My Mouth, Never, Infinity, The Big Bang, and The Universe

So first I want to say how I arrived at this post.

Earlier today, I developed a canker sore in my mouth that was bothering me. I went to go get some food and as I was walking to my bike I was reminded of the fact that I recently fell of my bike for the first time after having it for about 5 years. This, in turn, reminded me of a conversation I had (about 5 months ago) with some coworkers about driving.

Somebody asked, “Do you think that you could ever get so good a driving a manual transmission that you never stall?”

We discussed it a little more and talked about how often we stall when driving and got into probabilities, rates, etc.

Anyway it led me to thinking about the following. The term ‘never’ is basically useless. In order to test or see if it is actually never going to happen you have to wait an infinite amount of time to test to see if it never happens. This got me to thinking about some people’s arguments for a God/creator. They will say things like, “do you think that this all happened by chance?!” or “You can’t possibly believe that the universe just popped into existence.”

Then I thought about it some more. This argument is saying, “a universe will never just come into existence it’s too improbable.” My counter to that argument is that it actually seems more plausible that given a truly infinite amount of time it would actually be weirder if it didn’t happen, because thing would have to be so incredibly fined tuned to make it truly never happen. Who cares what the rate is or how long it takes to happen, you have an infinite amount of time/space to wait for it, it’s gonna happen. Thus eventually, I would expect, that a universe will come into existence from nothing, simply because of infinity. There is infinite nothingness in a universe without a universe so the only logical thing to assume is that eventually a universe will be born (basically the most improbable thing you could ever think of happening). Thus no matter what, Infinity has a weird way of turning a remote possibility into a ‘reality.’

This is also some what commensurate with some modern cosmological theories that postulate a multi-verse (many universe simultaneously existing). In cosmology there is something called a flatness problem that basically states that our universe should not have been able to exist for the 14 billion years it has because, any tiny (i mean really really tiny 1 in 1 followed by 60 zeroes) deviation away from a perfect balance would have lead to a universe blow apart or re collapsed by now.

But wait. The universe had an infinite amount of time to start. So even if the probability of starting any universe (not necessarily one that can live for 14 billion years without blowing apart or recollapsing) is tiny and there is an even tinier chance that a universe would be close enough to flat that it can live for 14 billion years (and thus be able to support life, like humans). None of this matter, because all you need is to wait and eventually because there is an infinite amount of time to wait. So that’s all that we needed to stumble upon a universe capable of supporting human life.

The universe just waited and waited until that one random time out of the tiniest probability one universe capable of living for 14 billion years forms. Although there may have been a gargantuan number of other universes that failed (to live long enough to support life), there is one that came from the shear fact that all it had to do was wait.

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