"A living organism is like a running clock. If it is not wound up,
it will sooner or later run out of free energy and stop. If the clock
of life on earth would be left to run down without rewinding, it would
take less than one hundred years for all life on the planet to approach
its end. First, green plants would die from starvation. Man and other
animals who feed on plants would follow. And finally, bacteria and fungi
feeding on dead animal and plant tissues would exhaust their food and die too."