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"Because the earth existing is more unlikely than winning the lottery, we should expect to see winning lottery tickets floating in space"
by sdwr 2y ago
"Because the earth existing is more unlikely than winning the lottery, we should expect to see winning lottery tickets floating in space"
- bee_rider 2y agoWe should expect that there will be at some point winning lottery ticket floating in space. I don’t think we should expect to see them, though, because they are probably very far away in time and/or space. Also the concept of a winning lottery ticket would seem to require the existence of a lottery game, which would seem to require some sort of society to play it. We are probably not the minimal working example of a society that is able to invent a lottery, but I bet that society is closer to us in complexity than it is to a scrap of paper.
- qingcharles 2y agoThis reads like a paragraph from H2G2.
- immibis 2y agoYes - if the observable universe is just a low entropy random fluctuation.
- sdwr 2y agoThe point of the Boltzmann brain is that it's spontaneous (which is also what makes it impossible). If a billion years of slowly ratcheting up complexity counts as a "random fluctuation", then every brain is a Boltzmann brain.