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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Not a physicist. It seems you underestimate the time it takes to get to state. The 2nd law of thermodynamics says in a closed system entropy can only increase until a equilibrium where no interaction can happen anymore and entropy stops increasing. It doesn’t say how that state is reached and how long it will take. Keep in mind that an equilibrium doesn’t mean uniformity. When entropy stops increasing that just means the state of the system stops changing.
In our solar system the sun creates the most entropy because of its size and the amount of fusion. But it will take several billion years for it to become a white dwarf and even then it will probably continue sending out light for many billion years.
Everything is tending towards the heat death of the universe. We’re essentially in a metastable configuration right now, where it’s locally stable but not universally stable. Now why that is, that’s more of a philosophical question, which is an argument often used as a logical explanation as to why a god must exist. Somehow, order must have been in the universe at some point.
It’s not a bad question at all, and the answer is fraught with unsolved problems. In short, the answer is: Because for some reason the universe started off at a state of very low entropy, and has been steadily evolving to a state of higher entropy ever since. We have planets and stars and people and the internet because we’re living in a time when there is still plenty of free energy (not free as in beer) to be had. That will change, but slowly and over a scale of something like 10^100 years.
Eventually though, assuming current trends continue, and assuming that protons decay, the universe will be a relatively uniform field of photons of a relatively uniform energy/temperature. Nothing will be left, nothing will be left to do anything with, and barring some kind of random fluctuation, that will be that.
We’re all just borrowing energy against that day, moving it from here to there, with less and less to show for it, and more and more heat. That is however, not a problem on the order of human lives, or even the likely lifetime of humanity as a species.
You might enjoy this comic based on a Isaac Asimov short story, which more or less asks this question and posits a somewhat fantastical answer:
Edit: HOWEVER… protons may not decay, in which case some atoms would be stable even on very long time scales. It’s also possible that the universe will cease its accelerating expansion and being to contract, or that our vacuum will decay. Lots of possibilities for the future exist.
Edit 2: It’s great to see so many old and new Asimov fans here. Cheers to all of you!
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