7 ms·
Well, how likely is that we even exist to begin with? And how likely is that we are alive because of a ball of hydrogen and helium really far away?
by culopatin 6y ago
Well, how likely is that we even exist to begin with? And how likely is that we are alive because of a ball of hydrogen and helium really far away?
- unwoundmouse 6y agobruv this some gamblers fallacy shyt
- posterboy 6y agowell it is, but it's an accurate response to somebody already engaged in it. It is the GP who finds it "probably unlikely" without any indication of actual probabilities, chiefly rounding down from a haphazard guess, after all.
- roywiggins 6y agoOne very unlikely thing happening doesn't make another unlikely thing any more likely.
- gibolt 6y agoNo, but it does show how significantly unlikely things can happen given enough time and billions of moving variables.
- mensetmanusman 6y agoIt doesn’t seem to just be one very unlikely thing, but a huge series of unlikely things...
- p1mrx 6y agoThe universe is pretty big, and there are lots of places where unlikely things didn't happen. When the next unlikely thing happens, it most likely won't happen here.
- vagrantJin 6y agoCarbon based life is unlikely in the universe and yet here we are. Watching tiktok. Just can't rule anything out.
- computerfriend 6y agoThere's an obvious observation bias here though.
- vagrantJin 6y agoYes. Yes there is.
- ajuc 6y agoIt's pretty likely. There's at least 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the universe, most of them have planets. Billion of years passed since the Big Bang. If some chemical process can create life it's very likely that somewhere it did.
- erichocean 6y agoScientists who have done the math disagree. It's a major current issue. It's extremely difficult to produce useful proteins from random DNA chains. As in, if I took all of the atoms in our galaxy, paired each with random DNA, and allowed you to pick just one (blindfolded), only one of those DNA strands would contain the DNA necessary to produce a valid/useful protein. Literally every other atom has garbage DNA/proteins. The human body contains between 80,000 and 400,000 proteins. DNA looks far more like "information" than it does like random bits written to disk. It's analogous to trying to find an x86 program of at least 160 instructions that computes a valid mathematical function by randomly splatting 1s and 0s to disk and then "running" the "code". Eh, maybe it'll eventually happen, but you can see how hard it actually is in practice. Heat-death-of-the-Universe hard. Give a long enough timeframe, even unlikely things will happen. However, the Universe isn't very old—which is why it's a major current issue.
- sveme 6y agoWell, that's why an RNA first world is most likely. RNA can act catalytically as RNAzymes.
- chmod775 6y agoThis assumes a perfect random distribution though. What if amino acids and proteins are in fact likely to arise naturally and in favorable circumstances? There was an article recently (~1-2 months) on HN about a supercomputer/AI discovering new chemical pathways for part of this process, but I can't seem to find it anymore. I think it was about forming amino acids. I'm no expert on this subject (the opposite really, I've slept through chemistry), but my experience with large-scale simulations has been that a surprising number of them converge to the same final result given the same starting parameters even if most processes within them are perfectly random. The bigger the simulation, the more likely they are to give you stable results. And the universe is pretty damn huge. So I like to believe the creation of the foundations of life is in fact more-or-less inevitable in our universe, in turn increasing the chance of useful proteins etc. forming.
- mocar 6y agoHow likely is that an observer can observe their own unlikely existence given that the observer does exist against all the odds?
- simias 6y agoIf you ask yourself this question, then 100%. You need to exist to even consider the unlikelihood of your existence. But as far as I know the existence of naturally occurring superconductors is a completely independent probability, so it doesn't really make sense to use one to justify the other. Are there naturally occurring superconductors somewhere in the universe? I mean, without doing any calculations I'm tempted to say almost certainly yes. Do they exist somewhere in the Earth? As far as we know, extremely unlikely.