Entropy & unlikely events

When you talk to physists about the future, you pretty quickly get to a couple inevitable distant future outcomes:

• Heat Death: Gravity pulls everything together until it’s all squished under immense pressure (aka the big squeeze)
• The Big Freeze: everything keeps flying apart until nothing is near anything else

(Apparently these are equivalent)

These are based on physical processes that we know about. Which one the universe end up at depends on some fine details about the amount of mass in the universe.

These processes are ‘normal’ – a variety of things can happen, but most of the time (the vast majority of the time) the normal thing happens.

For example: if there is a rock on a hill, the normal outcome is: it goes down hill. I think this is called Entropy. (Veritasium says I am probably misunderstanding the concept).

Sometimes something abnormal happens: a rock on a hill gets picked up, polished, and mounted on a pedestal on the top floor of a sky scraper (uphill  from its previous position).

The weird thing about the normal outcome of events is that they’re normal when un-perturbed.  Life has a way of perturbing situations. There’s a 50/50 chance of heads or tails on every coin flip. Unless you or I get involved. Pretty sure I can make a coin that doesn’t follow these odds.

So I guess what I’m wondering is: how long can life (very abnormal), go on perturbing the normal outcome of events?

This is probably terribly naive, maybe writing it down will help me get a bit smarter in the future.