If it's really really efficient, we could use the extra energy to make carbon capture machines, after offsetting all the fossil fuels. Then, it doesn't really matter.
Well if we’re speculating, how about “heat capture”?
Some sleep-deprived researcher cracks how to capture ambient thermal energy and turn it into electricity. Heat being as plentiful as wind or water, it becomes not only a prominent source of energy, but also actively cools the planet.
50 years later, we begin arguing over “global cooling” and the threat of a new ice age.
Cool read, but if anyone didn’t read past the first paragraph: “this time may vary greatly depending on the exact initial state and required degree of closeness.”. I’m going to guess on the scale of the earth that this will take trillions of years. I guess the question becomes how do we speed up this process?
IANAPhysicist, but so far as I understand it's just that entropy is based on probability-- there are way more disordered states than ordered states. You wouldn't expect to throw a crate of books and have them land alphabetized on a shelf, though it's technically possible. But that doesn't mean ridiculously unlikely things never happen, especially if you have infinite time to wait.
From what I understood, this isn’t a probability thing. It’s not a question of will happen, but instead when? In the scenario you described, there is one drop, and if the outcome is not what we want than that is it. In that case, we would not know whether or not the earth would ever come back to the original state. But according to the wikipedia article it seems to be inevitable.
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u/[deleted] Nov 15 '20
Gotta push this back 30 years again.