Pre Entropian Pot Shards

2017

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Entropy makes sure that museum staff just can’t catch a break. By the time artifacts make it to a good museum, entropy has inevitably imposed disorder: Stuff is broken, mixed with junk, and generally a mess. It’s up to the tireless staff to sort it out and restore order.

 

However, rare artifacts surviving from the Pre-Entropian period are a shining counterexample. Being Pre-Entropian, they instead invite the staff to mess them up and then restore their own order. This piece is a vase surviving from that long-ago civilization.

 

Notes on the Pre-Entropians:

A flourishing civilization before the last Ice Age, the Pre-Entropians lived in an era when the Earth was in a region of space free from the rules of entropy. The Pre-Entropians saw nothing unusual in unscrambling an egg, for example. Sadly, their civilization collapsed when one of them discovered fire. Upon lighting the first match, wood ashes began to combine with carbon dioxide to form firewood. Of course, being the reverse of fire, the process consumed heat energy from the room. Within hours, all of the Pre-Entropians froze to death and the Ice Age followed. Over the millennia, the Earth has passed into a region of space in which entropy is the rule. Museum staff now must contend with broken stuff, but at least they aren’t all frozen!