[chiefalchemist]

> " it's just too unlikely to have originated completely independently twice."

Unlikely, but not absolutely impossible. Correct?

Editorial: This is where Science / science loses me. It makes absolute statements that aren't in fact truly absolute.

The point being, __if__ there was a chance identical mutation that changes (a lot?) of things. Truth be told, life coming into being has to be a couple orders of magnitude coincidental than some gene mutation. In that context, "too unlikely" starts to feel much less so, yes?

[matte_black]

It is possible for every atom in a quarter to suddenly move in the exact same direction at the same instant, temporarily lifting the quarter off a table. But it won’t happen. It has likely never happened in the history of the universe.

[lisper]

> Unlikely, but not absolutely impossible. Correct?

Correct but irrelevant. Winning the Powerball 100 times in a row is also not absolutely impossible. Nonetheless, it won't happen.

[pvaldes]

Yep, the aura of statistics can blind us. It will most probably happen if enough numbers of people keep trying again and again for the next ten millions of years. Would be not much different as and asteroid falling on earth once an killing most animals.

[chiefalchemist]

Agreed. But just the same, given the number of cells, the number of a species, the amount of time...I think you see where this is going.

The occurance of something is also a function of the total universe of occurrences. This doesn't seem to be part of the "close to impossible" numbers being mentioned.

If life itself was the result of a roll of the cosmic dice then anything down stream sounds reasonable.

[lisper]

An asteroid wiping us out is vastly more likely than someone winning the Powerball 100 times in a row.

[pvaldes]

Is just an example of how unprobable things can still happen

Think about winning the spermatozoan race 2 millions of times in a row, as member of the most intelligent species known in the universe, one among millions of different forms of life, after surviving five consecutive massive extinctions that wipped the 90% of the life in the planet each time.

Statistically speaking, we can't be real.

[lisper]

Flip a coin 100 times. The odds of getting the exact sequence of heads and tails that you got are about 0.00000000000000000000000000001% (give or take a zero). And yet, it happened!

[CodeCube]

Whoa there tiger ... don't tell that to my dad!

[chiefalchemist]

Not accurate. It depends on how many times you play.

That matters here because we're not talking about any single cell or single strand of DNA. We're talking about millions upon gazillion. So "the game" is being played an unimaginable number of times. Clearly that changes the possibility of an outcome.

[lisper]

> "the game" is being played an unimaginable number of times.

Actually, it's quite imaginable. Not only is it imaginable, it's fairly straightforward to calculate an upper bound on the actual number, and from there to calculate the odds of producing the same gene completely independently more than once. If you do the math you will find that the odds are indistinguishable from zero.

[throwaway2048]

Science is fundamentally empirical, it serves no purpose to say "with extremely high likelyhood" behind every statement, its implicit in any scientific context.

The only thing this encourages is crap like creationism and flat earth theory because there is no way science is ACTUALLY SURE.

[xcvbxzas]

I don't think these statements are as absolute as you take them. I'm also not sure where you go if "almost certainly did(n't)" is no longer sufficient. At that point you basically have to give up on saying anything about anything.

Science doesn't (intentionally) forget about unlikely alternatives. That doesn't mean there is any good reason to treat highly unlikely scenarios as the equals of the vastly more likely cases.

And arguing anything about chances based on things that have already happened is kind of bullshit. They already happened, however unlikely. We know unlikely things can and do happen occasionally. That does not mean other unlikely things are more likely to happen.

And if you really insist on doing that, keep in mind the timespans here also differ by orders of magnitude.