Orbital marker
Is approaching once again
Entropy denied
- UpliftZen

Me: So we are like a back eddy in the giant river of entropy?

GPT4: That's a very poetic way to put it, and it's not a bad analogy. In a river, most of the water flows downstream, but in some places, like where there's a bend or obstacle, an eddy or a smaller counter-current might form that flows upstream for a little while. However, it's important to note that this doesn't affect the overall flow of the river, which is still very much downstream.

Similarly, living organisms can be seen as "eddies" in the entropy "river". They locally decrease entropy by maintaining and organizing their internal structures, creating order out of disorder. But they do this by increasing the entropy elsewhere, much like how the formation of an eddy is balanced by the water flow elsewhere.

However, just like the eddy, organisms are not defying the overall "flow" of the universe towards higher entropy. They're just locally and temporarily creating pockets of decreased entropy, while the total entropy of the closed system (including the environment around the organisms) is still increasing.

So yes, in the grand scheme of things, life can be viewed as a kind of temporary, local "back eddy" in the entropic "river" of the universe. It's a beautiful metaphor for the temporary and localized order that life represents against the universal trend towards disorder.