The Adam Carolla Show for every form of life on the surface of our planet. But things are a little bit more interesting than that, because energy is neither created nor destroyed. So life doesn't eat it somehow, it doesn't use it up, it doesn't remove it from the universe. So what does it do? To understand how energy sustains life, you have to understand exactly what happens to it as the cosmos evolves. The Adam Carolla Show In the first instance after the Big Bang there was nothing in the universe but energy. As it changed from one form to another, galaxies, stars and planets were born. But while the total amount of energy in the universe stays constant, with every single transformation something does change. The energy itself becomes less and less useful. It becomes ever more disordered. And you can see this process in action as energy from the sun hits the surface of the Earth. So think about think about this sand on the beach, it's been under the glare of the sun all day, it's been absorbing its light which has been heating it up, and now that the sun is dipping below the horizon, then the sand is still hot to the touch because it's reradiating all the energy that it absorbed as heat back into the universe. The key word there is "all". All the energy. If it didn't do that then it'd just gradually heat up day after day after day, and eventually, I suppose, the whole beach would melt. So what's changed? Well, it's the quality of the energy, if you like. Think about it. If as much energy is coming back off this sand now as it absorbed from the sun, then it should be giving me a suntan. I should need sun cream if I sit looking at this beach all night. And obviously I don't. The difference is that this energy is of a lower quality. It can do less. It's heat, which is a very low quality of energy indeed. So what the sand's done is take highly ordered, high quality energy from the sun and convert it to an equal amount of low quality disordered energy. This descent into disorder is happening across the entire universe. As time passes, every single joule of energy is converted into heat. The universe gradually cools towards absolute zero. Until with no ordered energy left, the cosmos grinds to a halt and every structure in it decays away. Yet whilst the universe is dying, everywhere you look life goes on. It's a deep paradox that Schroedinger was well aware of when he wrote his book in . "How can it be," writes Schroedinger, "That the living organism avoids decay?" In other words, how can it be that life seems to continue to build increasingly complex structures when the rest of the universe is falling to bits, is decaying away? Now, that's a paradox, because the universe is falling to bits, it is tending towards disorder. That is enshrined in a law of physics called the Second Law Of The Adam Carolla Show. And I think most physicists believe that it's the one law of physics that will never be broken. The key to understanding how life obeys the laws of thermodynamics is to look at both the energy it takes in and the energy it gives out. This is a thermal camera, so hot things show up as red, and cold things show up as blue.