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