Chance, Gambling, and the End of the World
I was thinking....
Postulate: the universe evolved through chance causes. The slight statistical "advantage" that particles have of slipping into matter as opposed to anti-matter made there "be" something material at the big bang. That same statistical percentage accounts for why the universe is "lumpy" and not a homogeneous heat death. Again, the sun is only a few billion years old, as opposed to the oldest stars that have burned out (say eighteen billion by current estimates). The earth is five billion or so years old so it has had time to cool and develop atmosphere. The earth is close enough to the sun to be warm, but far enough away not to be too hot. There was enough of the correct type of organic chemicals to create amino acids in the middle-early years of this planet. "Survival of the fittest" works well enough to create favorable evolutionary mutations. Here we are. All of this is chance (by the postulate).
Now, I don't want to calculate the statistical odds of all of this (were I even capable), but I think anyone can reasonably say that they are long odds.
Thought experiment: suppose I have two coffee cans. One has ten poker chips in it, one has one-hundred. All of the chips in each can are red except one blue one in each. We can easily see the odds of me pulling out the blue chip in each case. But we aren't going to discuss that. Suppose I have been pulling out chips one at a time - unknown in numbers to you. I show you the blue chip, which I have just pulled out. Would you say that I had a lot of chips left, or very little in each coffee can? In the case of ten chips, the odds are fairly good that I will come up with the blue chip in any order - first, eighth, etc. But in the case of the one-hundred chips we would all bet that there were more chips pulled out than left in - because as I pull chips my odds of getting the blue one get better all the time. So, for me, and I'm sure for everyone else, we would bet that the blue chip came out well after the halfway point - not that we would always be right. There is actually a statistical method for obtaining this - but let's just go on common sense here. Now say I have billions and billions of red chips - and still only one blue one? Would we bet on the blue one coming very close to the "end" of pulling out red chips?
If the universe being in such a way as we could come to be is by chance, the odds are horribly bad. And, from our betting game of poker chips in coffee cans, we can see that the one in a million will almost certainly come at the end of the road. The universe is eighteen billion years old. We came to be by chance. Therefore, the universe is almost at an end.
Which gives you three choices:
1: Relief?
2: Dread?
3: This is all very silly. . .
