Where does all the *free energy* go? (Tension Universe · Q131 · Free energy and entropy in open systems)

[onestardao]

we talk a lot about entropy on this sub: disorder, information, climate, politics, even personal life.

what we talk about less explicitly is the complementary quantity:

not “how disordered things are”
but “how much useful structure-making power is still available”.

in physics language that is roughly free energy.

the question behind my Q131 problem is simple to state:

in open systems – like the biosphere, an economy, or the internet –
where exactly does free energy come from, where does it get spent,
and how does that show up as entropy in different places?

i’ll describe how i formalise that question, and how i use the word tension in this project.
i am not claiming to solve any deep problem of thermodynamics or foundations here.

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1. Entropy, free energy and open systems in very plain terms

very roughly:

• entropy measures how many microstates are compatible with what you see
• free energy (in any of its forms) measures how much “push” is still available
  to do work, create structure, maintain order against background noise

for a truly isolated system, the story is simple and brutal:

• you have a fixed total energy
• entropy tends to increase
• free energy is gradually degraded into forms that cannot do structured work

but the systems we actually care about are open:

• Earth radiating to space while receiving a low-entropy solar flux
• a living cell exchanging matter and energy with its environment
• an economy powered by fossil fuels and sunlight
• an online community that burns human attention as a scarce resource

in all of these, the interesting structures are sitting on a river of free energy.

Q131 is about making that sentence less poetic and more explicit.

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2. How i use the word “tension” here

in this project i use the word tension in a way that is not standard thermodynamics.

it is not surface tension, mechanical tension, membrane tension, or anything like that.

instead, in the Tension Universe framework, tension is a bookkeeping scalar:

tension measures how hard different levels of description
are pulling against each other when they pretend to describe the same system.

for Q131 the two levels are usually:

• a more microscopic or physical description
  (energies, fluxes, entropy production, constraints)

• a more macroscopic or functional description
  (organisms, organisations, institutions, narratives, goals)

the tension is high when:

• the functional story assumes a lot of sustained, coherent work being done
• but the underlying free energy budget and entropy flows look incompatible with that story

this is not a new physical quantity.
it is a way to say:

“if you really believe this system behaves like your macro story,
then someone, somewhere, must be paying a free-energy bill
that your model is not accounting for.”

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3. A few concrete pictures of Q131

inside the project, Q131 lives as a single Markdown file.
it contains a set of stylised scenarios, for example:

a) Biosphere as an open system

• incoming low-entropy solar radiation
• outgoing high-entropy infrared radiation
• chemical free energy stored in gradients, biomass, fossil fuels

the questions Q131 asks in this scenario:

• which processes actually maintain low-entropy, high-structure states?

• how is free energy partitioned between

  • maintaining existing structure
  • creating new structure
  • accelerating its own depletion (e.g. extracting stored fuels faster)?

b) Economy as a free energy transformer

• primary energy inputs (fossil, nuclear, solar, etc.)
• transformation chains (mining, industry, logistics, digital layers)
• waste heat and material dissipation

here the Q131 framing is:

• how much of the free energy budget ends up as

  • physical infrastructure
  • information structures (software, databases, models)
  • pure heat and low-grade disorder?

• when a narrative says “we can have X level of complexity and growth indefinitely”,
  is that compatible with even very crude free-energy accounting?

c) Information processing and Landauer-style costs

• computation and memory operations consume energy and produce heat
• deleting a bit has a minimum thermodynamic cost in idealised models
• real systems are far less efficient

Q131 does not try to refine Landauer’s principle.
instead it uses it as intuition pump:

• if we build a civilisation where more and more “order” lives in information systems,
  then free energy is increasingly channelled into a particular kind of entropy:

  • heat from data centres
  • waste from hardware turnover
  • cognitive overload and attention depletion on the human side

again, the tension question is:

are our stories about information and progress
even loosely in line with what we know about free energy and dissipation?

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4. Why talk about this on r/Entropy?

from the outside, this sub already uses entropy in three overlapping ways:

1. physics and information
   entropy in thermodynamics, stat mech, information theory

2. world and society
   entropy as a metaphor for political chaos, climate risk, institutional decay

3. personal and existential
   entropy as the feeling that things fall apart unless you keep paying effort

Q131 is an attempt to put a simple structure under that mix:

• instead of only asking “how fast is disorder growing?”
• also ask “who is supplying the free energy, and where does its structure-making power end up?”

some examples of the kind of conversations i hope this framing can support:

• in climate:
  are we simply burning through geological free energy stores
  to maintain a temporary low-entropy bubble of civilisation?

• in politics:
  when institutions degrade, is that because their internal free-energy channels
  (money, trust, attention, legitimacy) have been rerouted elsewhere?

• in information ecosystems:
  are we using massive free-energy inputs
  to create noise that erodes the cognitive free energy of users?

i am not claiming Q131 solves any of these questions.
it is just a disciplined way of saying:
“let’s follow the free energy, and see which narratives survive even crude accounting”.

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5. How Q131 is encoded and what it is for

technically, Q131 is one of 131 “S-class” problems in a text-only framework i call the Tension Universe.

for each problem:

• there is a single Markdown file at an “effective layer”
• no hidden code or black-box model is required to understand it
• both humans and large language models can read exactly the same text
• the goal is to define stress-tests and scenarios, not to announce breakthroughs

for Q131 specifically, the file contains:

• several open-system scenarios like the ones above
• qualitative free-energy and entropy budgets
• explicit questions about where macro narratives and micro accounting disagree

i use it in two ways:

1. as a thinking tool for myself
   to notice when i am secretly assuming a free-energy source that i have not modelled

2. as a stress-test for AI systems
   to see whether they can follow free-energy arguments,
   or whether they only repeat “entropy increases” in a generic way

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6. Invitation

if you work with entropy in physics, information, ecology, economics, or just life:

• i would love to see examples where you already think in “free energy budgets”
• or cases where you feel our societal narratives are clearly in tension
  with any reasonable free-energy accounting

criticisms of this framing are also very welcome,
especially if you know of existing work that already does this better.

Q131 is only one of many problems i am writing in this style.
i recently started a small subreddit to collect them and the experiments built on top: