Last phrase sounds like a guilt trip plug, but I'll assume it's just me. 
It is what it is. It's probably not a healthy lifestyle for humans, but the planet overall isn't going to care. Egoists that we are, this is of course what we mean when we say we're "destroying the planet". It can't possibly be literal: physically destroying the planet would require the Sun's
total power output for a week, an amount of power we simply don't have control of.
The other side of burning that that coal was at great help in adding even more structure to this world.
First, it helped keeping more of us, the monkeys, alive. Then, some of that coal was used to melt sand into microprocessors, some other part is used as we speak to power those processors. Now, piles and piles of data are harvested and structured it into databases and knowledge.
But why would a database structure be of any relevance relative to real world structures we were talking, by real world thinking matter and energy?
Without going into very bamboozling hypotheses like "we are living in a computer", there are clues that there is a direct equivalence between information and energy, like there is the already accepted equivalence between energy and mass.
Well, right, and thus you can calculate the amount of entropy that all of those things contain.
I'll give you a head start: the entropy of any given material is not very different from any other.
Very high purity silicon crystal sounds like a low entropy material, but it has about the same heat capacity, binding energy, etc. as everything else.
So on a physical basis, we've drawn neat patterns in the sand, but all we have is still just a whole lot of sand, and the ocean of the cosmos is impossibly, unimaginably larger in comparison, ready to wipe away those patterns in an instant. (Gosh, that's kind of a threatening way to put it, but in perspective, over billions or trillions of years, that's not undeserved I guess.)
Even if we had crafted "computronium", it's not obvious to me that it would have any higher or lower entropy than most other materials. It's going to be an incredibly complex substance compared to a crystal, sure -- perhaps it would even release a measurable amount of energy when melted and crystallized into its component elements (and assuming it doesn't store a lot of chemical energy). But that complexity means there's still more disorder left to go, and it need not be any higher entropy than, say, ordinary soda-lime glass.
No, material entropy is a big nothing-burger. Doesn't even begin to register on our planet's energy balance, not by orders of orders of magnitude.
The highest entropy activities we're doing right now, have to do with transformation of bulk materials (concrete, iron?), and motive power (everything we use fuels for). At least... that would be my guess.
We pass around a truly insignificant amount of information. Our best computers are about 0.00001% efficient by an information-theoretic basis. And those computers only make up a negligible fraction* of our total material output. We're still very much in the industrial age, burning fuel for heat for the most part. Our computers are quite useful to us, driving an excitingly disproportionate sum of our economy -- but are utterly, impossibly humble compared to the physical limits of the universe.
*In terms of, say, high-purity silicon output? Which is what, a few million tonnes over the history of semiconductors? We use gigatons of concrete and steel
annually!Imagine how much potential we would have, if we committed that much materiel to computation alone! But then, we wouldn't even have the infrastructure or fuel reserves to power it, let alone the programs to run on it that would allow us to create and solve ever more advanced problems. Problems like, oh I don't know, synthesizing complete manufacturing processes for new, ever more efficient and powerful computers.
That's the curse of the cave-man computation we are at: we aren't even advanced enough to save ourselves from our own inefficiency (again, in an information theoretic sense).
What we have today is far beyond the wildest dreams of any
human of generations past, but we are at still such an incredibly early stage compared to the ultimate limits of these pursuits.
In case my point is not yet clear --
So, at an optimistic stretch, we burnt some coal (matter), gained some very well structured computers in the process, and lots of databases (information), which information is equivalent with energy, as we just showed, and energy is equivalent with mass, as it was already known.
The amount of coal we have burned is, I don't even know, I'd have to look it up -- say a million quads. 10^24 joules.
The amount of information we possess is... something like 10^22 bits? Say that's stored at a whopping
one electronvolt per bit (which seems like a pretty safe level near room temperature, and given a little idle power to run error correction with). 1eV is 1.6e-19 J, so the sum knowledge of the human race amounts to, not even a candy bar's worth of energy with that kind of storage.
Tim
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