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am_Unition  ·  3399 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Thenewgreen is in my garage.

There is no known mechanism that I can think of to reduce the overall entropy in our observable universe. You can have a local decrease, like laser-cooling something into a Bose-Einstein condensate, but especially on a cosmological scale, there's no way to significantly delay the system from progressing from low to high entropy, and it's actually believed to be impossible to reverse the flow of universal entropy. Globally, things progress from low to high disorganization. And that's basically the foundation of statistical thermodynamics.

I think what mk is invoking is the "Big Crunch" Theory. That particular fate of the universe isn't yet ruled out, but current projections involving measured universal expansion rates see an acceleration of spacetime on a cosmological scale (a la dark energy), which suggests that we could be headed towards a "Big Rip", but we don't have enough data to really know yet.

And yes, in the event of a "Big Crunch" scenario, the entropy of the universe would be minimized, just as it was at the moment of the Big Bang.

It is more than likely that no one alive today will know what the ultimate fate of the universe will be.