 Now we are very fortunate as living creatures to live in the universe, which is in a highly non equilibrium state from the get-go As we say and how do we know this? Well, we know an amazing amount about the early universe This is a map of the temperature of the night sky and the temperature of the night sky If you look past all the stars past all the galaxies is about 2.7 degrees Kelvin and very close to absolute zero And that is the heat left over from the Big Bang Just a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang the universe became transparent and the heat from the Big Bang was released And we're still seeing that heat today It's just shifted down to this very cold temperature by the expansion of the universe But the initial condition of the universe was not perfectly flat. It was a little bit lumpy Okay, and each of these little temperature fluctuations, which are very small Map the lumpiness of the universe at its very earliest stages You can think of this as the kind of lumps in the primordial soup as we like to call it And what's interesting about that is ever since that time, which is about 13.6 billion years ago Those lumps have been falling together under gravity and forming interesting structures And they're still doing that today and they're falling together to more informed for example stars and galaxies This is a very humbling picture because it shows a survey not of stars But of whole galaxies of stars Galaxies that contain billions of stars each of these little specs in this picture is a whole is a galaxy And there are thousands and thousands of them here and you see that the universe is is a kind of it's not uniform It's a kind of foam or lumpy mass and it is believed that these galaxies are actually falling together From those primordial lumps that I showed you in the previous picture and we're looking out here almost 2 billion light years into the past And so as the as the matter in the universe falls together it forms stars stars produce higher elements They send heat to the to the universe and so on and that process is ongoing So ultimately the universe's entropy is constantly being produced and produced and produced The universe is a very non-equilibrium place if we waited at infinite length of time the universe might become boring But believe me that's going to be a very long time from now. We don't need