The Crash Course - Chris Martenson [67]
A closed system is any defined set of space, matter, energy, or information that we care to draw a box around and study. The universe itself is a system, and within that largest of all systems, one can define any numbers of smaller systems. For example, our planet is a system, as is your body, your house, or a bathtub full of water. A closed system is a system having no interaction or communication with any other system—no energy, matter, or information flowing into or out of it. The universe itself is a closed system. There is no “outside” the universe, no other system beyond its boundaries that it can interact with.
The second type of system is an open system, with energy and matter flowing into and out of it. Such a system can use the energy and matter flowing through it to temporarily fight entropy and create order, structure, and patterns for a time. Our planet, for example, is an open system; it sits in the middle of a river of energy streaming out from the sun. This flow of energy enables the creation of large, complex molecules which in turn have enabled life, thus creating a biosphere that is teeming with order and complexity.
Closed systems always have a predictable end state. Although they might do unpredictable things along the way, they always, eventually, head toward maximum entropy equilibrium. Open systems are much more complicated. Sometimes they can be in a stable, equilibriumlike state, or they can exhibit very complex and unpredictable behavior patterns that are far from equilibrium—patterns such as exponential growth, radical collapse, or oscillations. As long as an open system has free energy, it may be impossible to predict its ultimate end state or whether it will ever reach an end state.1
The most important concept here is that order and complexity arise in any open system (such as our economy) if and only if energy is consumed. Let me restate this critical point: Order and complexity arise as a consequence of taking concentrated energy and reducing it to a less concentrated form, extracting useful work and generating heat along the way.
Our economy has been exponentially growing in complexity by leaps and bounds, as Beinhocker captures in this observation:
Retailers have a measure, known as stock keeping units (SKUs) that is used to count the number of types of products sold by their stores. For example, five types of blue jeans would be five SKUs. If one inventories all the types of products and services in the Yanomamö [stone age tribe] economy, that is, the different models of stone axes, the number and types of food, and so on, one would find that the total number of SKUs in the Yanomamö economy can probably be measured in the several hundreds, and at the most thousands. The number of SKUs in the New Yorker’s economy is not precisely known, but using a variety of data sources, I very roughly estimate that it is on the order of 10 to the 10th (in other words, tens of billions).
To summarize, 2.5 million years of economic history in brief: for a very, very, very long time not much happened; then all of a sudden, all hell broke loose. It took 99.4 percent of economic history to reach the wealth levels of the Yanomamö, 0.59 percent to double that level by 1750, and then just 0.01 percent for global wealth to leap to the levels of the modern world.2
The amount of economic complexity required to build, track, ship, and utilize tens of billions of items is enormous. We can only describe our economy as a complex system that, like any other, owes its complexity to the continuous throughput of energy.
The purpose of this section of the book is to explore the connection between the economy and energy, and then ask what will happen to our economy