Life wants entropy like sunlight or glucose becase it can do something with it. Heat can speed up chemical reactions which makes a minimal amount useful indirectly but not as an energy source.
PS: Heat gradients are a form of entropy and for example create thermals which are then useful.
You're correct of course, but same difference here. The extra energy will kickstart processes that nurture life.
I was actually pondering whether to expand on "energy", "water", "carbon" and "life" in the original post (none of them trivial concepts) but decided against it. It'd only muddy the waters, so to speak, missing the point:
A submerged data centre will be a net boon to the biological life around it.
> The extra energy will kickstart processes that nurture life.
Why would that be the case? If this were the case, the biological density of the highest-temperature locations in the ocean should be significantly higher than average. This has not been observed. Quite the opposite, actually.
Secondly, in thermodynamic terms, heat is the least useful form of energy. Heat is often the waste product of a chemical/mechanical process and cannot be easily be converted into other forms of energy without significant loss.
And no offense, but water and carbon are both trivial well defined concepts. Energy is also fairly well defined.
Local pockets of increased heat have not been observed to nurture life? Thermals mentioned by OP are just one obvious example.
I agree making use of subtle energy gradients is not trivial, but life is pretty good at it nevertheless. Even in conditions you wouldn't expect it. And no surprise — it had billions of years to evolve that way.
If you wanted to be daring, you could even say that's what life is for.
> Local pockets of increased heat have not been observed to nurture life?
That's absolutely not what the comment you're replying to says. What it says is:
> If this were the case, the biological density of the highest-temperature locations in the ocean should be significantly higher than average.
> Thermals mentioned by OP are just one obvious example.
Thermals are not just heat, and by and large the heat is not a source of energy (sulphur chemistry is the basal energy source of thermals). And shallow waters have much higher biological densities.
Ambient heat is only useful so far as helping the organism improve the efficiency of its chemical and biological reactions, it's extremely rare for it to be an actual energy source (because as you've been told multiple times it's extremely hard to use/harvest). And organisms are generally adapted to a certain level of ambient heat with compensatory mechanisms matching, most don't do very well if you drastically change their ambient heat levels, again aside from micro-organisms with short lifecycle which can adapt extremely quickly.
Listen, my claim is simple: submerged data centres will give rise to richer, more complex ecosystems around them (due to the extra energy, heat convection, increased entropy etc), in a surprisingly short timeframe. Because that's what life's good at.
You disagree, giving reasons I find irrelevant here (a data centre won't make a dent in the average ocean temperature, and certainly won't make it "the highest-temperature location in the ocean"), but I respect that. The good news is that the impact will be easy to evaluate once deployed.
In fact, testing the data centre's impact on the surrounding ecosystem will surely be a mandatory component of any such project, so we'll get to see the hard data. Let evidence be the judge of the "absolutely nots".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics
Life wants entropy like sunlight or glucose becase it can do something with it. Heat can speed up chemical reactions which makes a minimal amount useful indirectly but not as an energy source.
PS: Heat gradients are a form of entropy and for example create thermals which are then useful.