Frederick, you're on to something. Let me try to rephrase it, I hope without violence to your basic concepts.

[But first, are you related to Bott the Hungarian mathematician who taught at Harvard? He let me -- a highschooler auditing his intro to group theory -- present my proof of the Bernoulli numbers to his class when he was away.]

I think it was Jacque Monod who explained that the negentropy that life represents requires an essentially steady flow of energy through the system to counter the entropy which leads to dead and decay. Of course, what goes in must come out, so the high-grade energy that goes in comes out as lower-grade energy. Thus the net effect is greater entropy (no violating that!), but an "oasis" of negentropy is preserved.

The reason life in general has persist so long is because of the injection of high-grade energy from the sun. Indeed, vast "carbon sinks" were created by the overabundance of this high-grade energy. As we extract energy from these oil deposits, we inject lower-grade energy into the environment (call it pollution, if you will). This cannot go on forever.

Even if (when?) we find a means of accessing more solar energy, we must also find a way of discarding, off-Earth, the resultant low-grade energy. Maybe we can send it to Mars, where Musk serves as our extraterrestrial junkman.