Yesterday, I randomly came to know about the Wall of Entropy at Cloudflare’s(CF) San Francisco office. You might wonder what’s so special about a bunch of lava lamps in a tech company’s lobby. Well, TL;DR: Cloudflare uses them for cryptography. If you want the full details, CF’s blog post on the same is an excellent read, but in a nutshell, encryption needs a random seed, and computers—being deterministic— can’t generate truly random numbers on their own. With the same inputs and conditions, a computer will always produce the same “random” seed. That’s obviously not ideal for security and cryptography.
So, to increase the entropy of its system, CF uses a live video feed of these lava lamps and combines it with other sources to generate the seed. Because the motion of the lava inside each lamp is chaotic, it’s nearly impossible to get two identical frames, which makes for a genuinely random seed. I found this absolutely fascinating! It got me thinking: isn’t randomness the most powerful force in the world?
I read a post by Charles Seife that resonated with me on this topic. According to him, our brains revolt against the idea of randomness. As humans, we’re wired to seek patterns—think of pareidolia, where we see faces in clouds or shapes on burnt toast. It’s likely an evolutionary survival mechanism, but it also means that true randomness often defies our instincts. While we struggle to comprehend it on a grand scale, I believe it is the most powerful force in the world. This got me thinking—if randomness is so fundamental at a small scale, what about at the grandest scale possible: the origins of life itself?
Let’s look at abiogenesis , the process by which life emerged from non-living matter. The whole idea of the emergence of life from non-living organic compounds to self-replicating molecules is a marvel. The probability of that happening seems close to zero, or we would have observed multiple origins of life. According to current scientific consensus, every organism on Earth originated from a single ancestor. The fact that something we call life—something so unique—exists at all is a marvel of randomness.
Everything in this universe just feels random. The K–Pg extinction event wiped out the dinosaurs—something they could never have foreseen! Would humans have evolved if that event hadn’t occurred?
Now consider evolution. During genetic copying, random mutations occur. Most are neutral, some are harmful, but occasionally one leads to something beneficial. These random “errors” gave rise to the vast genetic diversity we see today. About 400 million years ago, some marine life moved into shallower waters, then slowly crawled onto land for food. That random transition resulted in everything we see around us today. The ability to see colors in primates is believed to be due to random gene duplications. All of this happened because of some random occurrences!
Randomness doesn’t just shape the natural world—it influences human history, personal decisions, and even technological breakthroughs in ways we can’t always anticipate. On a more anecdotal level, I listened to a podcast about Naveen John, a Purdue engineer who decided to return to India and ended up changing the face of Indian cycling. This seemingly small and random decision, in the grand scheme of things, transformed the cycling landscape in the country. Another random event elevated it again in 2022 when Rick Nobel, a Dutch diplomat, came to India for work and took up cycling. Until that moment, there was little competition at the professional level in India, but his involvement sparked a sense of higher-level competition. I also remember reading about a young father who accidentally discovered he had cancer—only because he was in an accident in the sand dunes. A moment of misfortune led to an unforeseen diagnosis. How random are these events?
As I’m drafting this, DeepSeek AI is making news. Almost $600 billion of NVIDIA’s market share has been wiped out—just because the DeepSeek team managed to train models at a fraction of the usual cost. I’m not sure if this qualifies as a black swan event or if it could have been predicted, but this kind of randomness shapes our world, fuels creativity, and drives us forward.
Coincidentally, while drafting these thoughts, “Cornfield Chase” by Hans Zimmer (from the Interstellar OST ) started playing on my phone. Perhaps that’s just another random event—or maybe randomness itself is the hidden architect of everything we know.
╯°□°)╯︵ 🌍
Note: Randomness, the origin of life, the K–Pg extinction event, LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor), quantum physics, etc., are tricky and confusing when viewed on a grand scale or from a macro perspective. I wrote this without aiming for strict factual accuracy—it’s more of a reflection, written probably to think better. The title A Random Universe was consciously chosen to acknowledge that I am speaking from the perspective of the random universe I inhabit, while also acknowledging the possibility of parallel universes. Comments and criticism are welcome!
📚 Want to stay connected?
If you enjoyed this post, you might like my weekly newsletter 10+1 Things read by 2500+ curious minds from 94 countries. Each week, I share personal insights and 11 fascinating finds — books, articles, or random curiosities that spark ideas.
No pressure, but I'd love to have you along for the ride!
No comments yet.