complexity, the rising costs and declining payback of basic research, and many more than I can name in this space. If you’re aware of bottlenecks, you have a better chance of navigating through them with something intact. If society is aware of them, there is a higher chance things of value (like ecosystems, or knowledge) make it through. However, if you just blunder into them, the necks tend to get narrower. The principle purpose of Reality101 is to remedy bottleneck blindness . The Bottom Line: The graph of time versus population may fluctuate a great deal, and sometimes a population will approach zero. This is a bottleneck, with only two outcomes: The species recovers, but with lost genetic diversity, or it falls into extinction.
The 2 nd Law of Thermodynamics
Summary: Thermodynamics is the name given to the science of energy, work, and heat. It turns out, the rules of thermodynamics are not only a basic aspect of reality, but are central to understanding life, which itself is a thermodynamic process. The most consequential (and sometimes misunderstood) of these rules is known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or 2LoT. 91 We are going to touch upon many scientific disciplines, but in a way this law underlies them all when it comes to describing reality. While all the other rules of physics are formulated as reversible with respect to time - equally valid backwards or forwards - 2LoT establishes that natural processes are irreversible, which is pretty much what defines the arrow of time in our reality. The “future” is the direction of entropy increase in the time dimension, where “entropy” is a measure of the disorder of a system -
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