I once wrote an essay about the heat death of the universe. Based on the Second Law of Thermodynamics, it basically says that all the moving things in the universe will eventually lose steam and flop over. It was a gloomy topic to research. A good illustration is if you set a top spinning on the table, eventually the top will wobble and stop. Hot tea cools down. Cold tea warms up. Energy runs out. Our sun will slowly expand as it runs out of the elements necessary to keep up fission; it will generate less heat, but grow beyond its current girth to a red giant, enveloping all of the inner-system planets. Then, when its fuel finally hits the big “E”, it will collapse on itself into a white dwarf, and maybe, some way far down into the future, it will further implode into a black hole, sucking in all light and whatever remains of our former home into an inescapable void of gravitational destruction. Of course, to quote Bill Bryson in another context, we will be “considerably past caring”.
As I say, gloomy. But the great cosmic petering-out is many millions of years off, and we can console ourselves in the meantime by the apparent lack of evidence for cosmic entropy in our daily lives, right? After all, the sun ‘rose’ this morning and it will ‘set’ later. All is well, because all appears normal.
At least, that's what 6’3” Dave might have said. Unfortunately, the Dave writing this essay, is 6' 2 and 7/8”. I used to be 6’3”. I've shrunk a bit recently. Why? Well, the Organic Mechanic says it is age and gravity. She says my vertebral discs aren't as youthfully springy as they once were. Almost fifty years of walking upright under the 1G gravity pull and atmospheric pressure of our homeworld, combined with that aforementioned loss of supple springiness in the back region, has compressed my spine the tiniest bit so far. The Organic says there will be more to come.
This decline from an orderly system (my perfect springy spine) to a disorderly one, is just one more example of entropy. It’s not just my back, either and it’s not just me. It is happening to all of us, every day, all the time and it is a perfect example of the Second Law of Thermodynamics: all systems lose energy over time and come to disorder.
We have a picture of the two of us, Micki and me, sitting at the beach at dusk, waiting for fireworks. My beard is without even a sprinkle of frost. Micki hasn't changed—she fortunately has strong Sicilian genes—but I have nary a crow's foot or crease in the picture. I was probably not thinning so much on top back then either. It was the long-lost age of 2018. I was 41. Compare it to a picture of me from just last Spring. I have aged more than a decade in less than a decade. Sure, some of it is genetics, but it is really just entropy.
Other than for jellyfish and the naked mole rat, aging is a universal and extremely odd thing. No one is really sure exactly why it happens. They know what happens as we age, of course, but not why the aging factors, sometimes called senescence, turn on. When it does, though, cell death becomes more frequent, skin loses tone, muscles atrophy more quickly, the long, lean form of the body thickens and shortens, knots from arthritis appear at the knuckles and other tender joints, our eyes cloud over, and of course, my favorite, hair turns grey, loses its luster, thickness and color and then turns loose.
Some of the consequences of aging come from star damage. The sun’s rays are essential for life and provide a lot of Vitamin D for us, but those same rays also damage our eyes and skin over time. Compared to that lovely pic of us at the beach, I look a lot like I’ve spent the last several years living out in direct sun all day every day in every season. Pop Bare saw a more recent picture of me and said that I looked “weather-beaten”. It’s funny, because I have an inside job.
Back before AI took over generating pictures by scraping the internet, I asked a popular (at that time) application what I would look like when I was old. I shared a pic of myself sitting at my work desk. The result was me, but looking more like Arnold Schwarzenegger than myself. Still, the result of the aging was not completely inaccurate. That was more than a decade ago, now, I think and the creases and lines suggested by the app are turning out to be pretty accurate.
Speaking universally, we all age. Some of us more quickly than others. Some seem to age more brutally than others, too. I helped someone recently and in the course of helping them they told me their age. It was a year off from our Elliott, but this person looked for all the world like they were older than me. I had a second startling moment a few weeks ago, when I got an invitation from a High School classmate for a [redacted] year reunion. It has been a while and of course, I'm not really in denial about it. Obviously, I opted out quickly. I worked hard for 4 years to clear my obligation to the state education requirements and though I made some very close friends during that time, we few, we happy few, we band of graduates do not need a reunion on that scale. At any rate, looking at some of the pictures of my former “peers” I was horrified to see that some of them (of an age with me give or take a year) actually looked weather beaten. I guess I should have sent one of them to Pop Bare.
By those lights, I guess, I have been quite lucky. I could look like an extremely elderly man while only in my (very) late forties like some of my former school mates. Still, eventually, I will succumb to a countenance that looks more like that than the man in that beach picture. I'm not so vain that I cannot bear to see the Bare face reach its wrinkliest stage. Rather, my dread of entropy is a more cerebral problem to consider and by that, I mean literally my brain.
After a dramatic fall at age 95, our Nana had to be moved to a senior facility. After that, her once sharp mind atrophied. It was devastating. Of course, by then, too, she had lost her ability to walk or to see because of severe macular degeneration, so she just pulled herself around in her wheelchair, and sang hymns with her friends. The idea of slowly but surely losing oneself in a labyrinth of dementia is horrifying. It has motivated me to keep the brain as limber as the physical form.
The other end of the same spectrum is no less terrifying. My dear Aunt MJ was sharp as a razor her whole life—in many ways the smartest and best person for family memories, book recommendations and recipes on the Bare side—but for her rebelling physical form. Lung cancer, horrible arthritis in her back, and a terrible sickness near the end, reduced her piteously. She never lost her wit or sharp memory, but she confided that the pain was not worth it.
So far, now entering the last half of his time as octogenarian, Pop Bare is still sharp, too. He has the occasional problem with what he calls “CRS”, an ailment I also struggle with daily, but his doesn't rise to the level of dementia. He seems fit and takes good care of himself, and can talk for ages about all kinds of things, but especially automobiles and his favorite show about treasure hunters digging on Oak Island. Since he retired from all his jobs, at 80, he’s less physically fit than ever before, but is still hale and hardy by comparison to many other people I know, his own age. That may mean that, other than my weather-worn face, I might have a chance at longevity, but entropy is still coming for all of us.
Of course, entropy, while a universal law of physics, can be influenced. Compared to our ancestors, life expectancy has grown quite a bit since industrialization. It varies by country, region (and in the South, by county and town, judging by what I’ve seen) but people are living longer, healthier lives. Even just in my short few decades here, the term “old people” has changed. Anyone at the base level of the AARP range when I was a kid was “old”, looked old, dressed old, acted old. Today, a man or woman can be seventy and be the fittest they have ever been in their lives, running, exercising, eating right and getting plenty of rest. Proof, perhaps, that we can slow the aging process, if not stop it altogether.
Thankfully, entropy is usually extremely slow. The sun won't burn out for millions, possibly billions of years. Humankind, if we can survive the next few generations and the incalculable damage done to our earth by greed, lust and brutal disrespect for the web of nature, will have a shorter time than that. If dinosaurs could talk, they would mention the Chicxulub Asteroid and the cataclysm that brought the Cretaceous period to a crashing halt.
There have been five such cataclysmic chapter endings thus far (that we know of) on our meager backwater planet. Survival—human or any other kind—is not guaranteed. That puts a slightly different spin on the problems of entropy I mentioned before. If true, then the whole human race may need to find another home or space station to dwell on.
This brings another problem to the forefront. Humans are short-lived (sorry, Methusela). Our minds, memories, and capacity for knowledge are necessarily limited. If we were to live to be 900 or more, with—like Moses—our “eye undimmed and natural force unabated”—our minds would definitely not be able to handle the strain. To live that long would be flatly impossible.
A good friend of mine is a transhumanist. He feels that, very soon now, human consciousness will be able to be uploaded into the Internet, or into mind-like programs that will go into humanoid or android bodies, allowing us to transcend the natural barriers of our physical forms. I leave this to him, though I have read some believable theories that show that a human mind will not be able to stand the transformation. The emotional stress of not being one with the body, or the devastating need to rest or die without reprieve would eventually cause a kind of cascading failure. It would be like organ rejection, but on a cybernetic and cerebral scale we cannot anticipate.
How then do we bring ourselves to the furthest reaches of the galaxy to find that special and rare new homeworld? The distances of our solar system, let alone our galaxy, even at incredible speeds, wouldn't have us arriving within three or five generations, meaning that humans would have to learn to dwell on space arcs, traveling the bleak and dangerous cosmic oceans, until we found a new home. Even there, we would not escape aging and entropy.
This is not to say that such hopes are unreasonable, but that they present significant barriers to immediate solutions. The strange and terrifying fact is, we will have the same problems of entropy on those other worlds. If the gravity on Earth 2 is higher than our Earth, I will presumably shrink even faster. The sun that charges the mechanisms of life on that hunk of rock, might be even closer to its own fuel crisis. There is genuinely no telling. The only good news is that, being on a space ship or space station (as in the ISS) are both good for counteracting entropy (time dilation means that people onboard age just a few seconds slower than those on the planet surface) and the micro-gravity helps to stretch one’s back to its regular length.
These are perhaps problems for the next generations, but mine is most assuredly an earth-bound age group, focused on the wear and tear of earth-bound living, aging, facing the slow and interminable slowing down of ourselves, first, and then, eventually, all things. In the immediate future, therefore, we must face our own fragile mortal frames, the disreputable reliability of our tiny, primitive brains, and the potent, unavoidable reality that our solar system is a top, slowly but inexorably losing steam. We may still destroy the earth with war or famine or pestilence, long before the planet ever dies. All that makes the grey in my beard, the thin spot on my head and the crow's feet by my eyes seem pretty tame by comparison, but I can at least take some hope in the fact that naked mole rats and some jellyfish will still be here.
