Answer: about 2,100 trillion years, or roughly 153,000 times the age of the universe.
So a million monkeys typing furiously would never even reproduce one book’s short opening line. Moral: Forget the monkeys-and-typewriters thing. It’s bogus.
Worse, it overly credits the power of random events. As a corollary, if you’re a longtime reader, you know I share former
Encyclopedia Britannica Publisher Paul Hoffman’s views about consciousness — that it’s the greatest mystery in all of science. How could random atom collisions ever give creatures a sense of
perception?
Astronomers hope to find life elsewhere, and many assume that an alien’s self-awareness would have arisen through random physical or chemical processes. I’m not advocating any philosophical viewpoint here; I’m merely saying that the random supposition is simply not any kind of useful hypothesis. The “random” business is given far more potency in the popular imagination than it deserves. We’d do better to candidly say, “This is a mystery.” Then maybe some researchers could begin to tackle it from scratch.
Accomplishing a particular complex task by mere chance is what we’re examining. Its limitations may seem puzzling because random events do indeed create dizzying possibilities.
Consider all of the ways you can arrange four books on a shelf. You find the possibilities by multiplying 4 × 3 × 2 — pronounced “4 factorial” and written 4! — which is 24. But what if you have 10 books? Easy again: it’s 10! or 10 × 9 × 8 × 7 × 6 × 5 × 4 × 3 × 2, which is — ready? — 3,628,800 different ways. Going from four items to 10 increases the possible arrangements from 24 to 3.6 million. So if you haphazardly put 10 books on a shelf, the chances are 3.6 million to one against them appearing alphabetically. Few of us would expect such long odds — 100 to one sounds more plausible, doesn’t it?
Possibilities are always insanely enormous. They surprise us. The number of atoms in the entire visible universe can be written right here: 100,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000 — that’s 80 zeros. Add just six more zeros (you’d hardly notice them), and you’ve represented all the atoms in a million universes.
But you’d have to type zeros for the rest of your life to express the ways — just the written representation and not the actual count — that stars can be arranged in our galaxy. Or neurons can connect in a human brain. The mind’s potential lies beyond its own comprehension.
We can always count
things. No problem there. But when it comes to assessing
possibilities — on Earth or off it — we monkeys haven’t got a chance.
Contact me about my strange universe by visiting http://skymanbob.com.