Thanks for the invitation, @Chen Jun.
Collected in · The Runaway Age of Light Speed (complete)
The question looks difficult. Let me explain it plainly for readers on Zhihu.
Do not treat history merely as a storybook. Think of it as an account of the global village’s energy metabolism.
Every civilization depends on flows of energy and materials to sustain cities, production and organization. From this perspective, studying history means asking how societies obtain and use available energy, handle environmental costs, and sometimes lose the capacity to sustain themselves. This is one analytical lens. Social collapse cannot simply be called “entropy reaching its limit,” and thermodynamics alone cannot establish that AI will save civilization.
Here is my answer:
1. History as the evolution of dissipative structures
Physically, human society is an open system operating far from equilibrium.
What is history? From the perspective of energy history, it includes the ways people harness available energy to sustain and transform social structures. Thermodynamic entropy describes physical states; social order requires institutional, network and behavioral measures. They cannot be equated without careful definitions.
What is the underlying contest? Order does not arise from nothing: maintaining it involves exporting entropy to the environment. Through this lens, access to resources, energy use and environmental feedback help shape the rise and decline of civilizations. They do not exhaust history, and differences in war, institutions or culture cannot all be converted into a single “negative entropy” measure.
2. What are we studying? The efficiency of social systems
Set aside heroic figures and moral judgments for a moment, and historical inquiry can examine the energy efficiency of social systems:
Organizational entropy: how law, religion and institutions reduce internal friction. An effective institution can sustain more coordinated activity at a lower energy cost.
Technological negative entropy: how technological revolutions, such as the steam engine and the internet, open new energy sources or methods of processing information, enabling the maintenance of order at a larger scale.
Failure modes: why previously organized civilizations collapse. One plausible mechanism is that the cost of maintaining institutions and infrastructure exceeds sustainably available resources. War, epidemics, institutional conflict and ecological change may also contribute. Social disintegration is not thermodynamic heat death, and complexity is not a single explanation for civilizational collapse.
3. Metabolism and strategic interaction in the global village
Within society’s metabolic processes, the interplay of increasing entropy and locally maintained order can be explored on three levels:
A. Energy metabolism and competition for resources
The phenomenon: the Industrial Revolution involved extracting fossil energy on a large scale to construct complex, organized systems.
The contest: finite resources contribute to conflict between states. Control over energy flows can help a society maintain its own organization while shifting environmental burdens and disruption onto other systems.
B. Information metabolism and organizational evolution
The phenomenon: language, writing and data help people coordinate and predict. But Shannon information entropy, thermodynamic entropy and useful knowledge are different concepts; they are not interchangeable.
The contest: noise can disrupt information transmission, while channel coding and error correction can reduce errors. Noise, Shannon entropy and thermodynamic entropy each have their own definitions and should not be casually equated. Historical inquiry can examine how communication technologies and administrative systems reduce losses and errors in transmission, making global collaboration possible.
C. Environmental metabolism and feedback loops
The phenomenon: people have created highly organized cities, power grids and civilizations, accompanied by energy consumption, waste and ecological pressures. Current global warming is driven primarily by changes in Earth’s radiative balance caused by human greenhouse-gas emissions. It cannot be reduced to direct waste heat or a vague claim about “environmental entropy.”
The contest: local order is maintained within broader physical processes. Earth already receives solar radiation and radiates heat into space; it is not waiting to become open to an external environment. Whether humanity reduces ecological risk depends on energy systems, resource use, institutions and feedback. The second law cannot determine a single historical endpoint.
“History is not poetry, but a long struggle through which physical laws play out in communities of carbon-based life. We study it to seek the algorithms of order that might keep civilization’s flame burning even one second longer in the wilderness of increasing entropy.”