Does life increase entropy?
I heard life increases entropy. How?
Entropy is a trippy concept. It’s the reason why it takes conscious effort to clean your room, but getting it messy in the first place is effortless. I’ve often heard of entropy being described as “things getting messier on their own”. Or as the “opposite of order”. But these descriptions are reliant on our human definitions of “messy” and “order”. Your room is messy because the clothes are on the ground instead of inside the drawers. But we choose to label that as messy. Maybe the clothes are in their optimal position when on the floor and not inside drawers.
A more satisfying definition of entropy that I’ve heard is “things in equilibrium”. I like to think of equilibrium as the point where an object is at rest. It’s state will only change if an external force is applied. Your clothes are in equilibrium when they are on the ground. It’s where they naturally end up. And it’s where they will naturally stay until you put conscious effort to clean them up. Equilibrium seems messy to us. Entropy is the force that guides things to reach equilibrium.
Another useful way to think of entropy and equilibrium is “things being evenly distributed”. This seems to be a near fact of reality. Everything is naturally approaching this state. The sugar in your coffee will spread evenly across your cup, people in a bus will disperse evenly among their seats and eventually, all atoms in existence will be spread evenly across the universe, resulting in a dimly-light primordial soup of atoms. Depressing.
Maybe these examples of even dispersion are pointless, because I can just as easily give examples where this does not happen. For example, wealth is distributed unevenly, and stars in a galaxy cluster rather than spread out evenly through space[1]. In fact, normal distributions and uniform distributions are mutually exclusive, yet both show up all over the universe. There must be some underlying lowest common denominator that determines which distribution something falls into.
The universe is maximizing entropy. It is trying to evenly distribute atoms across itself. Why? I don’t know, I’d like to find out.
If the universe is maximizing entropy then how does life come to happen? Let’s ignore the creationist view of life and consider life as emerging from evolution. Life, especially complex multicellular life, like us, is the exact opposite of entropy. It is extremely precise organization of atoms in just the right way. If the universe is maximizing entropy, how does this happen?
One argument I’ve heard is that life is a temporary minimization of entropy to enable a faster increase in entropy. One step back for two steps forward. This means that even though life will temporarily reduce entropy by being extremely organized, the presence of life, the transfer of energy needed to sustain it, the waste produced by it, and many other things, eventually end up increasing entropy far more than if life had never existed in the first place. Life is a net increase in entropy.
I wonder if that is true. In the long run, does biological life increase entropy?
1.Returning to this almost 3 years later, I think gravity is the explanation. See here.