Energy

There is nothing more contrasting in our world to me then driving along a man-made tarmac road, with telephone wires above and along side other cars with there zombielike drivers, and by looking up into the sky being moved by seeing these beautiful rolling clouds with the sun behind, even though the sky appears grey and sad, there in the distance is a ray of light shinning down on some little patch as if it is blessing from the heavens on who or whatever was underneath it. But it is this contrast between the man made and that of the natural world that concerns me. 

Ever since the age of the Enlightenment the freedom for intellectual thinking and science has become boundless giving way to experimentation and explorations of our world. This has lead to many new discoveries such as the laws of thermodynamics where physics explains how resources, i.e. fossil fuels, can be manipulated to release energy that we we now used to produce most of our power. This development by a number of physicists in the 1800’s helped with the Industrial Revolution that changed our world.

This was this revelation that gives us the power of machines and gave us factories and industries that we now in turn rely on so much. Our cars, mobiles, computers and our need for clothes, shoes and possessions have caused civilization to produce mass productions of material items. This may all sound great in the sense that us humans have been given so much more time for leisure and our own enjoyment and that we have these beautiful material things to look at but life craves a sense of equilibrium which is where the down side starts.
    Through physics and the second law of thermodynamics the term Entropy can often be used to mean disorganization or disorder because it is the measurement of how structures hold unused energy. This to me is alot like many sceanos of how orderd utopia systems can change to disordered dystopian systems. With in physics the term arrow of time states that due to entropy and the second law of thermodynamics all systems or structures will disintegrate into a sense of equilibrium. For example, heat always travels from hot to cold and never cold to hot, so if you had a bucket of cold water and dropped a hot stone into it, the molecules on the surface of the stone would exchange protons with the molecules of the water so the water would warm up the stone would cool down. This would continue until the temperature of the water and stone reach the same, as a state of equilibrium. Once this state had reached equilibrium the exchanging of particles would stop.

It is this knowledge of the exchanging of particles and the need for equilibrium that is how I understand the current issues of erosion within our civilization. We need energy to live and we gain most of it from the sun, which is a constant source. Now you would think that by constantly absorbing the suns heat, the earth would get hotter and hotter but this is not the case. The reason the earth dose not over heat is because of The Carbon Cycle, which is explained in the video link below.

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Experiments/PlanetEarthScience/GlobalWarming/GW_Movie4.php 

This exchange of energy from the sun and within the earth has kept the earth in a state of equilibrium for years until the dawn of the industrial revolution. Humans deforesting and burning fossil fuel are creating more and more carbon dioxide and is causing the earth’s temperature to slowly rise and is seen as a possible cause of Global warming and the rise in natural disasters.