Jake Platt
Most instances of decay are not an object decomposing or otherwise succumbing to the inevitable homogeneity of all things, but rather it wanting to rejoin the decidedly negentropic enterprise that is the interaction of all matter on earth. Most instances of decay are the decay of the man-made. All of the things humans make are thus inherently entropic: not in their destination but in their inception. Our world of forms is not orderly. We are haphazard, provisional makers at our core. Need to get somewhere faster? Invent a car. Need to fuel it? Frack for oil. One step at a time, it’ll get sorted out, and if it doesn’t this spinning orb of substance will reincorporate everything we’ve displaced in a relatively short amount of time. To our credit, we’re good at synchronic order: we can draw a detailed schematic, design an efficient machine. We just aren’t very good at temporal order. We can’t structure time, it rushes over and passed us, the current we drown in, the fire in which we burn. In an attempt to gain mastery over it by considering it a corollary of space, another dimension, something measurable, we have only conceded our fear of it.
The West Antarctic ice sheet melting isn’t entropic in the sense that it spells doom for humanity but rather simply in the sense that what had been the ice and what had been the water are now one substance with no possibility of reversal even as the constituent parts of both the ice and water remain intact in the new mixture. Most changes aren’t as drastic as they’re made out to be.
Movement requires time, time requires an increase in total entropy.
Entropy requires motion and therefore produces the ability to move forward through its own decay.
All motion tends towards order, not disorder. Discrete objects are on the way out.
Everything is made of fields, but they will eventually cease to make and simply be.
Our motion is not perpetual.