After two years of chit-chat over coffee once a week, are we running out of new ideas? My challenge to the group today: tell me something different!
Negentropy – To get us started, Jeffrey proposed the following theory: life equals reverse entropy, or negentropy. According to Wikipedia, “a living system imports negentropy and stores it.” If entropy is the universe tending toward disorder, then it would make sense that life is the struggle to do the very opposite, turning chaos into order…until we die, at which point entropy takes over again and our once highly organized molecules disorganize back into earth.…
Time – Barry shared the concept behind the science fiction book Dragon’s Egg. What happens when you encounter a world with an extremely different time scale? Imagine interacting with an intelligent civilization that lives, thinks and develops a million times faster than humans. This encouraged us to wonder what we might be missing in our observations of the universe due to the perceptual limitations imposed by our human experience of time. Anything too fast or too slow could easily be missed all together.
City Birds – AJ told us the story of urban birds quickly evolving their songs to new frequencies in order to communicate over the din of the streets. Smart, right? Unfortunately, the wild flocks can’t understand their new dialect, which puts them at a big disadvantage when it comes to mating. “City Bird meets Country Bird” might make for an entertaining comedy on the big screen, but in real life, any evolutionary variation that hinders procreation spells trouble!
So there you have it. Three relatively new ideas from today’s Coffee Social for your enjoyment!
Written and photographed by Natasha Juliana. Edited by Linda Jay.
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