This is even more mind-blowing!
Monday, August 9th 2010 @ 1:52 PM
Thinking over my previous post about War and Peace and the evolution of our universe, I realized that it wasn’t quite mind-blowing enough. I mean, War and Peace has about 560,000 words—2,800,000 letters. It’s probably the longest novel in history. Maybe it does seem logical to many people, even at first glance, that 10 billion years would not be enough time to randomly generate such a long work of literature.
Let’s try this another way.
Assuming again that we are talking about letters only—disregarding spaces and punctuation—and that we’re imagining randomly generating a string of letters, one new permutation each second. We’ll keep up this once-a-second random letter generation for 10 billion years (just to have a nice round number). How many letters long do you think a work of literature would have to be so that the probability that it will randomly appear sometime in 10 billion years will be 100 percent—in other words, a sure thing?
Do you think a string of 100,000 specific letters would be sure to be generated in 10 billion years? 10,000 letters? 1,000?
Nope—try eleven. Eleven letters!! With eleven letters, the number of different permutations is
26^11 (26 raised to the 11th power) which is about 3.5 quadrillion, just a "bit" less than the number of seconds in 10 billion years.
(Skeptical? Try multiplying 26 x 26 x 26... and see how far you get. Can you multiply 26 by itself 11 times? Even if you can calculate it, to count as high as the answer would take you almost 10 billion years.)
The 11-letter word “quadrillion” would have a 100% chance of turning up as one of the 315 quadrillion permutations that would occur in 10 billion years. (As I showed in my previous post, there are about 315,000,000,000,000,000 seconds in 10 billion years.)
But try to get pure chance to spell “quadrillions” and you’re already taking chances. It's likely to happen, but it might not.
Try for “antidisestablishmentarianism” and you have about a 50% chance of succeeding in 10 billion years.
So tell me again how chance mutations and “billions of years” for evolution to run its course would work to create an unfathomably complex and meaningful universe, with symbiotic mothers and babies, and brains that think and hearts that beat and tears that flow, and cells whose energy pulses purposefully in every living thing, and absolutely everything else?
“Billions of years” always sounds like such a long time—enough time for pretty much anything to happen. But it isn’t. Like everything else in our world, compared to its Creator, 10 billion years is just a little blip on the screen. To make an orderly, beautiful universe, you’d need infinite time… or the guiding hand of the Infinite.
