Comment on If conditions on earth are perfect for life to form shouldn't have happened more than once?
Apytele@sh.itjust.works 23 hours ago
First of all I love this question. My suggestion is that you shuffle a deck of cards, flip them over and note their exact order, then shuffle again and note the order again then keep shuffling and checking the order until the deck resets to the original shuffled order. It’s gotta happen eventually, but it might take you a while.
It’s gotta happen eventually, but it might take you a while.
A while is a great euphemism here… A deck of 52 cards (poker playing cards) has so many potential orders that it is said that each time someone shuffles a deck nowadays, it’s really likely to get a deck order that has never been gotten before!
That’s exactly what they just said.
52!
80658175170943878571660636856403766975289505440883277824000000000000
https://czep.net/weblog/52cards.html
I was fascinated for a couple years, back when flash player was coming to an end. I built a deck of cards in AS3 with the original goal of a simple single player blackjack. This was introductory research I came across that has held a fascination for me ever since.
Found it! It had actually just fallen into the couch cushions.
What’s more fucked is the “perfect container” thought experiment with infinity.
Take for an example an apple, you put it in your “perfect container” that nothing can pass thru. This is a hypothetical, it doesn’t exist.
What happens to the apple?
Fucking everything. It will rot and degrade, eventually breaking down to fundamental elements, but all the energy/matter to make an apple is in there. On an infinite timeline that stuff will go thru every possible permeation. Including an exact and perfect copy of the very same apple. Even if it takes billions and billions of years.
Maybe at some point in the middle. You get an orange.
no because entropy.
an apple is more like an ice sculpture. energetically far from equilibrium. once reduced to a puddle, the molecules will never spontaneously rearrange into the sculpture. It will just be a puddle. the molecules, yes, will constantly rearrange, into also, a puddle.
there has to be a force to act on them to push them out of equilibrium.
life is a state of matter held far from equilibrium.
life is a state of matter held far from equilibrium.
Way too early for this shit.
life is a state of matter held far from equilibrium.
Way too early for this shit.
Blame plants. Get back at them by smoking/ drinking some of them.
*permutation
There are more combinations in a deck of cards than atoms on earth.
But since we're talking about early life forming (actually chemical replicators, much simpler than a virus) let's use the card shuffling odds, but decks of cards are being shuffled in billions or trillions of places on early Earth every second for millions of years. Even a very low odds of finding a working sequence of molecules will be found geologically quickly given the amount of times done over area and time. We're pretty sure now that life began very soon once the Earth cooled down enough to allow it. What took much longer was the more complex forms of life like viruses and single cells, then even longer for multicellular.
Phen@lemmy.eco.br 23 hours ago
It’s like when playing the lottery, if you say you’re picking all your numbers in a sequence, like 1,2,3,4,5 and 6. People will tell you’re crazy because sequences like that “never” happen. But the same is true for every other combination of numbers too. The sequence just makes it clearer how unlikely you are to ever pick the winning numbers.