The ultimate long-shot bet: trying to profit from the universe's inevitable slide into disorder. Since entropy always increases, "harnessing" it could mean capturing the energy of diffusion, decay, and chaos. More speculatively, it might involve creating localized regions of negative entropy (negentropy) to temporarily reverse decay, repair things perfectly, or create order from chaos without extra energy input. It's the power source of last resort when all the neat, ordered energy is gone, and all you have left is the universal heat death to play with.
Example: "In the far future, their last power source was entropy harnessing. They'd drop probes into the gentle thermal gradients between dying stars, extracting picowatts from the universe's final, pathetic sigh. It was less a power plant and more a hospice for physics."
by Dumuabzu January 29, 2026
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