In Entropy: A New Worldview, will thermal death spell the end of humanity, or are technological advances and alternative energy the answer?

This article discusses the book Entropy: A New Worldview by Jeremy Rifkin. In this book, Rifkin takes a critical look at the sustainability of modern civilization and industry based on the second law of thermodynamics, the law of entropy. The text introduces the possibility of humanity’s demise due to increasing entropy, which Rifkin argues is likely, but also offers counterarguments and a positive outlook that technological advancements and alternative energy sources will prevent humanity from reaching destruction.

 

The author begins the book by discussing the mechanistic worldview, which has been built up over the past 300 years by Francis Bacon, René Descartes, and Isaac Newton. According to the mechanistic worldview, the components of the world are given in a measurable, ordered, perfect, and predictable state, which can be described in the language of mathematics. Furthermore, according to the logic of mechanistic thinking, science and math allow for the expansion of the human realm. Since the world in its natural state is of little use to humans, it follows that nature is something to be developed and exploited by human hands to make it more efficient and useful.
Rifkin criticizes this production-oriented worldview because it does not always advance the interests of humanity as a whole. I agree with Rifkin’s criticism of the mechanistic worldview. Certainly, the mechanistic worldview has enabled the development of Western rationalism, and the progress of science and the gains of civilization have been based on a mechanistic cosmology. If the mechanistic worldview were accepted uncritically and these production-oriented values prevailed today, all the rivers on earth would be polluted, all the trees in the forests and mountains would be cut down, and the earth would be uninhabitable.
Whereas the mechanistic worldview and scientific theories of the past were concerned only with producing faster and more and advancing civilization, the laws of thermodynamics are about the “cost” of progress and production – how much energy and resources are consumed and lost in the process. The first law of thermodynamics states that the total amount of energy in the universe is constant. No energy is created or lost when some energy is converted to another form. The fact that energy doesn’t disappear creates another problem when humans use it indiscriminately. Although the total amount of energy is constant, the second law of thermodynamics states that every time we use energy, we convert useful energy into unusable forms, which means that entropy increases. The subsurface resources that humans consume in their productive activities, such as oil, coal, natural gas, and minerals, are finite and will eventually be depleted in the energy conversion process.
I agree with his mechanical worldview to a certain extent, and the law of entropy is also a law of nature that we cannot defy unless we are gods. Human industrial activity and consumption increases entropy. But he has a different idea about the bleak future of humanity. Although humans increase the entropy of the planet, on a cosmic scale, the entropy caused by human activity is very insignificant. We are increasing entropy every moment, but it is not a stranglehold on humanity. It’s been more than 20 years since Rifkin wrote this book. I would like to take a look at the dark future that Rifkin predicted then, and argue that our future is not as dark and bleak as it seems.
Rifkin’s logic is that human development activities increase the entropy of the planet as a whole, making it increasingly uninhabitable, and he cites the depletion of oil resources as an example. However, I have a slightly different take on this. For example, one of the theories that predicts past oil production is called “Peak Oil”, which was developed by M. King Hubbert in 1956 in the United States. According to this theory, the curve of oil production over time is bell-shaped, and after a point of peak production, oil production will no longer increase, but will gradually decrease and eventually be depleted. According to this theory, oil production in the United States and Canada was expected to peak in 1970 and decline thereafter. In fact, this theory was fairly accurate for its time (1970s-1980s), and after 1970, oil production in both countries was on a declining trend, and they were destined to run out of oil completely after 2010.
However, with the rise in oil prices since the 2000s, technological advances and economic competitiveness have made it possible to mine oil from oil sands (sandy formations containing crude oil) in shale formations, which were previously considered uneconomical due to the high cost of extraction. As a result, oil production has been steadily increasing since 1999, and as of 2010, Canada was producing 2.8 gigabarrels (GB) of oil, 40% more than the 2 GB produced in 1973, which was considered the peak of oil production. This explains why Canada has been able to handle the explosive growth in oil demand from emerging and developing economies despite the many theories of oil risk. According to Michael J. Economides, a professor of petroleum engineering at the University of Houston, there is no peak oil, and oil production will continue for the next 300 years. New oil fields and alternative energy sources are being discovered due to technological advances and economic logic, and the most advanced theories of energy production predict that we won’t run out of energy for hundreds of years.
Thanks to the development of new oil fields and technological advances, the ticking time bomb that would end the human race seems to have been turned back a few hundred years. If these resources were to run out in the more distant future, would there be an energy crisis? I don’t think so. Even after oil resources are depleted, human progress will continue using nuclear fusion energy. Nuclear fusion power is a technology that uses light elements like hydrogen as fuel to generate energy. Theoretically, fusion power can produce almost unlimited energy, so if it is commercialized, it will be a major turning point in solving humanity’s energy shortage. The fuel material, hydrogen, can be obtained very cheaply from seawater, and since hydrogen is the most common substance in the universe, we don’t have to worry about running out of it, at least not for the next few hundred million years. Why worry about something that is not in our lifetime, or even in the distant future, when we don’t even know if humanity will exist?
Nuclear fusion energy technology has been researched since the 1980s under the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Agency through the ITER project, which involves the United States, the EU, Russia, China, and Japan, including Korea. The current level of technology is such that more energy is produced than is put into the fusion reactor, but it is expected to be commercialized within the next 20 years. I believe that humanity is currently preparing to transition from a petroleum energy-based society to a fusion energy-based society. As long as oil production continues, there will be a natural transition from the current oil-based society to a fusion energy-based society.
Next, Rifkin notes that the Earth is an isolated system, and he argues that the material entropy on Earth will continue to increase until it eventually reaches a point of maximum entropy, i.e., a barren land where all useful material on Earth has been used up. (Between pages 97 and 110 of Rifkin’s book, the terms closed system and isolated system are used interchangeably. The context suggests that he was confused or that it was a translation error.) This is because in a closed system, matter cannot move, but energy can. For the past 4.5 billion years, the Earth has been receiving enormous energy from the Sun.
This energy serves to lower the entropy of the Earth. For example, radiant energy from the sun evaporates ocean water, which becomes rain and turns turbines in hydroelectric power plants. The sun’s heat creates wind, which can be used to generate wind power, or it can be used to generate solar power. The moon’s tidal force creates tidal differences that can be used to generate electricity from tidal power. With this electricity, humans can dissolve and electrolyze bauxite to get aluminum, which is not available in nature. We can also electrolyze seawater to get substances like magnesium, sodium, and chlorine that are useful to us. Even if entropy is not reduced by artificial means, sunlight allows plants to synthesize high-entropy substances into low-entropy carbohydrates through photosynthesis. This process will continue for billions of years to come as long as the sun remains active, so it’s not a problem we need to worry about as long as humans inhabit the planet. Rifkin didn’t overlook solar energy. Later in the article, he presents an idealized future in which humanity is an agrarian society that relies on solar energy. However, I think a better future would be to have all of humanity farming and living off the land like we did 2000 years ago.
Of course, this sustainable development will require more research and commercialization of alternative energy sources. Currently, only 19% of the world’s electricity is generated from alternative energy sources, including hydropower. To avoid what Rifkin calls “heat death,” we’ll be using oil for hundreds of years to come, and until nuclear fusion power is fully commercialized, we’ll need to expand our use of alternative energy.