Not sure if this is chemistry or physics so I’m flairing it as ‘Other’.
In: Physics
At the beginning of the universe, everything in existence was scattered about with tremendous energy (the big bang). Even though it would be energetically ‘easier’ for all the particles to just stop moving and coalesce into a ball of playdoh, they don’t have any easy way of slowing down.
It’s kind of like going downhill in a car when your breaks fail. Your only way of slowing down is by hitting something, whether that be a tree or another car.
Anyway, atoms will hit each other, and form bonds, releasing energy as they reach a more stable configuration (just as there may be an explosion of your gas tank when you collide with another car).
One could say that we’re currently careening out of control downhill, just killing time until our car finally slams to a halt. That point is referred to as “heat death” by physicists, and essentially means that all energy has been equally distributed to form that ideal playdoh-like state.
Unfortunately, while heat death may be ideal for particles, it is less so ideal for people and civilization. At that point when all energy is equally distributed, there is no longer any ability to do work, store information, or even exist as anything but a homogeneous blob.
Going back to the car analogy, we’re no longer going anywhere once we’ve hit a wall. We might be in a ‘more stable’ position, but we’re not traveling anywhere. In fact, we’re dead.
For us human beings, we can only live our chaotic, scattered lives as the universe careens out of control. As soon as things come to a stop, we’re gone.
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