Like why planet? Why sphere? Why is there a solar system? Why system instead of no system? How did entropy create anti-entropy agents? Bees, humans, anything that builds non-random structures?
Sorry if this is a bad question, it just popped into my head and it won’t go away.
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>How did entropy create anti-entropy agents?
It never did. Everything takes more energy to make than it puts out. Nothing even comes close to 100% efficiency on returns, and you’re assuming that planets and systems somehow produce more than 100% of the energy used to bring them into existence in the first place. Anything that happens causes entropy, even building structures and power plants. The net loss is always greater than the gain. If you could gain more than you lost, then you would have infinite energy and could reverse entropy. As far as we know, that’s impossible.
>Like why planet? Why sphere? Why is there a solar system? Why system instead of no system?
These are all easily answered by the laws of physics. Gravity exerts energy equally in all directions. This makes mass attract into nice balls of material. Mass that doesn’t fall into the sun is in constant freefall in orbit, but eventually even orbits decay. So the system we have now didn’t always exist, and will eventually not exist anymore in the future. There is no such thing as an anti-entropy agent.
>Bees, humans, anything that builds non-random structures?
Life, as complex and amazing as it may be, is still powered entirely by the sun and limited by all the available material on Earth. The sun is inputting energy into the Earth ecosystem, but the sun is losing vastly more amounts of energy in the meantime. The Earth doesn’t neatly collect 100% of the energy, and converting that energy into something else causes even more losses. So while it may look like the Earth is an amazing anti-entropy dynamo, it’s actually like blasting a flamethrower (sun) onto a firecracker (earth). Most of the flames don’t hit the firecracker, and the flames that do light the wick lead the firecracker to make explosive reactions at far less the energy output of the flamethrower itself. This also significantly wastes flamethrower fuel that would be more than enough to light thousands of firecrackers. I hope that makes sense.
Imagine you want to make brownies. You start with a clean, orderly kitchen and neat bowls of ingredients. As you mix things, your kitchen gets messier, and so does your oven and the brownie pan. And then when you eat the brownies you make even more mess.
When you’re done, you have more mess than when you started: but you also got brownies for a while.
The universe is kind of like that. Big, low-entropy mixes of matter and energy are slowly making the universe into a high-entropy place. But along the way, we temporarily get cool stuff like stars and planets. The local entropy is reduced temporarily, but the *total* entropy still increased.
At the end, it’ll all be high-entropy: but we also got planets and stars and life and stuff for a while.
This is actually one of the major questions of philosophy of physics! I will come back to answer this in detail at some other time
Because we aren’t *”there”* yet.
**This** is between the big bang and the big nothing. Its like we are all in a car currently on a road trip, from something to nothing.
[Here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA) is a really interesting video on the (possible) ultimate fate of the universe.
Simple answer: energy in.
In an energy neutral environment, things tend toward entropy, but you’d be hard pressed to find an environment that isn’t getting fresh injections of energy.
The Earth gets sunlight, for example.
I think it’s a cycle really.. A chaotic system, at some point, will become ordered and an ordered system will, at some point, become chaotic. It’s the ebb and flow of reality
Sorry to get all philosophical
Stars are really big. Flying around Earth in a commercial jet takes about 45 hours. If you tried that on the Sun, you’d be flying for 19 years.
All that energy causes systems to form. People, bees, snowflakes, everything. The energy to make it comes from the sun. If you were to add it all up, *the sun loses more energy than the planets gain*. But Earth gains energy, and that’s where most order comes from.
Entropy DOES NOT EQUAL Complexity
This is a question I had too – how do we see order in the world around us if entropy is supposed to be increasing? But what is important to understand is the difference between order and complexity.
If we look at a human, what does it do – fundamentally, we try survive. But surviving involves turning food into energy and using that energy to generate heat, to move, to cause disorder. These all involve complex processes, that may seem ordered, but are actually creating disorder.
Similarly, the sun compresses hydrogen to form helium and releases vast amounts of energy, increasing entropy. There may be several types of coordinated fusion happening but it is all complexity, not entropy.
So why does it happen at all? It is a positive feedback loop. Provide energy to a system and it can do complex things to generate more energy – give a human food and they will think of ways to build tools that help them cause more disorder – it is just a way of speeding up the conversion of order to disorder.
Source – A great minute physics video – have a google of it, it’s a better explainer than me
The Universe gets more messy with time — but part of it can get in order, as long as another part gets *even more* disordered.
Rack up a set of pool balls (and block the pockets), and break them with the cue. Call the energy you used to hit the cue, **X**. The question: can you return the balls back to the rack?
Of course you can. Can you come up with a way to do it that, even if you do it a whole bunch of times, uses *less* energy than **X**?
The ELI5 answer is “no”. That’s why cars break down, but people have to fix them. Rooms get messy, and people need to clean them. You have to mess up the *whole universe* more, to tidy up your corner a little less.
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