FROM OUR DEMOGRAPHICS DESK

IT MAY BE the hidden slow-acting poison that no one notices until it’s too late, namely the richer your society gets the more distracted it becomes, and the less children it has. Until one day it has no children.

“People who even understand the concept usually see entropy – the tendency towards future disorder – as a purely physical phenomenon, but it may be that it has an intellectual dimension too,” says Dr Eugene Ennix of the Don’t Forget To Turn Off The Lights Foundation, a privately funded research institute based in Berlin, that maps the influence of the Second Law of Thermodynamics on less studied aspects of existence.

“It works insidiously. The wealthier communities get, the more comfortable they become with their lifestyle, the less likely they are to allow anything interfere with that arrangement. Death by distraction, distraction being entropy at work. So many things to do, places to visit, people to meet, all taking you in different directions. And then you actually die. But you die without having done what is arguably the only significant thing you can every do in a lifetime – reproducing yourself. Because you’ve let your life distract you from life, which is a much greater thing. And slowly but surely the generations shrink, until there’s no one left. Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way. We fight entropy in all sorts of ways ever day. It’s just that this version hardly reveals itself till the damage is complete.”