> I don't think you or anyone possesses the omniscience to declare that entropy was increased. It's the second law of thermodynamics. It's why heat only flows

> I don't think you or anyone possesses the omniscience to declare that entropy was increased. It's the second law of thermodynamics. It's why heat only flows into objects colder than the source (in an isolated system). You can argue against it, but I'd be curious what your alternative is for why heat only moves one direction. It's also what makes perpetual motion machines impossible. Otherwise you'd be able to do nutty things like reversing the flow of heat to expand/contract gases in a chamber, driving a shaft into a generator which would create energy (i.e. expand the total amount of energy in the universe). > then we're getting into defining order and disorder and that's outside the scope of what I want to discuss on an internet forum. I think you may be misunderstanding "disorder" in the context of entropy. It's disorder at the chemical level. Energy is stored in bonds in molecules. When those bonds are broken or formed, some amount of the energy stored in those bonds is released as heat. The universe has a constant amount of energy (it can be neither created nor destroyed), this means that heat used to be stored energy. Given that heat can only go from an atom/particle to a colder particle, at some point this means all (or nearly all) energy will eventually be converted to heat. If all the energy is heat, that means particles aren't bound together into molecules, and the universe is disordered at a chemical level. It has a pretty specific meaning in this exact context. > OP's asserting that all that "energy" was somehow wasted, but they don't take into account the place those species occupied within ecosystems. This would be entropy: the amount of energy that was irreversibly converted to heat by those organisms metabolism, and growth, and the same for the things they ate. It's not wasted in the sense that it vanished, but in the sense that we'll never be able to convert some of that heat back into useful energy. At some point the universe will become particle soup, and them existing moved the universe an infinitesimally small amount closer to that soup.