There is a fascinated YouTube video about Entropy - The Most Misunderstood Concept in Physics. The video starts with the question:
What does the Earth get from the Sun?
Is it light rays? Heat? Warmth? Vitamin D? Energy? Yeah, energy. Every day, the earth gets a certain amount of energy from the sun. But let see how much energy does the earth radiate back into space relative to that amount that it gets from the sun?
The thing about energy is it never really goes away. You can't really use it all up, if this is so then the earth would get a lot hotter, that would be a problem. The fact is, the Earth radiates into space the same amount of energy as it gets from the Sun. So the question remains - What Earth is really getting from the Sun?
To answer to that question we need to learn something from the Physics. It is called Entropy. In simple terms, Entropy is a measure of disorder or randomness in a system. Think of it as a measure of how spread out the energy is within a system, or how many different ways things can be arranged. Briefly it makes order into disorder.
A system with high entropy is more disordered, while a system with low entropy is more organized. Imagine a messy room versus a tidy one – the messy room has higher entropy. 😉
Entropy increases as energy spreads out within a system. For example, hot coffee slowly cools down as it disperses its energy into room. A higher entropy means less of a system's energy left for work.
Ice melting is an example of entropy increasing as the ice absorbs heat, turning a solid state into a liquid state. Or, when a spoon of salt dissolves in water, the salt molecules become more randomly distributed, less salty, increasing the entropy of the salt in a glass...
I think by now you have understood the concept of Entropy. The universe is constantly trending towards higher entropy, higher disorder, colder space, eventually reaching a state of maximum disorder known as "heat death".
What the Sun really gives Earth?
It is a steady stream of low entropy, the concentrated bundled up energy. The energy that we get from the Sun is more useful than the energy we give back. It's more compact, it's more balanced together.
Plants capture this energy and use it to grow, animals eat plants and use that energy to maintain their bodies and move around. Bigger animals get their energy by eating smaller animals and so on. And each step of the way, the energy becomes more spread out.
Ultimately, all the energy that reaches earth from the Sun is converted into thermal energy, and then it's radiated back into space. But in fact, it's the same amount of energy but with higher Entropy. It can be said, the Earth increases the Entropy of the energy received from the Sun.
We can observe that by looking at the relative number of photons arriving at and leaving the Earth. For each photon received from the Sun, 20 photons are emitted, and everything that happens on Earth, plants growing, trees falling, herds stampeding, hurricanes and tornadoes, people eating, sleeping, and breathing... all of it happens in the process of converting fewer, higher energy photons into 20 times as many lower energy photons.
Without a source of concentrated energy and a way to discard the spread out energy, life on earth would not be possible. It has even been suggested that life itself may be a consequence of the Entropy.
The universe tends toward maximum Entropy - the total chaos, and life offers a way to accelerate that natural tendency, because life is a process of converting low Entropy into high Entropy. You are just observer of all this. Find out who you are.
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