The Conservation of Energy – The Terrifying Reality of Heat
Space is big. Like, there’s a whole lot of it. It’s kind of everywhere. There’s so much space that no matter how much stuff you put into it, if it winds up being evenly distributed throughout it, you’ll hardly have anything left. Just stray particles spread out so far they can’t even really be said to exert pressure on anything. Getting a bit more local, it’s a bit easier to work with though.
Right now we effectively exist inside the atmosphere of our sun, which is constantly bathing us in the result of hundreds of septillions of joules of nuclear energy every second(Not all of it directly at us of course. Space is still big.) You might be familiar with the fact that energy can never be created or destroyed, it can only change forms. Unfortunately, many of those forms, such as heat, are not really all that prone to being kept track of in any way that it can still be made proper use of.
Balancing our constantly being bathed in nuclear hellfire is the fact that heat naturally tries to flow away from hot things, to balance out and equalize everything, so the hotter we get, the faster the heat gets away from us. All temperature changes are mostly a matter of whether we’re gaining heat faster or slower than we’re losing it. The cold of every night is the reason we don’t all burn by evening, the fact that the night doesn’t last forever is the reason we don’t freeze, though if either of those things happened, both would. A slower rotation means more extremes, and the wind coming off the oceans is the main thing keeping us from them as it is(water equalizes and holds temperature really well, compared to air anyway.).
So, if the sun suddenly burned faster or slower, our day shorter or longer, our position further or closer, our atmosphere more insulated or less, or even if the wind stopped blowing(You don’t want the wind to stop blowing), you would very soon, certainly within the day, learn to fear the air. As the hours pass, and the temperature moves further and further from what you expect. What’s the difference between your morning and the high afternoon when the temperature stops rising? What if it didn’t stop? What if it didn’t come down? Imagine if your morning was just as hot as the high from the day before. Only now you have another afternoon worth of heat exchange to look forward to.
Sure, nothing we’re currently aware of makes any of this likely, but if it happened, it really wouldn’t matter what we were aware of. Our lives hang in the balance of literal cosmic forces that are all perfectly capable of ending our comfort and indeed our lives all on their own. And yet we make use of them. Plants the world over convert the nuclear energy of the sun into easily stored chemicals that are then redistributed throughout all life on our little world, all of us happily wasting significant portions of that energy returning it back as yet more heat, which redistributes itself throughout the vastness of space, just like all the other extra energy we get bathed with on a constant basis.
But if ever at any point we were expected to take control of that energy, to find a way to generate enough heat and light to keep us alive or distribute enough away(to where?) to keep us from freezing, to actually control our environment that is so precariously allowing us to continue to live in the way we’re familiar with, how long would we last? If we converted all of the chemical energy we have at our disposal to heat … we would no longer have any fuel. Energy is never lost, but it can certainly be redistributed, and changed into forms we can no longer convert.
Not attempting to create systems of living without depending on Earth, is basing our survival on the hope that nothing will ever change. Ever.
Good luck with that.
