I once heard a cell phone was blamed for starting a gas station on fire.
I once watched a guy reset an entire fuel station with his hundred-watt CB (27MHz) linear amp (antenna about 30cm from nearest pump electronics). Does that count?
Everywhere else in the world, `gas' is the hissy stuff that happens when you heat a fluid too much. Admittedly what Aussies call "petrol stations" are actually selling some bona fide gas (LPG and sometimes LNG) as well, now.
they've done wonder[s] for the Tiny-Blue-LED Industry.
Yesterday, I watched a dude walking along the footpath in Merriwa with his GF. They could barely afford clothes (what they wore was ragged, and not in a trendy way), yet could apparently afford a mobile 'phone that flashed red, white, blue quite brightly against the guy's face as he talked, and also the spondoolies needed to keep the thing on the air.
One thing we are told about mobile 'phones is that they emit "2 watts" - we are not told that this comes as very steep pulses peaking at 200W. Domestic microwave ovens start at 600W and work up. What you are holding against your brain-case is a third of a microwave oven.
Nevertheless a highly inefficient 200W (mostly) electric transmitter in a metal tube full of absorbtive objects like water-filled (70%) human bodies is likely not going to generate a strong enough magnetic field to seriously upset a compass tens of m away behind a metal firewall. And at a range of 10m an omni 200W electric signal isn't going to be so curious about a small needle in an electrically shielded case.
Possibly two other problems...
on
SCO DOS'ed
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
From that article:
Now this is an interesting little problem for SCO. They are claiming that IBM copied SCO Unix code, unchanged, into Linux.
"We're finding...cases where there is line-by-line code in the Linux kernel that is matching up to our UnixWare code," McBride said in an interview.
Meanwhile, SCO themselves continue to knowingly distribute the infringing code under the GPL. The GPL states that:
b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.
Therefore, SCO is now knowingly granting me, you, and IBM full GPL rights to any IBM-introduced infringing code that they (SCO) own.
They have, haven't they? Contrary to what the article says, I do believe this is a major hole in the foot for their faux pas against IBM, because regardless of the validity of said code secrets, and regardless of whether they're GPLed or not, SCO have made the code publicly available, long before they prepared or made complaint against IBM. How could IBM steal something that's publicly available? D'oh?
I can't see how it could be applied this way (surprise: IANAL), but it would be ironic enough to be picked up with a magnet if SCO's publication-under-the-GPL of this code implied the GPLing of their UnixWare(tm,(R),(c),etc...) code as well. I imagine that would have rather... extensive effects on things like their share-market value.
True but you ain't gonna be able to hide an operation where you have dozens of people reverse engineering the card at the hardware level.
They'd be more interested in rev-enging the chip, for starters, and in Australia, at least, reverse-engineering is legally protected (producing and/or selling hardware using a proprietary idea is not). All they'd need to do would be contract the actual rev-eng out and clean-room the data they got back enough that showing it to their engineers wouldn't put them at risk of patent violation.
So the short answer is: you shouldn't need to hide anything; and the longer answer is: you have the expensive machinery anyway (to see what's really going on with your own chips), and reason to be using it - so slipping a competitor's chip into the analysis stream would be dead easy to hide. Only one or two people need ever know.
Well buddy yours might be that small but mine sure isn't
Dear Sir,
I'm sorry I haven't responded to your fascinating email earlier, but in addition to the two or three thousand others on the same topic that I get every week, I have a problem in that my penis is too large and rigid to fit under my desk, so I have to sit back from the desk a little, and in order to reach the keyboard I have to balance it on my penis. As you can imagine, this makes typing difficult.
The reason I'm writing is to enquire as to whether you have any products to painlessly shorten or soften a man's penis. This would enable me to select girlfriends less than seven feet tall, who have had less than four children and to get more than the first half of my penis involved in the activity.
I am more than willing to sacrifice the convenience of drying clothes on it, or the usefulness of being able to drive nails without finding a hammer.
I think the hardware manufacturers worry too much about information leakage due to drivers.
I look at it this way: who has the resources and expertise to best disassemble, interpret and live-hardware-debug your video card? Is it your competitors or the OSS developer-in-the-street? How many OSS freaks do you know carry digital scopes and logic analysers able to resolve and capture into the gigahertz range?
So by hiding the driver source and card details they're taking away advantages from their customers, not their competitors.
Your plan is a vast improvement on what we have now, but really the paranoid lawyers controlling the chipmakers need a heavy dose of reality.
Exposing details of their chips (especially for something like VIA's Savage4-derived horrors but this applies to ATI and nVidia just as well) isn't going to help their competitors very much at all, but it will help their customers lots, and a helped customer is a happy, loyal customer.
It's obvious that the patent isn't worth a pinch of duck poo, and standover tactics like theirs are illegal in many places and many ways, why should their particular form of blackmail be exempt?
...all of the machinery needed to support it, as well.
You get bequeathed almost everything except about half of your DNA from dear old Mum. The vast majority of your biological building blocks are epigenetic, and you get almost all of that matrilineally (certainly by weight; I don't know of any studies into what else besides DNA is contributed by the spermatoza - science seems to have been more than slightly tunnel-vision about DNA).
And cytoplasm is a long way from the simple `albuminous putty' that Haeckel wishfully describes. It's getting to the point where if that man supported an idea, you can be pretty sure it's gunna be a dud.
Given that the vast majority of the material inherited from one's mother is not DNA, not genes, and that this cellular material (cytosomes, organelles, replication molecules etc) regulates the DNA, surely we need to start finding out more about this other stuff about now?
Now, the Java inventors were Sicilians; and everybody knows that you can't trust Sicilians... so you can't take the language that's before them! But... they would have expected you to know that, so you clearly can't take the language that's in front of you...
"You think that's good? Wait 'till I get going!" (-:
It's still ridiculous to attempt to calculate the probability because there are virtually an infinite number of possible cases.
Not exactly, and the difference between "very many" and "virtually infinite" is a crucial one.
If in practically every example you can find or analogy you can invent, the probability is always negative, zero or infinitesimal, this is an indication (not a proof, but certainly an indication) that in reality the probability is effectively zero (-: "or less":-)
As I mentioned, it's also important that "lots" is not the same as "infinite". If you can fine your answers down to within, say, 5000 orders of magnitude <grin> then side-issues that only count for a hundred or so orders of magnitude are - in the statistical sense - insignificant.
I am not trying to demonstrate that complex organisms will inevitably arise from such reactions, I am just trying to point out that DNA (or something like it) is actually fairly likely to appear given the raw materials and plenty of time.
To cut a long story short, the experts in various fields who have actually done realistic calculations or experiments say no.
For (a classic) example, after the Urey/Miller experiments, Stanley Miller followed up. Google for it if you're interested, but for political reasons don't expect the headlines that greeted his first big experimentt. Far from eliminating the recemisation problem, he established that it was pretty much insurmountable (as were all others). He was also unable to produce any but a few of the simplest amino acids, even racemised, using ignredients-plus-energy experiments. Although the aminos generally represent local minima, most of them have fairly tall maxima on any reasonable "approach" to that minimum. This was (is) very disappointing to Miller; he still holds as an article of faith that spontaneous generation does happen, but has no explanation for how.
It's also sad-but-true that the conditions required for producing amino acids (to say nothing of more complex products) are also fairly hostile to their survival. It's even more frustrating than the bowling-ball-on-curved-rails arcade game in that if you put enough energy into the ball to get it over the first hump, you also put enough in to get it back over the first hump - in real-life chemistry, the hump is asymmetrical (the ball rolls out more readily than it rolls in). Complex chemicals are easier to break than to make.
In living biochemistry, the methods of producing and combining complex chemicals are radically different from those proposed for random formation from raw chemicals. To cut another long story short, it looks plausible on the surface but in implementation is high implausible. And of course a lot of people really, really want to believe that it is plausible, each for their own reasons and none of those reasons (that I've seen yet) are really related to doing raw science.
Now, as for the tornado analogy, I agree, it seems rather impossible. I've always seen it with 747s instead of B52s, but there isn't much difference. It is flawed in that metal parts can be broken down whereas atoms cannot (at least, not under natural circumstances) and a junkyard can contain an almost infinite variety of parts, whereas the universe only has 114 known to us, many of which are man-made and do not exist for more than a few billionths of a second.
Nit to pick: if you count lightning and cosmic rays as a `natural circumstances', each of them can indeed provoke transmutation. Given the amount of "lightning" (electrical discharge) damage that Mars has taken (it's the only force that explains almost all of the characteristics of Valles Marineris - but nobody's got around to figuring out how it happened yet), that may be an avenue worth pursuing.
At the level of the anology, the atoms are (very) like unto the steel, copper, aluminium, plastic, rubber, leather etc of which the B52 is built. An individual component like a bolt or a lens might equate to an amino acid (some structure, but not much). A slightly complex part like an electric motor or guage might correspond to a protein, a very complex part like a bombsight or a jet engine might correspond to a set of genes.
Sigh, I did want to avoid getting stuck in the detail, but in it's own way it's interesting.
Two successive tornadoes might be useful to your cause in that the first one frees up more random small parts (at the boilt and lens level) for the second one to fill gaps with. But what a B52 does is nothing like as complex as, say, E. coli or any other complete single-celled lifeform. It doesn't, for example, self
How is DNA a demonstration against macroevolution? With billions upon billions of years and billions upon billions of joules of energy flying every which way, I would be very surprised if life didn't start.
I'm going to borrow a couple of basic analogies to illustrate the point. Don't get carried away nitpicking the details of each analogy, just consider the broad view. The porpose of the analogies is not to prove or disprove evolution, but to illustrate some things about statistics.
If you sent a tornado through a junkyard, would you expect it to form a working B52?
My answer: No. I suspect your answer would be "what are you? nuts? the cases aren't comparable!" - but they are. A tornado brings with it energy, which is needed for assembling things, and the junkyard suplies raw materials, something for the energy to act on. In fact, this analogy gives you the advantage, since a tornado has a good deal more structure available than raw energy does.
If you sent a trillion tornados, one at a time, through the same junkyard, would you expect a working B52 to form as a result?
My answer: I would expect it to form a very fine metallic sand. Your answer?
OK, let's abandon illustrations connected with reality, and start giving you som serious ground. If you sent a trillion tornados through a trillion junkyards, would you expect to see a working B52 formed? Would it help to re-run the experiment a trillion times?
My answers: no, and no. Your answers?
If you sent a trillion tornados across a trillion copies of the biggest B52 junkyard in the world, would you expect to get a working B52 in the process? Or even something that flew under its own power, maybe a mutant with nineteen jet engines (three of which worked) and seven wings?
My answers: no, and no. Your answer?
Let's go back to that most popular of analogies, the infinite number of monkeys.
We don't have an infinite number of monkeys, so let's consider a very large number of them. Their task is to type out The Origin of Species, starting with the title. We'll use Golden Tamarinds, because they're small, and pack them and a little typewriter into a cage 10cm on a side. Given a surface area of 500,000,000 square kilometers, if we paved the entire Earth, oceans too, with cages, we'd fit 50,000,000,000,000,000 (5x10^15) cages on Earth. Let's stack those a kilometer high to get 5x10^19 cages. We don't know how many planets there are in the universe, but let's guess that there are 10^22, roughly one for every single star in the universe, and that they're Earth-sized. Cover those with tamarinds too. We're up to 5x10^41 tamarinds - oh, the plumbing...! Being fast little buggers, they type ten random characters a second, so we have 5x10^42 random keystrokes available every second to apply to our manuscript. That's a lot of keystrokes!
The title of Darwin's work is `On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.' That's 21 words in 119 characters, and a boring typewriter keyboard like this one has 63 symbols available. We'll tape over keys like tab, carriage return and backspace because layout is of no interest to us. Because we don't want to spend forever dithering around about how often a tamarind will hit shifted keys, or how much favour the spacebar gets because it's bigger, or ASDFGHJKL get because they're central - and also to maintain that typing speed - we'll arrange those 63 symbols in a "mammary" style keyboard with equal-sized unshifted keys and an equal chance of each being hit.
Ready to roll... each keystroke stands a 1/63 chance of being the right one, so it will take an average of a bit over 10^214 keystrokes to complete the title. Dividing by 5x10^42 gives 2x10^171 seconds to type out the heading... but the universe is less
And Avogadro's number has what to do with probability?
The smallest life forms still alive today are on the order of 10^8 atoms. And it had a billion years to form, and was aided by carbon-based molecules' tendency to coagulate and polymerize.
Well, you've made a start, I guess. Pick a lifeform of the order of 10^8 atoms and structure them in all chemically possible ways (ie, all combinations of 10^7 through 10^9 atoms). How many of those ways represent a living organism? Let's be generous and call it one in 10^9 possible arrangements. What does this organism eat/breathe? What proportion of possible locations in the universe contain those substances? Of those locations, what proportion fall within habitable ranges of temperature and radiation? What proportion of them contain no significant concentration of chemicals lethal to our organism-to-be? What mechanism(s) are you proposing to rearrange these auto-polymerising carbon chains? Is this "lifeform" that you've chosen standalone, or a virus? If it's a virus, what are you proposing to use for a host?
Earth could have been the one successful "attempt" out of a pool of 10^xx planets in the universe.
I don't think you're reading from the same page as me. Limiting yourself to a planetary surface would tilt the calculations dramatically toward "my" end of the table.
Way less than 1% of the atoms in the universe are other than hydrogen (92.5%) or helium (7.4%); oxygen (0.06%) and carbon (0.03%) are among the most abundant of those; but we'll ignore that, even though it's critical (because there are even more critical things to consider). If you rearrange every one of the (roughly) 10^81 atoms in the universe stupidly often (say, 10^9 times a second) for the (roughly) 10^17 second nominal life of the universe and ignore the effects of distance, you get 10^107 possible combinations of atoms (which certainly is a shitload of combinations).
Over against this, we set out the need for at least something like 100 functional proteins to appear in the same location simultaneously. Nothing this simple has been observed in the wild, "simple" one-celled lifeforms like E.Coli are enormously more complex. A protein is constructed from roughly 200-1000 amino acids, so let's select shortish ones that average 300 aminos to improve the odds. This yields 4^300 possible proteins (10^180) at each site. Grant that any one of a million different proteins will function in any particular slot and we're down to odds of 10^174 against; look for 100 such proteins and we're up to 10^176. Not that it makes any difference.
10^176 may not look so bad over against 10^107, but that's 10^69 short and in order for the numbers to be comparable we'd have to presume that every atom in the universe was an amino acid molecule. Statisticians generally quote somewhere between 10^30 and 10^50 as "impossible", so taking the stricter end of this spectrum and laying it alongside our universe made of amino acids with no space between them, we find that a working lifeform - any working lifeform - is 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 times impossible. This is a fantastic distance from even odds, and you've got to admit, I don't pull any punches when I use phrases like "wildly optimistic" to describe those starting conditions. (-:
Life could just as easily have been silicon based.
Firstly, no it couldn't. Silicon has different properties to carbon, and those properties won't allow it to form the kinds of compounds necessary to life. And if it could, why didn't it?
The problem with the "argument from design" is that it makes to many narrow assumptions about what environments can and cannot support life, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I once watched a guy reset an entire fuel station with his hundred-watt CB (27MHz) linear amp (antenna about 30cm from nearest pump electronics). Does that count?
Everywhere else in the world, `gas' is the hissy stuff that happens when you heat a fluid too much. Admittedly what Aussies call "petrol stations" are actually selling some bona fide gas (LPG and sometimes LNG) as well, now.
...but it'll never happen. Not on /. (-:
Yesterday, I watched a dude walking along the footpath in Merriwa with his GF. They could barely afford clothes (what they wore was ragged, and not in a trendy way), yet could apparently afford a mobile 'phone that flashed red, white, blue quite brightly against the guy's face as he talked, and also the spondoolies needed to keep the thing on the air.
`Hello? Is this brain on?'
...but at a range of tens of m I don't think so.
One thing we are told about mobile 'phones is that they emit "2 watts" - we are not told that this comes as very steep pulses peaking at 200W. Domestic microwave ovens start at 600W and work up. What you are holding against your brain-case is a third of a microwave oven.
Nevertheless a highly inefficient 200W (mostly) electric transmitter in a metal tube full of absorbtive objects like water-filled (70%) human bodies is likely not going to generate a strong enough magnetic field to seriously upset a compass tens of m away behind a metal firewall. And at a range of 10m an omni 200W electric signal isn't going to be so curious about a small needle in an electrically shielded case.
They have, haven't they? Contrary to what the article says, I do believe this is a major hole in the foot for their faux pas against IBM, because regardless of the validity of said code secrets, and regardless of whether they're GPLed or not, SCO have made the code publicly available, long before they prepared or made complaint against IBM. How could IBM steal something that's publicly available? D'oh?
I can't see how it could be applied this way (surprise: IANAL), but it would be ironic enough to be picked up with a magnet if SCO's publication-under-the-GPL of this code implied the GPLing of their UnixWare(tm,(R),(c),etc...) code as well. I imagine that would have rather... extensive effects on things like their share-market value.
Live with this: /. is probably not very different from Joe Public. (-:
They'd be more interested in rev-enging the chip, for starters, and in Australia, at least, reverse-engineering is legally protected (producing and/or selling hardware using a proprietary idea is not). All they'd need to do would be contract the actual rev-eng out and clean-room the data they got back enough that showing it to their engineers wouldn't put them at risk of patent violation.
So the short answer is: you shouldn't need to hide anything; and the longer answer is: you have the expensive machinery anyway (to see what's really going on with your own chips), and reason to be using it - so slipping a competitor's chip into the analysis stream would be dead easy to hide. Only one or two people need ever know.
Damn, I miss having mod points sometimes!
Dear Sir,
I'm sorry I haven't responded to your fascinating email earlier, but in addition to the two or three thousand others on the same topic that I get every week, I have a problem in that my penis is too large and rigid to fit under my desk, so I have to sit back from the desk a little, and in order to reach the keyboard I have to balance it on my penis. As you can imagine, this makes typing difficult.
The reason I'm writing is to enquire as to whether you have any products to painlessly shorten or soften a man's penis. This would enable me to select girlfriends less than seven feet tall, who have had less than four children and to get more than the first half of my penis involved in the activity.
I am more than willing to sacrifice the convenience of drying clothes on it, or the usefulness of being able to drive nails without finding a hammer.
Can you help me?
Yours Desperately
J Random Websurfer
...lots of giggles. Got another spare +1 Funny for this parent?
Does anyone have a +1 Funny to spare for the parent? (-:
At what level? SDL? GGI? GTK? Qt? wxWindows? KPart? Six of one, half a dozen of the other, perhaps you're spoilt for choice?
I look at it this way: who has the resources and expertise to best disassemble, interpret and live-hardware-debug your video card? Is it your competitors or the OSS developer-in-the-street? How many OSS freaks do you know carry digital scopes and logic analysers able to resolve and capture into the gigahertz range?
So by hiding the driver source and card details they're taking away advantages from their customers, not their competitors.
Your plan is a vast improvement on what we have now, but really the paranoid lawyers controlling the chipmakers need a heavy dose of reality.
Exposing details of their chips (especially for something like VIA's Savage4-derived horrors but this applies to ATI and nVidia just as well) isn't going to help their competitors very much at all, but it will help their customers lots, and a helped customer is a happy, loyal customer.
Are you listening, nVidia?
...lock azaleas like these up for blackmail?
It's obvious that the patent isn't worth a pinch of duck poo, and standover tactics like theirs are illegal in many places and many ways, why should their particular form of blackmail be exempt?
...honey? (-:
In America, I wouldn't be so sure.
However, there are many cases where the person using the browser has been successfully prosecuted for bringing up kiddie porn on it.
Whenever I see the phrase `kiddie porn' I'm inclined to ask, `And what sort of porn would kiddies be looking for? Jack Stone does Barbie?'
Can we let them fight one of my pet peeves but san no to the rest? (-:
...all of the machinery needed to support it, as well.
You get bequeathed almost everything except about half of your DNA from dear old Mum. The vast majority of your biological building blocks are epigenetic, and you get almost all of that matrilineally (certainly by weight; I don't know of any studies into what else besides DNA is contributed by the spermatoza - science seems to have been more than slightly tunnel-vision about DNA).
And cytoplasm is a long way from the simple `albuminous putty' that Haeckel wishfully describes. It's getting to the point where if that man supported an idea, you can be pretty sure it's gunna be a dud.
Given that the vast majority of the material inherited from one's mother is not DNA, not genes, and that this cellular material (cytosomes, organelles, replication molecules etc) regulates the DNA, surely we need to start finding out more about this other stuff about now?
Now, the Java inventors were Sicilians; and everybody knows that you can't trust Sicilians... so you can't take the language that's before them! But... they would have expected you to know that, so you clearly can't take the language that's in front of you...
"You think that's good? Wait 'till I get going!" (-:
Not exactly, and the difference between "very many" and "virtually infinite" is a crucial one.
If in practically every example you can find or analogy you can invent, the probability is always negative, zero or infinitesimal, this is an indication (not a proof, but certainly an indication) that in reality the probability is effectively zero (-: "or less" :-)
As I mentioned, it's also important that "lots" is not the same as "infinite". If you can fine your answers down to within, say, 5000 orders of magnitude <grin> then side-issues that only count for a hundred or so orders of magnitude are - in the statistical sense - insignificant.
To cut a long story short, the experts in various fields who have actually done realistic calculations or experiments say no.
For (a classic) example, after the Urey/Miller experiments, Stanley Miller followed up. Google for it if you're interested, but for political reasons don't expect the headlines that greeted his first big experimentt. Far from eliminating the recemisation problem, he established that it was pretty much insurmountable (as were all others). He was also unable to produce any but a few of the simplest amino acids, even racemised, using ignredients-plus-energy experiments. Although the aminos generally represent local minima, most of them have fairly tall maxima on any reasonable "approach" to that minimum. This was (is) very disappointing to Miller; he still holds as an article of faith that spontaneous generation does happen, but has no explanation for how.
It's also sad-but-true that the conditions required for producing amino acids (to say nothing of more complex products) are also fairly hostile to their survival. It's even more frustrating than the bowling-ball-on-curved-rails arcade game in that if you put enough energy into the ball to get it over the first hump, you also put enough in to get it back over the first hump - in real-life chemistry, the hump is asymmetrical (the ball rolls out more readily than it rolls in). Complex chemicals are easier to break than to make.
In living biochemistry, the methods of producing and combining complex chemicals are radically different from those proposed for random formation from raw chemicals. To cut another long story short, it looks plausible on the surface but in implementation is high implausible. And of course a lot of people really, really want to believe that it is plausible, each for their own reasons and none of those reasons (that I've seen yet) are really related to doing raw science.
Nit to pick: if you count lightning and cosmic rays as a `natural circumstances', each of them can indeed provoke transmutation. Given the amount of "lightning" (electrical discharge) damage that Mars has taken (it's the only force that explains almost all of the characteristics of Valles Marineris - but nobody's got around to figuring out how it happened yet), that may be an avenue worth pursuing.
At the level of the anology, the atoms are (very) like unto the steel, copper, aluminium, plastic, rubber, leather etc of which the B52 is built. An individual component like a bolt or a lens might equate to an amino acid (some structure, but not much). A slightly complex part like an electric motor or guage might correspond to a protein, a very complex part like a bombsight or a jet engine might correspond to a set of genes.
Sigh, I did want to avoid getting stuck in the detail, but in it's own way it's interesting.
Two successive tornadoes might be useful to your cause in that the first one frees up more random small parts (at the boilt and lens level) for the second one to fill gaps with. But what a B52 does is nothing like as complex as, say, E. coli or any other complete single-celled lifeform. It doesn't, for example, self
I'm going to borrow a couple of basic analogies to illustrate the point. Don't get carried away nitpicking the details of each analogy, just consider the broad view. The porpose of the analogies is not to prove or disprove evolution, but to illustrate some things about statistics.
If you sent a tornado through a junkyard, would you expect it to form a working B52?
My answer: No. I suspect your answer would be "what are you? nuts? the cases aren't comparable!" - but they are. A tornado brings with it energy, which is needed for assembling things, and the junkyard suplies raw materials, something for the energy to act on. In fact, this analogy gives you the advantage, since a tornado has a good deal more structure available than raw energy does.
If you sent a trillion tornados, one at a time, through the same junkyard, would you expect a working B52 to form as a result?
My answer: I would expect it to form a very fine metallic sand. Your answer?
OK, let's abandon illustrations connected with reality, and start giving you som serious ground. If you sent a trillion tornados through a trillion junkyards, would you expect to see a working B52 formed? Would it help to re-run the experiment a trillion times?
My answers: no, and no. Your answers?
If you sent a trillion tornados across a trillion copies of the biggest B52 junkyard in the world, would you expect to get a working B52 in the process? Or even something that flew under its own power, maybe a mutant with nineteen jet engines (three of which worked) and seven wings?
My answers: no, and no. Your answer?
Let's go back to that most popular of analogies, the infinite number of monkeys.
We don't have an infinite number of monkeys, so let's consider a very large number of them. Their task is to type out The Origin of Species, starting with the title. We'll use Golden Tamarinds, because they're small, and pack them and a little typewriter into a cage 10cm on a side. Given a surface area of 500,000,000 square kilometers, if we paved the entire Earth, oceans too, with cages, we'd fit 50,000,000,000,000,000 (5x10^15) cages on Earth. Let's stack those a kilometer high to get 5x10^19 cages. We don't know how many planets there are in the universe, but let's guess that there are 10^22, roughly one for every single star in the universe, and that they're Earth-sized. Cover those with tamarinds too. We're up to 5x10^41 tamarinds - oh, the plumbing...! Being fast little buggers, they type ten random characters a second, so we have 5x10^42 random keystrokes available every second to apply to our manuscript. That's a lot of keystrokes!
The title of Darwin's work is `On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.' That's 21 words in 119 characters, and a boring typewriter keyboard like this one has 63 symbols available. We'll tape over keys like tab, carriage return and backspace because layout is of no interest to us. Because we don't want to spend forever dithering around about how often a tamarind will hit shifted keys, or how much favour the spacebar gets because it's bigger, or ASDFGHJKL get because they're central - and also to maintain that typing speed - we'll arrange those 63 symbols in a "mammary" style keyboard with equal-sized unshifted keys and an equal chance of each being hit.
Ready to roll... each keystroke stands a 1/63 chance of being the right one, so it will take an average of a bit over 10^214 keystrokes to complete the title. Dividing by 5x10^42 gives 2x10^171 seconds to type out the heading... but the universe is less
Ya just did, ya drongo! (-:
If you were truly interested in not arguing you would simply have dropped it.
I saw the logic in your statement, it was broken, I pointed it out, and now you're having a hissy fit and leaving. Very reasonable... (-:
And Avogadro's number has what to do with probability?
Well, you've made a start, I guess. Pick a lifeform of the order of 10^8 atoms and structure them in all chemically possible ways (ie, all combinations of 10^7 through 10^9 atoms). How many of those ways represent a living organism? Let's be generous and call it one in 10^9 possible arrangements. What does this organism eat/breathe? What proportion of possible locations in the universe contain those substances? Of those locations, what proportion fall within habitable ranges of temperature and radiation? What proportion of them contain no significant concentration of chemicals lethal to our organism-to-be? What mechanism(s) are you proposing to rearrange these auto-polymerising carbon chains? Is this "lifeform" that you've chosen standalone, or a virus? If it's a virus, what are you proposing to use for a host?
I don't think you're reading from the same page as me. Limiting yourself to a planetary surface would tilt the calculations dramatically toward "my" end of the table.
Way less than 1% of the atoms in the universe are other than hydrogen (92.5%) or helium (7.4%); oxygen (0.06%) and carbon (0.03%) are among the most abundant of those; but we'll ignore that, even though it's critical (because there are even more critical things to consider). If you rearrange every one of the (roughly) 10^81 atoms in the universe stupidly often (say, 10^9 times a second) for the (roughly) 10^17 second nominal life of the universe and ignore the effects of distance, you get 10^107 possible combinations of atoms (which certainly is a shitload of combinations).
Over against this, we set out the need for at least something like 100 functional proteins to appear in the same location simultaneously. Nothing this simple has been observed in the wild, "simple" one-celled lifeforms like E.Coli are enormously more complex. A protein is constructed from roughly 200-1000 amino acids, so let's select shortish ones that average 300 aminos to improve the odds. This yields 4^300 possible proteins (10^180) at each site. Grant that any one of a million different proteins will function in any particular slot and we're down to odds of 10^174 against; look for 100 such proteins and we're up to 10^176. Not that it makes any difference.
10^176 may not look so bad over against 10^107, but that's 10^69 short and in order for the numbers to be comparable we'd have to presume that every atom in the universe was an amino acid molecule. Statisticians generally quote somewhere between 10^30 and 10^50 as "impossible", so taking the stricter end of this spectrum and laying it alongside our universe made of amino acids with no space between them, we find that a working lifeform - any working lifeform - is 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 times impossible. This is a fantastic distance from even odds, and you've got to admit, I don't pull any punches when I use phrases like "wildly optimistic" to describe those starting conditions. (-:
Firstly, no it couldn't. Silicon has different properties to carbon, and those properties won't allow it to form the kinds of compounds necessary to life. And if it could, why didn't it?
No, it doesn't. Argument f