  We show that heavy pure states of gravity can appear to be mixed states to
almost all probes. For AdS_5 Schwarzschild black holes, our arguments are made
using the field theory dual to string theory in such spacetimes. Our results
follow from applying information theoretic notions to field theory operators
capable of describing very heavy states in gravity. For half-BPS states of the
theory which are incipient black holes, our account is exact: typical
microstates are described in gravity by a spacetime ``foam'', the precise
details of which are almost invisible to almost all probes. We show that
universal low-energy effective description of a foam of given global charges is
via certain singular spacetime geometries. When one of the specified charges is
the number of D-branes, the effective singular geometry is the half-BPS
``superstar''. We propose this as the general mechanism by which the effective
thermodynamic character of gravity emerges.
