My craziest thought ever

[henrikrh]

[ QUOTE ]
So I was a little [censored] up last night and went to the late showing of March of the Penguins. Lets just say that I was doing some really deep thinking throughout the movie.

At some point I realize that given infinite time, many crazy things are possible. Because there are a finite number of combinations for DNA proteins to line up, the exact same person could be created twice. This really blew my mind.

Please respond with your thoughts on this subject, or tell me why it is flawed.

[/ QUOTE ]

What about the profound effect of external factors? They would not be as similar as you think. Even identical twins are not really "identical", and since mz twins tend to have similar upbringings your identical independent people would be even more different.

A more radical though would be that in an infinite universe there are infinite possibilities, and with infinite time to search one could find anything. A world identical to our own except we are all look like headless rabbits and talk out of our asses? It's possible, even inevitable in an infinite universe. Not only world something like that or equally absurd (from our perception) a world like that would not just exist on its own, infinite similar and identical worlds would exist.

With infinite time as you said not only would you find one indentical person, you would find an infinite amount of identical people.

Of course this assumes and infinite universe, infinite time and the ability to search such a universe. Don't flame me if my ideas are basic, I don't know jack about philosophy.

[John Cole]

Some say mine is Andy Fox (or at least Rick Nebiolo says this).

[Patrick del Poker Grande]

Wow. This is some crazy [censored].

[gumpzilla]

Try Googling and reading about the Poincare recurrence theorem. It'll blow your mind.

[Beerfund]

[ QUOTE ]
My chain of thought was brough on after reading that there was a 1 in 6.5 billion chance of a false positive in DNA crime scene matching. So, I took that to mean that there are 6.5bn different permutations of DNA - is that correct, and if so, what would someone with my identical DNA look like?

[/ QUOTE ]

No, the reason that there's a small chance of a false positive is because they don't check the entire strand of DNA. Two humans will have the majority of their DNA the same, except for small areas of reapeating sequences. The chances that two people randomly have the exact same DNA is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay higher.