Entropy gets a bad rap due to its association with decay and disorder. Maxwell is trying to go around and “reverse entropy” with little demons as if entropy is a bad thing. Intuitively, I once thought that complex living systems would mean decreased entropy because they are highly ordered. However, scientists like Jeremy England posit that living systems actually excel at accelerating entropy. Life, in this view, takes low-entropy energy and converts it into higher-entropy forms (heat, complex chemical arrangements, movement).
In this view, entropy is a measure of life. Take sunlight hitting the earth: the amount of entropy it creates is a function of warming up the surface. But, if there is life there, a being is animated and increases the amount of entropy beyond what would otherwise occur. A tree is a simple example. Sunlight hits the earth, the dirt is animated. Essentially life throws a bucket of sand in the air, increasing entropy in addition to what just the sun would elicit hitting a dead planet. The same applies to birds, bees, and cities.
Can we measure humanity’s long-term success by how much entropy we create? Now, before you go “burning coal” down the highway, consider what long-term entropy maximization looks like. The objective is not to increase entropy right here, right now, but to increase entropy for as long and as far and as much as we can, across the galaxy, across the visitable universe, and still be increasing entropy right up until heat death.
In order to achieve entropy maximization at that scale, we would need to be very conservative and efficient with our energy and material use today. This means maintaining the quality of environment, cooperation, and literal sustainability and resilience.
Life itself is too absurd to have an inherent goal like entropy, but entropy is at least a physical and measurable outcome of life. In this context, long-term entropy maximization is a potentially useful thermodynamic framing for evaluating actions today. This may be especially useful for evaluating resource use and may need to be paired with other philosophies that consider consciousness and well-being during our entropy maximization quest.