Abstract
Finding the basic physical foundation contributing to sustainable development is significantly useful in seeking ways to build an enduring human future. This paper introduces the dissipative structure theory to analyze the entropy budgets of the whole coupled human–Earth system and the key processes of the subsystems, and then presents the formulas to calculate these entropy budgets. The results show that the total net negative entropy of the coupled human–Earth system from exchange with space is sufficient, but only about 0.0042% of it is available for sustaining the life activities of the whole coupled system and the quantity of this portion is also not more than sufficient compared with the requirement of human life activities. In addition, the rate of negative entropy consumption by human subsystem from fossil fuels for sustaining modern civilization is too large, nearly a half of the negative entropy rate obtained by photosynthesis on the Earth, which indicates that entirely substituting biomass fuels for fossil fuels may be infeasible. The strategies for sustaining human life activities and modern civilization are proposed in the study, which would provide valuable information for humans to realize sustainable development.
Highlights
Since the term of sustainable development was widely articulated in the 1980s, it has risen rapidly in the public consciousness and the academic focus [1,2,3,4,5], and from that time on people have been seeking ways to forge new relationships between humans and nature [6,7,8,9,10,11], for gaining broad prosperity and a better way of life without environmental pollution, habitat destruction and species extinction
The processes of the exchanges follow the laws of thermodynamics, of which the first law quantifies how much work can be extracted from heat according to the law of conservation of energy, and the second law introduces the function of entropy to describe the state of a system that the change of entropy tells us about the irreversibility of processes, thereby providing us with the direction about the arrow of time
Classical thermodynamics focus on isolated systems which tend toward the state of thermodynamic equilibrium with maximum entropy according to the second law of thermodynamics
Summary
Since the term of sustainable development was widely articulated in the 1980s, it has risen rapidly in the public consciousness and the academic focus [1,2,3,4,5], and from that time on people have been seeking ways to forge new relationships between humans and nature [6,7,8,9,10,11], for gaining broad prosperity and a better way of life without environmental pollution, habitat destruction and species extinction. The emphasis of the study is on the net entropy influx of key processes of these systems from exchanges with their surroundings, which can give an understanding and quantification of underlying general directions into which key processes within or between the subsystems of the coupled human–Earth system evolve in time. These directions can help us deal with the relationship of humans and nature and are thereby essential for achieving sustainable development. The entropy budgets would provide basic physical foundation information contributing to sustainable development, and provoke humans into thinking about the pattern of the social development and the manner of human behaviors, and thereby seek paths to realize the strategy of sustainable development
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