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Hey, great article; have you considered tracking how many calories you can burn without gaining weight, or how much heat you produce, as a local version of the civilisational energy consumption metric?

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Yes, a human's individual body heat production does contribute to entropy maximization but pretty minutely as compared to one's potential contributions by other less direct means. It's just about measuring the opportunity cost, but generally exercise doesn't negate one's ability to contribute to the entropy maximization by intellectual means—it often even accelerates it by improving mental well-being. So yeah it's definitely a pretty based e/acc & ved/acc objective function, as long as you don't overindex on it and forget the opportunity cost.

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Here is a line from Nick Lane's book called "Power, sex, suicide: Mitochondria and the meaning of life": "Gram per gram, even when sitting comfortably, you are

converting 10 000 times more energy than the sun every second".

It seems to me that it's not just energy consumption/heat dissipation/entropy generation, but how concentrated that energy consumption is (in both time and space) that leads to everything good in life e.g. intelligent and empathetic organisms, as opposed to a relatively 'simple' object like the Sun. Meaning that burning huge amounts of fuel may not be as progressive as improving the metabolism of a human, in terms of energy consumption per unit time and space. Mortality is lowest at age 12, and per unit mass, 12 year olds consume far more energy than older humans.

Let me know what you think.

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