Re: Have aliens visited earth?
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Its like the monkeys pounding on the typewriter thing. If you have enough monkeys randomly punching keys on a typewriter, eventually one of them will punch out the complete works of william shakespear. So even if intelligent life is "OMG so super super rare" The universe is just so big that its going to happen, and more than oce. There are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on our ENTIRE planet, thats a whole hell of a lot of chances for life to evolve into intelligence
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I don't think you realize how vast the search space is.
Let's take a Shakespearian sonnet.
as an unperfect actor on the stage
who with his fear is put besides his part
or some fierce thing replete with too much rage
whose strengths abundance weakens his own heart
so I for fear of trust forget to say
the perfect ceremony of loves rite
and in mine own loves strength seem to decay
oercharged with burden of mine own loves might
o let my books be then the eloquence
and dumb presagers of my speaking breast
who plead for love and look for recompense
more than that tongue that more hath more expressd
o learn to read what silent love hath writ
to hear with eyes belongs to loves fine wit
Ignoring punctuation and capitalization, there are 596 characters in that sonnet. Assume our typewriters have 28 keys---26 letters, one space and one line feed/carriage return.
Let's take a monkey and make him hit 596 keys and stop. If it's the above sonnet he gets a banana otherwise we continue starving the poor bastard and he has to keep typing. The number of 596 character-long blocks of text is 28^596. Let's estimate
28^596 ~ 27^596 = (3^3)^596 = 3^1788 = (3^2)^894 ~ 10^894.
So there are 10^894 blocks of text. Let's assume our little monkey can crank out 100 characters in one minute. So approximately every 6 minutes he'll crank out a 596 character block and thus approximately 10 every hour, 240 every day and 87600 in a year. Let's just say 87600 ~ 10^5 so that the approximate number of years for the monkey to produce the above sonnet is 10^889. There are only 10^80 electrons in the universe so at most 10^80 monkeys. With this many monkeys we're producting approximately 10^86 character blocks of length 596 in one year and the approximate number of years until the Shakespeare sonnet is produced is 10^808. The sun will have expanded and swallowed the Earth long before that.
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