You would be trying to run the amount and speed of life down on an asymptotic curve that was nevertheless just slightly faster than the curve towards total entropy.
Is the total subjective time finite or infinite?
That said, even with total entropy you get the occasional quantum fluctuation that creates a small, local gradient again - in fact, arbitrarily large gradients if you wait arbitrarily long times;
Does the expansion of space pose a problem? If you had a universe of a constant size, you'd expect fluctuations in entropy to create arbitrarily large gradients in energy if you wait long enough, but if it keeps spreading out, the probability of a gradient of a given size ever happening would be less than one, wouldn't it?
Also, wouldn't we all be Boltzmann brains if it worked like that?
Is the total subjective time finite or infinite?
The intention was to make it infinite, otherwise there's no use to the process. You'll notice that the laws of thermodynamics don't say anything about the shape of the downward trend, so it is at least conceivable that it allows a non-convergent series.
...If you had a universe of a constant size, you'd expect fluctuations in entropy to create arbitrarily large gradients in energy if you wait long enough, but if it keeps spreading out, the probability of a gradient of a given size ever happening would be le
In response to falenas108's "Ask an X" thread. I have a PhD in experimental particle physics; I'm currently working as a postdoc at the University of Cincinnati. Ask me anything, as the saying goes.
This is an experiment. There's nothing I like better than talking about what I do; but I usually find that even quite well-informed people don't know enough to ask questions sufficiently specific that I can answer any better than the next guy. What goes through most people's heads when they hear "particle physics" is, judging by experience, string theory. Well, I dunno nuffin' about string theory - at least not any more than the average layman who has read Brian Greene's book. (Admittedly, neither do string theorists.) I'm equally ignorant about quantum gravity, dark energy, quantum computing, and the Higgs boson - in other words, the big theory stuff that shows up in popular-science articles. For that sort of thing you want a theorist, and not just any theorist at that, but one who works specifically on that problem. On the other hand I'm reasonably well informed about production, decay, and mixing of the charm quark and charmed mesons, but who has heard of that? (Well, now you have.) I know a little about CP violation, a bit about detectors, something about reconstructing and simulating events, a fair amount about how we extract signal from background, and quite a lot about fitting distributions in multiple dimensions.