For you, or me, or even a bacterium, our internal states are less disordered when we are alive than when we decompose into mush. Being alive means being in a condition of low entropy. Here’s the problem. In physics, the second law of thermodynamics tells us that the entropy of any isolated physical system increases over time. All such systems tend towards disorder, towards a dispersion of their constituent states over time. The second law tells us that instances of organised matter, like living systems, are intrinsically improbable and unstable, and that – in the long run – we’re all doomed.
