War as Entropy : its permanent costs

Pure - useless - ENTROPY

"Think about Germany and Japan : smashed to pieces in the last war, but look at them now." "So, no real - permanent - harm in a little war now and then is there ?" " Boys must be boys, etc."
(Sample conversations of conventional economists ...in their cups.)

In my last SVE post "Artillery Shells : Entropy for Economists" , I tried to put a difficult term from physical science into the everyday language of voters and consumers, into language that even conventional economists should be able to understand.

I focussed on the purest and quickest form of entropy most of us will ever personally experience , when we learn that the very expensive, very well made 105 mm artillery shell our taxes just paid for, has been blown to the tiniest of bits.

In that post, I neglected the entropy inherent in the fates of the three victims of our 105 mm shell : the soldier, the civilian car and the civilian building , as all three were also blown to pieces.

They are blown into much bigger pieces, physically , than the shell and the explosives that propelled it and blew it up, so does the concept of entropy really apply to them ?

Let me argue why it does.

It costs a lot of money to feed, clothe, shelter and above all educate a 20 year old man : his parents and society pay it hopeful his 45 years of labour as an adult will pay it back --- in particular taxes on his employment will help pay the health costs of his parents when they are old.

Blown into four or five big chunks by the shell, he is not really recyclable : at best he is about 15 cents worth of plant fertilizer when he is buried.

All that money in raising him, all that future return via his employment income ----- gone, gone, gone, in an instant.

Ignore scientists' bafflegab : entropy is war, end of story

The car, used daily as a taxi, also is blown into a few big pieces, but is "recyclable" --- albeit as scrap steel. $15,000 car to $100 in scrap metal --- in an instant.

The building, home to a dentist's clinic is worth say $100,000, independent of the land it sits on, which we will claim ins undiminished in value, despite being used as a battlefield.

Badly damaged, it will cost another $5,000 just to tear it down, before we can even think of rebuilding on the same site. The value of the carted away rubble, minus cost of cartage and disposal/sale is a negative $1000 dollars.

Surprisingly perhaps, much of the heavily built and very valuable dentistry equipment inside the building is virtually undamaged and can be easily returned to a useful long life ----- but only if it is got to, before the elements rust it to bits. And that is iffy : depending on the state of the war raging around it - and the weather.

I call these real life examples, taken from WWII,  pure entropy (useful to useless) , won't you ?

Thermodynamics laws for laypeople (the Entropy of War)

First Law : Fool's GOLD !

I am frequently called upon to explain the two main laws of thermodynamics that are my two lead characters in SVE and I generally try to explain them in a pared down sort of way.

 I begin by saying that the First law deals exclusively with the quantity of mass and energy in the universe : that quantity can never get bigger or smaller --- it can merely change its state ( ie character).

By contrast, the Second law deals exclusively in quality not quantity : it says that the quality (ie the character) of mass and energy becomes steadily less useful (to K-selected creatures like humans) as parts of it become more and more widely dispersed.

"Useful" for giant K-selected beings like humanity, is really code for "concentrated" : being giant in size and hunger and few in number, one molecule of sucrose every few miles along a trail won't keep us alive.

(Thus the concept of "lack of physical concentration as an biological limiting factor" is anathema to classical economists ,who have bathed exclusively in the Kool-aid of the First Law of Thermodynamics.)

Tell us, about ALL the gold in seawater...

Glad you asked, because 'Gold molecules in seawater 'is the classic 'dividing' example.

 People of the First law always proudly *deny* that we can be running out of gold - 'gosh, the amount in the oceans alone will last us folks for, oh say, billions of years at least.'

True, predictably sigh the folks of the Second law sardonically : only too true - if we but had the trillions of trillions in dollars needed to recover those molecules of gold scattered ocean wide!

But bacteria, being widely dispersed themselves (and thus being the ultimate in r-selected lifeforms) can profitably recover those widely dispersed gold molecules : they may only need a few dozen atoms of gold to make enough copies of a vital enzyme to survive and reproduce.

We humans demonstrate the superiority of the fundamental second law to the  derived first law every time we go to war.

The embodied energy in the artillery shell and gunpowder used to propel it along and blow it up, along with the embodied energy in the building it destroys , will never cease to exist as a quantity.

But as a quality, we can never usefully use them ever again : the energy has gone off to heat up the air and ultimately the Universe.

And the tiny fragments of shell body? They are now widely scattered and rusting in the soil. The building fragments have been used as rubble to fill holes in the ground.

That ,my friends, is a very uniquely human form of entropy : a wide - and useless - dispersing of once-usefully concentrated energy and matter.....