There would be no great entropy gradients in the universe, no time asymmetry, and of course, no life. Local time-asymmetry, such as the decay of any biological system from the leftovers in the back of your refrigerator to our own bodies must be accounted for by connecting it with the ongoing expansion of the universe and its earliest evolution. This is a long way from the notion of an isolated and noninteracting system that Boltzmann initially assumed. When you pour cold milk into hot coffee and the mixture comes to the same temperature and a greater entropy than when the fluids were separated, you profit from the universe's ongoing expansion and its cooling before nuclear reactions could transform the universe into a high entropy state. Similarly, that we all face the irreversible process of death, with its massive entropy increase, is traceable to the earliest and largest processes in the universe.
Irreversible processes are also essential to life.
If metabolic processes did not irreversibly transform my lunch, not only would I get indigestion, I would not live. That which sustains me also destroys me. This echoes the Buddha s fire sermon that showed how our desires are like a raging fire. They propel us through samsara , make us who we are as conventional beings, and eventually destroy us. . . . . . . . . . The doctrine of emptiness in the Middle Way school of Buddhism, teaches that all things, from the tiniest particle in Boltzmann's box, to a star in a distant galaxy, to my own body and mind, lack independent or inherent existence.