Development of Civilizations on a Barren Planet

"In his 1824 book, Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire, the 28-year-old French engineer Sadi Carnot worked out a formula for how efficiently steam engines can convert heat - now known to be a random, diffuse kind of energy - into work, an orderly kind of energy that might push a piston or turn a wheel. To Carnot's surprise, he discovered that a perfect engine's efficiency depends only on the difference in temperature between the engine's heat source (typically a fire) and its heat sink (typically the outside air). Work is a byproduct, Carnot realized, of heat naturally passing to a colder body from a warmer one. Carnot died of cholera eight years later, before he could see his efficiency formula develop over the 19th century into the theory of thermodynamics..." https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-q...ution-20170502

Implicit in Carnot's writings is a qualitative but still clear and unambiguous formulation of the second law of thermodynamics:

"A cold body is necessary"

That is, heat cannot be cyclically converted into work unless some temperature gradient is present - a hot body, source of heat, and a cold body, receiver of heat, must be available. The problem is that in 1824 Carnot deduced "A cold body is necessary" from a postulate that eventually turned out to be false:

Carnot's (false) postulate: Heat is an indestructible substance (caloric) that cannot be converted into work by the heat engine.

Unpublished notes written in the period 1824-1832 reveal that, after realizing that his postulate was false, Carnot found "A cold body is necessary" implausible:

Sadi Carnot, REFLECTIONS ON THE MOTIVE POWER OF HEAT, p. 225: "Heat is simply motive power, or rather motion which has changed form. It is a movement among the particles of bodies. Wherever there is destruction of motive power there is, at the same time, production of heat in quantity exactly proportional to the quantity of motive power destroyed. Reciprocally, wherever there is destruction of heat, there is production of motive power." p. 222: "Could a motion (that of radiating heat) produce matter (caloric)? No, undoubtedly; it can only produce a motion. Heat is then the result of a motion. Then it is plain that it could be produced by the consumption of motive power, and that it could produce this power. All the other phenomena - composition and decomposition of bodies, passage to the gaseous state, specific heat, equilibrium of heat, its more or less easy transmission, its constancy in experiments with the calorimeter - could be explained by this hypothesis.. But it would be DIFFICULT TO EXPLAIN WHY, IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF MOTIVE POWER BY HEAT, A COLD BODY IS NECESSARY; why, in consuming the heat of a warm body, motion cannot be produced." http://www.nd.edu/~powers/ame.20231/carnot1897.pdf

Generally, a cold body is not necessary, that is, the second law of thermodynamics is false. The cold body is only TECHNOLOGICALLY necessary as it makes heat engines fast-working. Heat engines working under isothermal conditions (in the absence of a cold body) are commonplace but are too slow and impuissant to be of any technological importance. Except, perhaps, for the case where water is placed in an electric field - the non-conservative force (pressure) that emerges between the cathode and the anode, able to convert ambient heat into work, seems to be quite vigorous:

"However, in experiments in which a capacitor is submerged in a dielectric liquid the force per unit area exerted by one plate on another is observed to decrease... [...] This apparent paradox can be explained by taking into account the difference in liquid pressure in the field filled space between the plates and the field free region outside the capacitor." http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teachin...es/node46.html

"Liquid Dielectric Capacitor" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6KAH1JpdPg

"The Formation of the Floating Water Bridge including electric breakdowns" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17UD1goTFhQ

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