I want to tell about my vision of the phenomenon of life.
I apologize in advance, I will use ready-made text fragments, as my knowledge of English will not allow me to accurately give the idea.
"Entropy".
Part of the inner energy of the closed system or the energy aggregate of the universe that cannot be used, in particular cannot pass or be converted into mechanical work. The most distinct effect of entropy is seen in the example of thermodynamic processes. So, heat never completely goes into mechanical work,transforming into etc. types of energy. It is noteworthy that in reversible processes, the value of entropy remains unchanged, while irreversible,on the contrary, steadily increases, and this increase is due to the reduction of mechanical energy. Consequently, all the many irreversible processes that occur in nature are accompanied by a decrease in mechanical energy, which should eventually lead to universal paralysis, or, in other words, "heat death of the universe". But such a conclusion is valid only in the case of postulated totalitarianism of the universe as a closed empirical given. Christ. theologians, based on entropy, talked about the limb of the world, using it as proof of God's existence.
Entropy and life "Negative entropy" was introduced by Erwin Schrödinger in his 1944 popular-science book
What is Life?
Erwin Schrödinger explains how a living system exports entropy to keep its own entropy low. Using the term negentropy, he could express his idea succinctly: a living system imports negentropy for self-preservation:
“A living organism continuously increases its entropy, or, otherwise, produces positive entropy and, thus, approaches a dangerous state of maximum entropy, which is death. He can avoid this state, that is, remain alive, only by constantly extracting negative entropy from his environment. Negative entropy is what the body eats. Or, to put it less paradoxically, what is essential in metabolism is that the body manages to free itself of all the entropy it has to produce while it is alive. "
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montycrusto wrote wonderfully about crystallization and other forms of self-organization, which also come with a decrease of entropy.
About crystals. The stability of molecules and crystals is due to the same principles and a molecule might be called "the germ of a solid." On the other hand, an amorphous solid, without crystalline structure, should be regarded as a liquid with a very high viscosity. Schrödinger believes the heredity material to be a molecule, which unlike a crystal does not repeat itself. He calls this an aperiodic crystal. Its aperiodic nature allows it to encode an almost infinite number of possibilities with a small number of atoms. He finally compares this picture with the known facts and finds it in accordance with them.
Schrödinger's "paradox"
In a world governed by the second law of thermodynamics, all isolated systems are expected to approach a state of maximum disorder. Since life approaches and maintains a highly ordered state, some argue that this seems to violate the aforementioned second law, implying that there is a paradox. However, since the biosphere is not an isolated system, there is no paradox. The increase of order inside an organism is more than paid for by an increase in disorder outside this organism by the loss of heat into the environment. By this mechanism, the second law is obeyed, and life maintains a highly ordered state, which it sustains by causing a net increase in disorder in the Universe. In order to increase the complexity on Earth—as life does—free energy is needed and in this case is provided by the Sun.
It turns out that life "lives" at the expense of the Universe, increasing its measure of chaos. The Universe can rightfully consider us a parasite, a "cancer".