy:

Stealth technology for occupied spacecraft.
Time travel that can change the past.
FTL in realspace in a relativistic universe.
Infinite energy sources, or energy sources which one can gain more than is put in forever.

Because all of these override either causality or the laws of thermodynamics, or could be manipulated to do so. With either of these being overridden, you can easily "manufacture" energy infinitely.

I'm sure other folks can come up with a few other technologies which override thermodynamics or causality.

[chiasaur11]

I'm sure that there's a super hero somewhere who has "reverse entropy" as his power.

Superman or the Martian Manhunter probably do. Or Mon-El, who punched the living embodiment of Entropy to death. With his fists.

[Dervag]

I don't think so. Isn't entropy the tendency of closed systems to drift towards disorder as the heat (and therefore energy) gets spread out more uniformly in accordance with the laws of thermodynamics?It's a bit more complicated than that.

For any given system, we can specify a number of possible "microstates" of the system. For instance, a block of iron contains a certain amount of heat energy. One possible "microstate" has all the units of energy doled out to one atom. Yes, that atom over there. Another has all the energy doled out to a different atom, and so on.

Then there's the (much larger) number of ways to assign the energy split among two atoms, or three,...

And there's a truly insanely huge number of ways in which the energy can be more or less evenly divided among all the atoms in the block.

If you graph the number of possible microstates as a function of the 'evenness' of the distribution of energy, you find that almost all the microstates lie very very close to 'even'. This is because if you keep track of which unit of energy is assigned to which atom, there are a LOT more combinations of assignments that give equal or near-equal amounts to everyone than there are that give all of it to one atom.
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The basic postulate of statistical physics, one that we have very good reasons to believe, is that all possible microstates of a system are equally likely to exist at any given moment in time, all else being equal. Note that if some of the microstates require a higher energy to achieve, or violate the laws of physics, then you've done it wrong. Energy is one of the parameters that defines the system, and you define your microstates in terms of what is possible for a given energy level.

The practical upshot of all this as far as heat is concerned is that 'even' distributions of energy are much more likely to be observed. You can do a bunch of math based on the principles of statistics and what I described above, and deduce the existence and behavior of temperature from first principles. Without ever having to stick a thermometer into anything. You can do this just by knowing that objects are made out of matter with a certain structure and that they contain energy in certain ways. You can also predict things like the mixing of gases and liquids, the behavior of magnets, the behavior of certain chemical systems, and so on.
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What we call "entropy" is a quantity related to the number of possible microstates for a system to occupy (logarithmically so, but that's a detail). The more ways there are to divide up the available energy among the particles in a system, and the more ways there are to have the particles themselves arrayed in space, the higher its entropy.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics has many forms, because it's more like a piece of text than like an equation. It's based on our observation that the probability of something happening depends on the number of microstates in which it has happened. Something that has 900 ways to happen out of a thousand possible events is more likely to happen than something that has only one way to happen. Since entropy is related to number of microstates, entropy and probability are closely tied. In fact, they're so closely tied that we can make absolute and true predictions about what nature will do, based purely on knowing what is most probable. You could journey around the universe for eons and never see an exception to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, because the probability against a violation is stunning.
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The Second Law basically states that:

"In a closed system, no reaction will occur that decreases entropy in the system."

The ways to cheat all depend on opening up the system and forcing it to decrease its entropy.

However, this does not mean that entropy will always increase. For example, a puddle of lava has higher entropy than a rock, because the atoms of the rock are held firmly in specific places, whereas they can jostle around all they like in the lava. However, this does not mean that rocks at room temperature will spontaneously melt into lava. There are powerful forces between the atoms of the rock, and you have to give the atoms of rock enough energy to break their bonds in order to turn rock into lava. If that energy is available, the rock will melt. If not, it won't, and entropy will not increase in this way.
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Another example:

I pour six ounces of milk into six ounces of coffee and stir vigorously. Now I have café au lait. But what if I decide that I don't want my coffee "au lait?" What if I want it black? Imagine that I tip my coffee cup over the sink, and a stream of milk pours out. Nothing but milk, pure milk. I keep pouring until I've poured all the milk back out of my coffee. I now have six ounces of black coffee in my cup, and six ounces of milk in the sink.

This is a perfectly reversible reaction- milk poured into coffee, milk poured back out of coffee. Theoretically, if I save the milk I could keep doing this over and over forever.

But any idiot can tell you that this is impossible. Once I have stirred the milk into the coffee, I can't just pour the milk back out. If I actually try this, I will be pouring my cafe au lait down the drain. No matter how carefully I pour, I will not be able to pour the milk out and leave the coffee behind if they're mixed together. Why?

It doesn't violate the laws of conservation of energy or momentum to pour the milk out of my mixture and leave the coffee behind. It doesn't violate any of the laws of atomic structure or the laws that govern the forces between atoms and molecules. The only rule that would be broken by pouring the milk back out of the coffee is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Why?
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If I combine six ounces of milk and six ounces of coffee in a cup and give things enough time to completely randomize, there are a lot of possible arrangements of milk and coffee molecules. In a very small number of those arrangements, all the milk is on top and all the coffee is on the bottom. In those arrangements, I can pour the milk out of the coffee, because the milk comes out first.

On the other hand, there are also a vastly larger number of arrangements in which this can't possibly work, because the coffee and the milk are mixed together all throughout the cup.

The ratio between the number of ways for all the milk to be on the top and the number of ways for the milk to be mixed in with the coffee is really small. For every possible arrangement with all the milk on the top so I can pour it back out of the coffee, there are... I'd have to sit down and calculate it to get it precisely... ways for the milk to be mixed with the coffee. I've done this kind of calculation before. The number typically turns out to be something on the rough order of, say, 10^(A trillion trillion). Seriously, we're talking about numbers so big that the number of zeros is big enough that you start breaking out exponents to talk about it.

So the odds of me being able to pour the milk out of the coffee are roughly one in, say, (one followed by a trillion trillion zeros). It isn't going to happen. I could keep doing this from now until the heat death of the universe*, and I would never get the milk to pour back out of the coffee, ever. Even if I made copies of myself, so many copies that all the mass in all the universe was made of nothing but copies of me and the coffee and milk we would need to try this, we'd still never make it happen. Ever. It is just that improbable.

*Which, ironically, is also guaranteed by the Second Law...
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There are a lot of other things we think of as impossible that are really only monstrously improbable. As in, they're never going to happen, even if the entire universe is built out of copies of the system it would happen in and even if we wait from now until the end of the universe. Marble statues waving hello, all the milk being poured out of my cafe au lait and leaving the coffee behind, dinosaurs walking the Earth again, hurricanes blowing through junkyards and assembling functional aircraft, dread Cthulhu awakening from forgotten R'lyeh... when you get right down to it, all those things are really only impossible because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Which, conversely, means that any being capable of making those things happen spontaneously, without having to do enormous amounts of physical labor to set up the conditions for it, can spin the Second Law of Thermodynamics right around and send it marching back where it came from.

[Closet_Skeleton]

A handy definition of the direction that time flows is the direction in which entropy increases.

By that definition time would reverse if entropy did.

Not sure that I buy that, myself.

The main differance between entropy reversal and time travel is that our current understanding of the laws of physics completely prevents the former and apparently allows the latter.

[Innis Cabal]

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Gold Experiance Reqiuem comes to mind immediatly. Entropy would be automatically reveresed, along with time itself.