Flip a coin.
Take a quarter from your pocket. I want you to flip it up in the air and make a note of what it lands on. Write down your results. Do this, oh, I don't know, maybe 20 or 30 times. Heads tails heads heads tails heads tails tails.
Now you have a silly list of nonsense... but at least it's unlikely nonsense. After thirty flips, you're really chasing down unlikeliness. Let's see. 2 to the thirtieth power, 2^30 is, well, I don't feel like getting out my calculator. After 8 flips, the chances of those results being what happens are 1 in 128. One more flip and you go to 256. Another and 512 comes up. You see where this is heading.
Here we go. After 30 flips, the chance of whatever you've written down are roughly 1 in 1,073,741,824. Amazing? Was it destiny? No, not really.
So, you're sitting around all thinking about stuff and then you have this epiphany or something. You're all like, "Wow, this is so crazy that I'm sitting here all thinking about this stuff. I mean, what are the chances of this? It's like the universe was perfectly designed for me to be having this moment with myself. I mean really, what are the chances?" But you know what else that might not have occurred to you is this: Well, not quite this yet, but I'm getting there. We tend to focus on the things that do happen while we completely gloss over the things that don't. I mean, this is completely understandable. It's how we work. If we spent all day thinking about the stuff that didn't happen then we'd likely get hit by a bus while we stood in the street just staring at the pavement.
Here I/you/we are just sitting around thinking about how amazing it is that we're here while there are an infinite number of potential individuals that aren't able to think about how they don't exist. We see everything that is around us and assume that it's so impossible. Like the outcome of flipping the coin 30 times was impossible. But it happened.
All this talk of life on other planets and how it's so 'unlikely.' How can we really know what the actual chances of life are? How do you measure where life isn't? Does the space between two atoms count as a place that life isn't?
You're here reading this because each and every one of your ancestors managed to crawl out of the primordial ooze, not get absorbed, eaten, squished, impaled, trampled, murdered or not contract a terminal disease before they produced your next line of offspring.
All the people alive today could say that the universe is perfectly designed for them to exist at this moment. Though, their voices would be drowned out by the massive number of individuals who could have potentially existed also. If those voices could talk. But they can't. Because they don't exist.
Um, I forgot what my point was. Maybe I didn't have a point. Oh well.
Now you have a silly list of nonsense... but at least it's unlikely nonsense. After thirty flips, you're really chasing down unlikeliness. Let's see. 2 to the thirtieth power, 2^30 is, well, I don't feel like getting out my calculator. After 8 flips, the chances of those results being what happens are 1 in 128. One more flip and you go to 256. Another and 512 comes up. You see where this is heading.
Here we go. After 30 flips, the chance of whatever you've written down are roughly 1 in 1,073,741,824. Amazing? Was it destiny? No, not really.
So, you're sitting around all thinking about stuff and then you have this epiphany or something. You're all like, "Wow, this is so crazy that I'm sitting here all thinking about this stuff. I mean, what are the chances of this? It's like the universe was perfectly designed for me to be having this moment with myself. I mean really, what are the chances?" But you know what else that might not have occurred to you is this: Well, not quite this yet, but I'm getting there. We tend to focus on the things that do happen while we completely gloss over the things that don't. I mean, this is completely understandable. It's how we work. If we spent all day thinking about the stuff that didn't happen then we'd likely get hit by a bus while we stood in the street just staring at the pavement.
Here I/you/we are just sitting around thinking about how amazing it is that we're here while there are an infinite number of potential individuals that aren't able to think about how they don't exist. We see everything that is around us and assume that it's so impossible. Like the outcome of flipping the coin 30 times was impossible. But it happened.
All this talk of life on other planets and how it's so 'unlikely.' How can we really know what the actual chances of life are? How do you measure where life isn't? Does the space between two atoms count as a place that life isn't?
You're here reading this because each and every one of your ancestors managed to crawl out of the primordial ooze, not get absorbed, eaten, squished, impaled, trampled, murdered or not contract a terminal disease before they produced your next line of offspring.
All the people alive today could say that the universe is perfectly designed for them to exist at this moment. Though, their voices would be drowned out by the massive number of individuals who could have potentially existed also. If those voices could talk. But they can't. Because they don't exist.
Um, I forgot what my point was. Maybe I didn't have a point. Oh well.