23 JAN 2014 by ideonexus

 Life Emerges from the Second Law of Thermodynamics

Every species of living thing can make a copy of itself by exchanging energy and matter with its surroundings. One feature common to all such examples of spontaneous “self-replication” is their statistical irreversibility: clearly, it is much more likely that one bacterium should turn into two than that two should somehow spontaneously revert back into one. From the standpoint of physics, this observation contains an intriguing hint of how the properties of self-replicators must be constr...
Folksonomies: life thermodynamics
Folksonomies: life thermodynamics
  1  notes

Hypothesis that life is the result of needing to dissipate energy that builds up.

01 JAN 2012 by ideonexus

 Measuring Cultural Information

But there may be more significant ways to characterize civilizations than by the energy they use for communications purposes. An important criterion of a civilization is the total amount of information that it stores. This information can be described in terms of bits, the number of yes-no statements concerning itself and the universe that such a civilization knows. An example of this concept is the popular game of "Twenty Questions," as played on Earth. One player imagines an object or conc...
  1  notes

The number of bits communicated in our radio broadcasts is quite enormous, conveying a great deal of information about our culture.