[~ot] why is programming so fun?

[Georg Wrede]

Gregor Richards wrote:
...
> intelligence!" As it turns out, when you consider your very low but 
> extremely ignorant statistic given the number of planets in the 
> universe, and the potentially huge number of possible ways life could 
> form (a number we can't even begin to fathom), it turns into 
> 99.9999999999%. Unfortunately, the general populous doesn't understand 

While you're using 99.999999% better here than most do in newsgroups, 
the average case is like "99.9999999999% of the time I win everybody".

In the late seventies I had a newsgroup reader to which I had attached a 
filter that went like (vi code here):

%s/ 99\.9+\%/ many/g

and it turned out that it not only improved the quality of what I read, 
it also improved my responses to it.

> statistics even in the slightest, and so they think "Wow, given the 
> extremely low odds that a protozoan would appear by random chance, we 
> must have been created by a higher power!" Idiots.

Correct!!!!!

Not that I could say I'm any less of an idiot, at least after I've tried 
to do some (really more modest) calculations, every once in a while ever 
since teen-age.

Let's be overly modest, and just try to get a probability for something 
vastly "smaller", and therefore easier(?) to understand.


For example, what are the odds that I got born at all? Even /given that/ 
human beings already have existed here for some 4 million years?

I can't be born at all if my mother had died before she got me. Same 
goes for my father. And their parents and their's.

One might take a male or a female tack on this one. Let's take the 
female tack:


Assume that it takes 20 years on average to get a child. Of course, now 
we have statutory rape laws and people used to start earlier, but 
nowadays it's not even uncommon to have first kids in the very late 
thirties. But, hey, one has to pick some age.

Now, considering the odds of accidentally dropping your daughter, her 
getting into any other accident, infant mortality, plagues, ordinary 
diseases or cancer, and women not getting married and/or not having 
children. What would be the probability that your daughter eventually 
bears you a granddaughter? Let's say it's 75%. But since I'm being 
/nice/ here, make it 99%.

In 4 million years we have 200000 generations. If even any /single one/ 
of your grandmothers fails, then the rest become unborn, so the only way 
your mother could have come to existence is that /all/ of them 
succeeded. Since they're independent (as a statistical sample), the 
formula would be:

P = (1 - 0.99) ^ 200000

which ought to be (er, now my calculator shows an error! ...I had to do 
it via logarithms), equal to:

10 ^ -400000

which is pretty damn close to zero.


OR we could do it the male way:

Ignoring all infant mortality, etc. (Just for the heck of it. This of 
course does weakens my point substantially, but boy, can I afford it! As 
you'll see.) Let's say that the average number of sperm at a go is:

20million/ml * 2ml = 40M
(from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semen_analysis#Sperm_count)

So, one could say that the probability of your father having been born 
(from that particular copulation) is

(1/ 40M) / 2

the "/2" being for only half of them are male. Again, I had to resort to 
logarithms to force a non-error result, which was

P = (1/80M) ^ 200000 = 10 ^ -1580618

This time the answer is even more preposterously small. Especially 
considering that any "real" quantity (like counting the electrons in the 
entire known universe), that can be said to have any meaning, can be 
done with a calculator that has a range of 10^-99 to 10^99. A quantity like

10^-1600000

is "99.9999%" smaller than I can imagine. Therefore I'm an idiot. :-)

Now, combining my mother with my father (and /really/ stupidly 
considering me having born to them as P=1), we get

10 ^ -(1.6M + 0.4M) = 10^-2M

which is a nice round figure. Ok, the math here has been sloppy, the 
prerequisites and estimates are all off-the-hat, but the end result 
should be "in the ballpark". At /least/ for proving that this simply is 
out of mental reach.


With this same logic, one might want to know the probability of the 
first human being having been born from animals that existed at the time 
of dinosaurs (a lot more than 4M years and 200k generations), or that 
animal from the first vertebrate, or that one from the first two-sex 
animal, or that one from the first multicellular animal, or that one 
from the first reproductive organism.

Compared to that, I think that the odds of life itself developing are 
just child's play. -- So, where I really need God is not to explain to 
me the existence of life on Earth, but to explain to me how come I 
personally exist at all.

Arrgghh. I just remembered that the odds of God someday explaining this 
to me are smaller than my existence (they equal zero). Ah, and since my 
existence (already within our current universe, not to speak of the 
infinite number of universes before ours, and those after ours), itself 
is smaller than I care to understand, I suddenly understood: it's 
guaranteed to get fixed within the next hundred years. Then I'll be long 
gone, and this (from my point of view, once in a lifetime (not mine, but 
that of the entire history of universes, come and gone)), aberration 
will be restored, once and for all.

That is pretty much the same as if I'd never been born to begin with. 
Compare that to the age of the universe(s), and the total probability 
starts to make sense. Hmm. Should one commit oneself to the funny farm 
if it suddenly makes sense, or if it doesn't?


I HOPE that nobody really starts to ponder on these things! One of my 
girlfriends was a nurse at a mental asylum, and she told me (years ago) 
that quite a lot of the inmates are physically normal people, who just 
by bad luck had started to try to understand things like this or the 
Meaning of Life or why we exist. She used to say "it's burned their 
circuits".

I think that is a succinct way of putting it.


After all this, things like elementary particles popping in and out of 
existence out of nowhere in empty space and on the surface of black 
holes, really doesn't sound all that exotic. :-)