Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Civilization is structure against entropy
Chaos is the law of nature and order is the dream of man. Every road, building, and factory is an effort to impose structure on a world that tends toward disorder. Civilization itself amounts to that effort, and a company that builds physical automation is one more piece of that structure.
Rockefeller used almost the same words about oil refining in its earliest days, when the industry was concentrated in Pennsylvania and looked chaotic. His plan was to impose order on this chaos.
Progress, on this view, is the organization and structuring of the world toward human happiness, liberty, and transcendence.
Why does entropy always increase?
Entropy measures how many microscopic arrangements match what we see, and disordered states vastly outnumber ordered ones. A system drifting at random is overwhelmingly likely to land in one of the disordered arrangements. This is the statistical idea behind the second law of thermodynamics. Ludwig Boltzmann's entropy formula, S = k log W, is engraved on his tombstone in Vienna.
How can life build order despite entropy?
The physicist Erwin Schrödinger addressed this in his 1944 book What Is Life? He argued that organisms keep their order by exporting entropy to their surroundings. Earth receives concentrated, low-entropy light from the sun and radiates the energy back into space as diffuse heat. The order in cells, cities, and factories is paid for by that flow of energy.
How chaotic was early oil refining?
Edwin Drake's 1859 well near Titusville, Pennsylvania, set off an oil boom. Crude prices swung wildly in the following years, from several dollars a barrel to mere pennies, as new wells flooded the market. Refiners opened and closed shops quickly, and shipping capacity was scarce. Standard Oil was founded in Ohio in 1870 as the industry was still sorting itself out.