Picking up from the quiz started in the previous part about the chances of rolling dice and getting Six face up 10 times in a row. Since the probability of a Six face up is 1/6, and different casts are independent (memoryless), then 2 in a row makes for 1/36 (1/ 6 times 1/6), and so on. A quick check shows the probability for 10 sixes in a row is a little less one in 60 million.
This does not say much by itself, but turning the argument around gets interesting.
Suppose your patience is large enough to roll dice non-stop say 70 million times (11 years non-stop, one cast each 5 seconds). Then, what the calculation says is that almost UNAVOIDABLY there will be a row of 10 sixes somewhere in the run. It does not say when it will happen, but that it is almost impossible for it not to happen.
If a witness happens by at that moment, he or she could rightly conclude: "Every time you cast dice, it will come six face up".
If 11 years mindlessly rolling dice seems too long, read on. Abusing again of a repeated comparison, suppose we accelerate time so the Earth's 4.5 billion years' history fits in 24 hours. Let's quickly check, in a day's journey, what happened and when. You may want to verify the calculations, at this scale one thousandth of a second (millisecond) corresponds approximately to 52 years.
First bacteriae appeared when the clock rang about 5 AM, eukariotes (nucleated and advanced unicellular organisms) by 4 PM. Dinosaurs were wiped at 11:39 PM. Man's first written records appeared at 11:59 PM. We (those reading this) were born either during the last or next to last millisecond.
We are ill-equipped to imagine and handle outrageously large numbers. But 4.5 billion years of Earth's history is an outrageously long time and an equally outrageously large space for experimentation - for mindlessly, randomly exploring all nooks and crannies, all possible corners of the universe of possible experiments. As said, the virtues of patience are sometimes not well appreciated.
There is nothing rationally unacceptable in the hypotheses the long and winding road for life on Earth - sobering and disquieting and disgusting as it may sound - is fully understandable in terms of a chain of outrageously numerous, mindless experimentation instances. Neither does it negate the possibility of a higher level designer intelligence, only in this case pushes the question back in time.
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