Artificial Improbable Structures

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Despite the natural trend toward disorder, humans continually add new order on Earth by investing work and knowledge (information) into nature. Like Maxwell’s demon, before starting to do or create something, any human artisan, designer, or constructor sets the goal and form the mental pictures of what he or she wants to create. Hence, in the beginning, there is the idea of doing something, followed by the work and knowledge to actualize the idea.
An essential difference between nature’s artworks and artificial structures is that the first arise by chance and, thus, their form is unpredictable. For instance, the continued action of natural agents (temperature fluctuations, rain, snow, wind, etc.), gradually eroded a piece of rock until it produced the Balanced Rock—an unpredictable product of chance. Its shape and appearance is determined both internally (by the structure and texture of the original rock) and externally (by the nature of the eroding factors). By contrast, artificial structures, determined by the creator, are predictable; they are products of forces acting against the second law, in the direction of the decreasing entropy.

Human civilizations created highly ordered structures. There are not only “seven wonders of the world,” but inhabited centers, roads, cultivated fields, industrial production centers, etc. For thousands of years, human civilizations around the world, to encourage better living conditions and to exploit nature for their own benefit and satisfy their aesthetic, intellectual, and religious needs, created a world of material culture full of structures that could never arise naturally: homes, palaces, pyramids, and other buildings.

Even the wildest human imagination could not dream of a pyramid sprouting spontaneously by a fortuitous combination of the stones they are built from. Human  work and design have been indispensable in erecting these mystifying structures. The Pyramid of Cheops (Khufu) was built more than 4,500 years ago. About 2.5 million stone blocks and 20 years of work of about 200,000 slaves were used to erect it. However, the building blocks and the labor of slaves were not all that was needed for erecting the pyramid; slave workers did not know how to build a pyramid that would lead the pharaoh’s soul to the realm of the ancient Egyptian gods. A detailed construction plan by Hemon, the Khufu’s architect and high official, was the first step in the pyramid’s construction. What essentially took to build the Khufu (or any other artificial structure, for that matter) are building blocks (matter), work (free energy), and knowledge (information).

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