Starting  from  the  idea  that  to  move,  work,  communicate,  it  is  necessary  to  be  constantly supplied with energy, that the natural selection favors the living organism which dissipates the energy most quickly (Lotka,1922, p.149), and that the basis of the national economy is the struggle for energy (Soddy, [1933]2014, p.63), the astronomer Eric Chaisson (2001, p.17) drew a curve that shows the energy dissipatedper unit of mass (figure 1), and reveals the emergence of structures capable of dissipating more and more energy over the history of  the  universe.  Human  societies  are  at  the  top,  since  human  beings  are  the  only  ones  to have industries, services and all kinds of products that dissipate a lot of energy.

It is disturbing to contemplate that the most distinguishing feature of living things is the high rate at which they dissipate energy and that human societies are at the very top of the list. While it is true that the Earth, considered as 'the system' exists on a timescale that far transcends the limit of individual human lives and of the lives of cultures and of species, considerations of the role of resource depletion - or dissipation - in the demise of numerous civilizations should give us pause. While the solar system will last for billions more years we may well be able to burn out our own civilization, culture and ecosystem in a stunningly shorter time.

As  astrophysicist  François Roddier  (2014,  pp.2-4)  notes,  dissipative  structures  memorize information   about   their   environment.   The   more   a   dissipative structure   memorizes information,  the  more  it  dissipates  energy.  But  the  faster  it  dissipates  energy,  the  faster  it changes  its  environment,  so  that  the  information  it  memorizes  quickly  becomes  obsolete. The dissipative structure then has more and more difficulty dissipating energy. To be able to continue  to  do  this,  it  must  constantly  restructure  itself  in  order  to  finally  reach  a  critical point.  In  this  sense,  the  more  a  human  society  seeks  to  adapt  itself  to  an  evolving environment,  the  more  it  dissipates  energy,  therefore  more  it  makes  it  evolve.  Each structure will seek to adapt itself faster and faster until where the time of adaptation can no longer decreases. In this context, its vitality takes a hit and goes off gradually.If  the  implications  of  out-of-equilibrium  thermodynamics  suggest  a  likely  collapse  of  the most energy-dissipating human societies, the question then is if it is possible to avoid or at least delay collapse of such societies. To do this, the dynamics of the process needs to be understood in order to evolve slowly enough to continually have the time to adapt itself far from the obsession with competitiveness that feed a frantic race that have no other aim than to keep a market share.

So what light do these considerations throw upon our fundamental problem?

Thus,  the  conception  of  laws  in  thermodynamics  is  different  from  that  commonly  accepted in  economics  where,  ultimately,  there  is  no  choice  but  to  adapt  or  disappear;  it  is synonymous with common property and, more generally, with trend or regularity empirically observable.  In  other  words,  it  is  not  performative.  Most  economists  forget  or  are  unaware that  the  answers  provided  by  models  are  valid  only  in  a  given  context:  there  are  no universal economic laws valid at all times and in all places.

Moreover,  the  non-equilibrium  thermodynamics,  which  postulates  the  existence  of  a  local thermodynamic  equilibrium  for  each  of  the  elementary  subsystems  associated  with  an element  of  space-time,  opens  the  field  to  diversity  and  sensitivity  to  initial  conditions.  As Henri Poincaré  (1908b,  p.72),  points  out, "if  it  may  happen  that  small  differences  in  the initial conditions generate very large differences in the final phenomena; a small mistake on the first would produce a huge mistake on the last ones. Prediction becomes impossible".

The  facts  of  everyday  life  in  the  field  of  alternative  and  renewable  energy,  which  are generally  ignored  in  economics,  become  worthy  objects  of  study  that  need  to  be  carefully studied by energy engineers, which undermines any  fixed point,  any  formula  that  is ready, any step that starts with some certainty or leads to certainty. In the world of certainty, there is no room for questioning, nor for substantive debate. There are only answers, ready-made solutions,  denying  time,  space,  and  local  cultural  heritage.  However,  as  Ilya  Prigogine (1998)  pointed  out  in  an  interview,  thirty  years  ago, "complexity  is  when the  truth  is  no longer certain, and uncertainty is not more ignorance". Moreover, the enemy of complexity, noted Edgar  Morin  (1990,  p.254), "is  not  the  simplicity,  it  is  the  mutilation.  Mutilation  can take  the  form  of  one-dimensional  conceptions  or  reductive  conceptions".