ABSTRACT
In 2010, if any historians or other social scientists still embraced “Vitalism”, it was not under that name; the once lively debate between “Evolutionists” and “Degradationists” described by Henry Adams (1910) seemed as dead as the debaters; and the alarm inspired in the human sciences by the conclusions for humanity (and the human sciences) that Faye (1885) and others had drawn from the Second Law of Thermodynamics (enunciated by physicists c. 1850) had apparently been dissipated or displaced by 20th century physicists’ discoveries of nuclear fission and fusion, and the concomitant extension of the upper bound on how long life as we have come to know it can be energetically sustained by Earth’s (fusion-powered) insolation and (fission-powered) internal heat production.
