Reading about Ernest Shackleton stuck in a boat (the James Caird)…

… the struggle against the sea is an act of physical combat, and there is no escape. It is a battle against a tireless enemy in which men never actually wins; the most that he can hope for is not to be defeated.

— Alfred Lansing, Endurance p.223

This so very closely matches the short version of the laws of thermodynamics:

1. You can’t win
2. You can’t break even
3. You can’t get out of the game

From the long version:

The zeroth law of thermodynamics defines thermal equilibrium and forms a basis for the definition of temperature: If two systems are each in thermal equilibrium with a third system, then they are in thermal equilibrium with each other.

The first law of thermodynamics states that, when energy passes into or out of a system (as work, heat, or matter), the system’s internal energy changes in accordance with the law of conservation of energy.

The second law of thermodynamics states that in a natural thermodynamic process, the sum of the entropies of the interacting thermodynamic systems never decreases. A common corollary of the statement is that heat does not spontaneously pass from a colder body to a warmer body.

The third law of thermodynamics states that a system’s entropy approaches a constant value as the temperature approaches absolute zero. With the exception of non-crystalline solids (glasses), the entropy of a system at absolute zero is typically close to zero.

— https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_thermodynamics