SINK
| Collection | International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics |
|---|---|
| Year | 2004 |
| Vol. (num.) | 2(2) |
| ID | ◀ 3058 ▶ |
| Object type | General information |
A fixed point that acts as an attractor for all points in its neighborhood.
There is no escape from a sink.
2. A place in the environment of a system which receives waste from the system.
Different types of waste go to different types of sinks, which receive either material (rubbish dumps of many different types) or energetic waste (f. ex. the atmosphere, as receptor of heat, i.e. degraded energy).
As the use of materials and energy is growing exponentially, the problem of sinks is growing at the same pace. This introduces the need for reusing as much as possible all kind of waste as sources of useful resources, i.e. the need for recycling.
Recently, we also started to create information sinks, by accelerated accumulation of unused (or unusable) data and premature invalidation of techniques. This will probably become a very serious problem in a near future.