>the energy of all of the living members, but all of the ancestors of all of the living members as well that is destroyed

The law of conservation of energy states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed.

It sure as hell can be wasted though

In this context, what’s destroyed isn’t the energy itself but the product that was yielded from the work it enabled.

If you want to be pedantic, the correct term is probably entropy. That being living irreversibly increased the entropy of the universe, and we wasted that increase in entropy.

"energy" the way OP is using it is bordering on woo. I was simply reminding them of the proper use of the word.

I don't think entropy is necessarily more correct, either. I don't think you or anyone possesses the omniscience to declare that entropy was increased. It could just as well be that some living being decreased entropy in some way, but then we're getting into defining order and disorder and that's outside the scope of what I want to discuss on an internet forum.

OP's asserting that all that "energy" was somehow wasted, but they don't take into account the place those species occupied within ecosystems. Depending on what species you are, the other species being gone is either a good thing or a bad thing or an indifferent thing. No energy was wasted, nothing lasts, nothing is lost. It's the way of the world, or this universe for that matter. If the sun exploded today wiping out the entirety of humanity and everything else on this planet, what is "lost"? My guess is nothing outside of our planet would even notice.

And our "energy" will still live on, in our radio transmissions. So maybe not all would be lost.

Sorry. Let me clarify. For simplicity's sake, consider this hypothetical:

You spend 1 terawatt hour of energy powering a datacenter to come up with a novel protein for a drug by simulating protein interactions.

Your competitor studies an already existing fungus, which may have expended that amount of energy over the combined lifetime of all of its ancestors to arrive at the same design, and gets the novel protein "for free."

One of you had to pay the energy cost, and the other didn't. The fungus is "free" and when it is destroyed, "it" -- that energy expenditure -- is lost forever.

It's not a ridiculous hypothetical because many such things (medicines, food, etc) come from living beings. Some from very obscure living beings. And some that are impossible to buy at any price, like living things that pollinate food, regulate the soil, stuff like that. Thermodynamically it doesn't matter if humanity goes extinct but I think we can do a little better than that!

The existence of any proteins in any fungus is not an automatic solution for anything - even more energy has to be expended to find it, purify it, test it, and notice any benefit for anything. There are likely a billion such proteins in nature right now that will never be discovered as useful for anything.

Targeted research is likely a shorter and less expensive route to "finding" breakthrough medicines, especially since technology evolves exponentially.

> I don't think you or anyone possesses the omniscience to declare that entropy was increased.

It's the second law of thermodynamics. It's why heat only flows into objects colder than the source (in an isolated system). You can argue against it, but I'd be curious what your alternative is for why heat only moves one direction.

It's also what makes perpetual motion machines impossible. Otherwise you'd be able to do nutty things like reversing the flow of heat to expand/contract gases in a chamber, driving a shaft into a generator which would create energy (i.e. expand the total amount of energy in the universe).

> then we're getting into defining order and disorder and that's outside the scope of what I want to discuss on an internet forum.

I think you may be misunderstanding "disorder" in the context of entropy. It's disorder at the chemical level. Energy is stored in bonds in molecules. When those bonds are broken or formed, some amount of the energy stored in those bonds is released as heat. The universe has a constant amount of energy (it can be neither created nor destroyed), this means that heat used to be stored energy. Given that heat can only go from an atom/particle to a colder particle, at some point this means all (or nearly all) energy will eventually be converted to heat. If all the energy is heat, that means particles aren't bound together into molecules, and the universe is disordered at a chemical level.

It has a pretty specific meaning in this exact context.

> OP's asserting that all that "energy" was somehow wasted, but they don't take into account the place those species occupied within ecosystems.

This would be entropy: the amount of energy that was irreversibly converted to heat by those organisms metabolism, and growth, and the same for the things they ate. It's not wasted in the sense that it vanished, but in the sense that we'll never be able to convert some of that heat back into useful energy. At some point the universe will become particle soup, and them existing moved the universe an infinitesimally small amount closer to that soup.

No, the energy was spent and now we have it in the form of petroleum, which we use to advance our civilisation at an extremely fast rate.

Sure, we can burn animals for energy, but the following process:

Nature -> Petroleum -> Refinery -> Power Plant -> Simulation -> R&D -> Production -> Testing -> Drug

is significantly less efficient than:

Nature -> Testing -> Drug

The argument is that we could likely be advancing biotech industries at an even faster rate.

The time energy that goes into designing something is valuable, and we lose access to that once we lose access to that species.

Put in Douglas Adams terms: "If you try to take a apart a cat to find out how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat."