The opposite of entropy is order, an unlikely state like an unbroken egg, but if order declines by universal law, why is it all around us? Day follows night, seasons cycle, and plants produce not only food but also the air we breathe, in a synergistic, self-regulating system that some call Gaiea.
Is life on earth then just a local anomaly that bucks the universal trend? For example, a fridge that keeps beer cold on a hot day is an anomaly, but it doesn’t deny the second law because it is powered by electrical energy, so is the earth the same? It has the sun to power it but earth isn’t the only planet that orbits a star, they all do, so it may be lucky but it isn’t an anomaly. It also needs order above it as the earth could only evolve life if the sun kept its planets in order, and that required the galaxy to keep its stars in order, so if life depends on a cosmic order, it isn’t an anomaly.
Another possibility that physics allows is that the big bang was highly ordered, so life still occurs because the universe is still only half-way through its devolution:
“The ultimate source of order, of low entropy, must be the big bang itself. … The egg splatters rather than unsplatters because it is … the drive toward higher entropy … initiated by the extraordinarily low entropy state with which the universe began.” (Greene, 2004), p173-174.
In this reverse logic, our universe began very ordered because the second law is true, but that the initial chaos was highly ordered makes no sense at all. How is the white-hot plasma that came before atoms and molecules formed, let alone stars, very ordered? If there was a prize for backward thinking (Note 1), this would surely be a top contender.
Life is highly ordered, so how did it begin? Our earth is estimated to be 4.54 billion years old but for most of that time, it hosted single cell organisms like bacteria. Over two billion years ago, as continents formed and volcanoes erupted, bacteria produced oxygen in a great oxidation event, to give an atmosphere suitable for animals later. Another billion years passed, then somehow, somewhere, the seemingly impossible happened. Two cells that worked differently, archaea and bacteria, merged into the complex cell that allowed plants, animals, and us (Lane, 2015). Modern life began about half a billion years ago, not long in the earth’s timeline but a crucial event for us. The chances of life arising on earth are far beyond a trillion to one, so it took a long time, but it happened. To call the evolution of life a devolution based on a heat engine law is then ridiculous.
We arrived about three million years ago but bacteria have survived on our planet for billions of years. For example, bacteria in boxes placed outside the International Space Station for a year came back to life when they returned to earth. Under harsh conditions, some bacteria form spores that are dead metabolically but revive when conditions are right, even after many years, so they could hitch a ride on a meteor to travel between planets. The panspermia hypothesis, that life can evolve on one planet and spread to another, would then let bacteria from mars colonize the earth.
Whether this occurred or not we don’t know but bacteria exist on earth, so of the mind-boggling 160 billion planets in our galaxy, chances are that others host them too. If so, a galaxy that hosts life in many places isn’t what the second law predicts after 14 billion years of decay!
That modern life arose despite seemingly impossible odds suggests another universal principle is in operation, which is now proposed to be evolution.
Note 1. Backward thinking explains an already known answer by tweaking it to fit the facts, or the facts to fit it, so it produces no new knowledge. In contrast, forward thinking begins with a question and lets the evidence provide an answer, so it does produce new knowledge. Science is based on forward thinking not backward thinking (see Research Roadmap).