Could someone explain how entropy is connected to the human body?

Question

I hear a lot of comments about how entropy is related to aging and death but I was reading up about it and I cannot seem to fully understand it.

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Answer 1

Entropy is a measure of how many possible ways there are for a bunch of particles to be arranged in this particular way. Let’s take a million bricks and arrange them into a building. There is a certain number of ways these bricks can be rearranged while still comprising that same building. And now let’s push that building over and turn it into a pile of bricks. The number of ways a million bricks can be just a pile is much larger than the number of ways they can be a particular building. This means that the entropy of a pile of bricks is larger than the entropy of a building. In cause of a human body, the number of ways its molecules can be arranged so that the body is actually alive and functioning is rather limited. Conversely, a dead body can have its molecules arranged in pretty much any way and still stay a dead body. Therefore, the entropy of a dead body is larger than the entropy of a living body. The second law of thermodynamics says that in a closed system entropy never decreases. Therefore, constructing a building or growing a human – activities that decrease entropy locally – require using external energy and increasing entropy elsewhere.