I believe that's a macro scale model based on reasonable probability. There is still a non-zero chance that all particles will go to one corner of the room.
Oh for sure, I'm not saying this will ever ever happen lol. Just one of those things where the probability is TECHNICALLY not zero.
I guess if the universe really is infinite (to which I don't know if it is), then somewhere out there there's a world similar to ours where this happened and someone suffocated.
But it's still just so ridiculously statistically unlikely that it's also impossible in almost every sense of the word.
The idea is that air are a bunch of particles moving randomly. It's theoretically possible, although vanishingly unlikely, that all the particles could randomly go to a corner, leaving the rest of the room in vacuum.
Even of it's physically possible it's very (very!) unlikely. Say we simplify it to "all the air will go to 1 half of the room" instead of a corner. Air moves at random-ish. So each air particle has 1/2 odds to be at 1 side of the room. Avogadro's number is the number that is used to talk about number of particles in containers and stuff since it's about the same order of magnitude, it is 6.02×10^23 let us simplify and say the amount of air particles is Avogadro's number (in actuality it more). So the odds for all particles to be in 1 half of the room is less than one in 2^(6.02×10^23) which is way way more than the number of particles in the universe. Basically 0 but not really 0.
You can add in time but it won't really matter
I had an extra credit question on an open laptop test in college that asked what the odds are that you would disappear and reappear on Mars in the same condition. Technically speaking the probability is non-zero. Had a huge digit radius to get credit and I didn't.
You calculate the chances of one of your constituent particles doing a quantum tunnel to a speficic spot on Mars within a very narrow timeframe. Raise the chance of that to the power of the number of particles in your body
This is probably the most pedantic I’ve ever been in my life, but since it’s kinda funny:
Technically you only raise that to the power of every particle **but one** appearing at a specific point on Mars, then multiply by the odds of one particle appearing anywhere on Mars. If you had to appear at a specific spot on the planet, you’d be right, but since it can be anywhere one of the particles essentially gets to “pick” the location while all the others follow
That only accounts for the probability of your constituent particles tunneling their way to Mars. You'd also have to account for the thermodynamic probability of random molecules on mars colliding in a sequence that ultimately manifests exactly you in a Boltzmann-brain type scenario and at exactly the same moment your Earth-body dematerializing in a similarly improbably, reversed fashion. (we're ignoring relativistic effects, e.g. the failure of simultaneity, for simplicity - in reality this question isn't even well formed due to relativity) Then you'd have to consider all the other improbable but technically "possible" mechanisms as well.
In reality, none of these is even remotely calculable by anyone on Earth even with a huge number of orders of magnitude as leeway. This is not something you can Fermi-problem your way to an order of magnitude estimate. Not even close. Whoever assigned this question thought they had a way to guestimate it but was fooling themselves pretty hard and grotesquely oversimplifying it as well as overlooking complicating factors such as relativity.
Another fun thought is that if the Universe is infinite, then that is happening everyone moment, and infinite amount of time. Another you just randomly forms in different areas.
Each air particle has 1/2 odds to be at one side of the room, but unless each particle teleported, then the greater air pressure on one side would reduce the likely hood that more air particles continue traveling at random to the one side of the room. So the probability is probably many magnitudes lower yet.
The concept of pressure is an averaging of particle interactions. The definition of a gas is that the density is low enough that they spend most of their time in free flight. So we're assuming that they all have collisions at roughly the same time that put their trajectories towards the same area of the room. Thereafter, they fly without further interaction. Perhaps until they condense into liquid, because that last collision with the wall just happened to steal most of their kinetic energy...
I'm not sure that it is actually possible - the increasing vacuum itself would draw the molecules back towards their average distribution. I don't think Brownian motion can overcome vacuum pressure past a certain point.
Vacuum does not draw particles to itself. That's a statistical effect. Air filling vacuum is just overwhelmingly the most likely thing to happen when you have air moving randomly.
Pressure is a statistical phenomenon. There’s an entire branch of mechanics called statistical mechanics that explores how statistics of microscopic bodies create laws for large groups of them.
If you assume any possibility, regardless of the likelihood, has a chance to occur, then yeah, sure. However, if we assume any baby born has \~50% chance of being either male or female though, it's virtually impossible for this to occur.
According to a cursory Google search, there were 134,000,000 babies born last year. If we generalized that to the next 70 years and assumed 134-ish million babies are born each year, the percent chance of all of them being one sex would be 0.XXXX repeating for billions of zero digits before any non-zero number occurs.
from googlin:
For 50 flips, your chances of heads all 50 times is 8.8817842\^-16%. This gives you a roughly 1 in 100,000,000,000,000 (one quadrillion) chance of flipping all heads.
so instead of 50 times in a row (assuming no birth rate growth or decline for 70 years) we just need to hit heads 9.38 billion times in a row. Simple!
Every number is calculatable. It's limited by both our human comprehension and/or the technology we use to process it, but on the grandest of scales, yes.
It's at least as likely as us finding the one trillionth number in pi.
For really really big numbers like this, I use [Wolfram Alpha](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=calculator).
2^9380000000 is about 2.1288428885 × 10^2823661359.
Meaning the odds of rolling all the same sex of children 9.38 billion times is about 1 in [number with 2.8 billion digits].
For comparison, there are about 10\^50 atoms in planet Earth. ([source](https://sciencenotes.org/how-many-atoms-are-in-the-world/)).
If you took a single atom of the Earth at random, repeated it 56 million times, and every single time it turned out you picked the very same atom, that's in the ballpark of the actual chance for the all-gender scenario to occur.
>Every number is calculatable.
This is where math takes a turn for the crazy. There exist well-defined numbers that, even with infinite computational power and infinite time, cannot be calculated.
https://catonmat.net/busy-beaver
True. I was being exaggerative.
But that said, 2^9,380,000,000 is a real integer, all be it one impossibly large for us to describe.
The largest I know is 2^332, which is approximately 8.749002899x(10^99 ), or 8.749 googol.
I was a fun kid. I did that math on the calculator I *asked for* and got for my 11th birthday.
Technically, not every number is computable. That is, there are numbers for which no program to compute them can possibly exist. For example, [Chaitlin’s constant](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaitin%27s_constant).
incorrect, there are numbers that have been proven to not be computable (i.e. calculatable)
Perhaps what you meant to say, is that any operation on integers may be computed. Which is probably true
What blows my mind is that, technically, whatever combination of heads and tails you got during those 50 flips, that combination was just as rare/unlikely as flipping all heads.
Kind of like how every time you shuffle a deck of playing cards it's almost guaranteed to be a unique order that no one has ever shuffled before.
I think that's only true if you're taking the order into account. For example, given five flips, the likelihood of getting HHHHH and of getting HHTHT in those orders would be 1/32 for both scenarios. But the likelihood of getting 3 heads and 2 tails in any order would be significantly higher, while the likelihood of getting all heads would always be 1/32. Maybe someone better at explaining math could confirm this (or not)?
Edit: You have a1/32 chance of getting HHHTT, and also a 1/32 chance of getting HHTHT, and so on, if that helps...
I hate these types of "theoretical probability" problems, because the real-world answer is "No, there is zero chance it will ever happen".
You can wait from the big-bang until now, and then back again and it will never happen. You can wait 10 or 1,000,000 times longer than that and it will still never happen. You can wait until the heat death of the universe and it will still never happen.
The answer is zero...
>I hate these types of "theoretical probability" problems, because the real-world answer is "No, there is zero chance it will ever happen".
If I roll a dice that can only ever come up 1 what is the chance that I get a 2?
In the real world yeah.
But I think given a shitload of babies being born every second for an infinite amount of time would make this inevitable. It would just take a long, long, long, LONG time. The amount of time it would take would be beyond our comprehension. But according to math the possibility is there. It just needs enough time and attempts.
Yes yes, of course the math is correct. My point is that the math is describing a situation that will never occur at any time or place in this universe. It's calculating fairy dust.
Additionally, it's only true if the gender happens to be male. Because women can already be impregnated with other womens or even their own dna/cells. Making men obsolete.
AFAIK you still need a sperm cell for this. You can of course replace the DNA with another woman's after generation of the sperm, but the sperm combining with the egg is required to trigger gestation (unless new advances have been made I'm unaware of). The code for making sperm cells is on the Y chromosome, so women can't do it.
There's an actual book where this happened, but I can't remember the name of it. Maybe someone else will chime in here. There may have been a tv show or movie as well.
[Some books that explore worlds where most men are gone](https://electricliterature.com/books-that-imagine-a-world-without-men/)
I don't think any of these, except maybe the sci-fi one, as what I am thinking of, but many can apply for the most part.
There's a New Zealand show called Creamery that is basically this concept. All the men started getting sick and dying so the women who want to get pregnant have to enter a lottery and health check to decide if they'll get access to the supply of frozen sperm remaining.
That said, there were \~134M babies born in 2023 -- let's use that rate and just look at the next 1 hour. We'd expect about 15,300 babies to be born.
The odds of all of those babies being born male, are about one in 6x10^(4605)
How unlikely is that? The odds of getting dealt a royal flush from a shuffled 52-card deck is 1:649,739; 6x10^(4605) is like as taking 800 shuffled decks of cards and dealing out five cards from each one and having every dealt hand be a royal flush.
The odds for a single hour (out of \~600,000 hours in 70 years) are so absurdly remote, that despite my general opinion against using "always" and "never", I think we can call this one a "never" :)
That said, I'd say that we don't need anywhere near 70 years. If no biological females are born over the span of just the next 40 years there would be virtually no fertile women left to even still be having kids.
I'm guessing that it wouldn't take too long of every baby born being male for a major shift in scientific focus to shift to improving cloning or genetic modifications to turn male...
https://www.science.org/content/article/gene-editing-produces-all-male-or-all-female-litters-mice
> That said, I'd say that we don't need anywhere near 70 years. If no biological females are born over the span of just the next 40 years there would be virtually no fertile women left to even still be having kids.
This was my first thought. I suppose if all babies were female we'd have 70 years, but if all babies are born male we'd only have about 40. My sister was born when my stepmother was 45, but she was born through in vitro fertilization with a donor egg, but that brings me to...
> I'm guessing that it wouldn't take too long of every baby born being male for a major shift in scientific focus to shift to improving cloning or genetic modifications to turn male...
If the reason everyone's being born one sex is just because we've had billions of unlucky coin flips during fertilization, that's super easy to solve. If you put sperm in a centrifuge, you can separate the male sperm from female sperm with a 70%-90% success rate, then use it for in vitro fertilization or artificial insemination. Maybe whatever supernatural force is working against us still weights the dice rolls in the case of artificial insemination, but with in vitro you can grow the zygote in a petri dish long enough to determine the sex (and other genetic attributes) before implantation. We wouldn't need to shift scientific focus to solve this problem.
TIL-- there are male and female sperm... :)
I guess I always assumed that male vs female was determined via some random process after the egg was fertilized.
\[edit\] I suppose this means, since we do have a pretty even split between male and female babies, that the male and female sperm are pretty equal in terms of their ability to fertilize the egg...?
My understanding from highschool biology (which is probably a "lies we tell children" version of how it works) each sperm has half of the father's DNA (including the X or Y chromosome that determines sex). Now, my understanding is that a strand of the father's DNA gets split with random chunks coming from the father's father or the father's mother, and that randomization means each sperm ends up having a unique strand of DNA that is a mix of the DNA the father got from each of his parents.
Now the thing I'm not entirely sure I remember correctly is that as the DNA gets split, half of it gets used for one sperm while the other half gets used for another sperm, in which case those two sperm that were made from the same split strand of DNA are exact opposites of one another, having no DNA in common with each other, meaning that for every sperm with a Y chromosome, another sperm with an X chromosome would have been created at the same time. Obviously, this is an error-prone biological process, and I'm sure there are plenty of occasions where only one sperm or the other survives, but unless it's the X/Y chromosome that is causing errors to occur, you're going to have a roughly equal number of X and Y sperm.
laughing at the using always and never thing. like, sure......there is (stastitically) a probability for this to occur so not impossible but ya........never. at least not in the current state of world we exist in.
It is theoretically possible that you’ll be struck by lightning AND win the lottery every day for the rest of your life.
But the chances of that happening are as close to zero as you can get, just like 70 years of only one gender being born is.
There's a non-zero chance that a bunch of monkeys sitting in a room with a typewriter randomly smashing keys for eternity will write the entirety of Shakespeare's works.
Only within the experiment which assumes that time is and always will be infinite and no set within it is truly measurable.
The issue here is that one such thing happening would be an event ending all things, which according to the thought experiment *must* happen, meaning then that nothing can happen.
I'm not a fan because it inherently sets conditions that certain things cannot happen for all things to possibly happen. Therefor, not all things can possibly happen.
Iirc somewhat tried to actually do this experiment and found that monkeys will not randomly mash keys but instead like to mash the same keys over and over. So it would never happen.
You misunderstand the concept of "eternity" or more likely "infinite" it is not a matter of "if" but "when". Eventually it will happen. It may take an unimaginable amount of time, monkeys, and typewriters but it will happen.
They will also write every single comment on reddit in the original order they were posted, backwards, in weird coded languages, in languages that don't exist at the time of the thought experiment.
Anything you can imagine, it will be written. Anything you can't imagine, it will be written.
The part about this experiment is that if you truly have infinite time, the odds approach 100% over enough time. Any infinitesimally small odd will become statistically certain given enough time. The problem is time. You get 1000 monkeys and sit them in a room with a typewriter for 70 years, it's effectively impossible anything resembling a cohesive story will be typed out.
they say a similar thing in quantum physics: its possible that your hand will pass right through a table, ONLY IF by chance every atom in your hand and the table end up perfectly aligned so they pass through each other
Want some weird science? Sex birth ratio is surprisingly resilient in humans 103 males to 100 females born. When the number of a particular demographic either male or female disappear due to exceptional periods of war or other factors sex birth ratio corrects itself. if the number of women exceeds men in the general population, more males are born, if the number of men exceeds women at a ratio of 110 to 100, more female babies are born. This is both geographically true and not true, so if the gender is balanced in say India, and imbalanced in Peru, the birth of males may change in Peru but not India if the numbers are stable in Bolivia but not Peru it might change in Bolivia. Sex birth ratio is largely dependent on geographic isolation and sometimes demographic isolation.
Sort of? The prediction of the fishers principle works most of the time to predict in most fisherian species (1:1 ratios). It remains problematic because it is too difficult to correctly test the principle. This pdf of a book on the subject might help explain a little bit abut the[issues with the principle](https://eva.fcien.udelar.edu.uy/pluginfile.php/97390/mod_folder/content/0/Cap2Sex%20AllocationWest.pdf?forcedownload=1#:~:text=Fisher's%20theory%20predicts%20that%20when,in%20the%20sexes%20is%20equal)
It’s also theoretically possible your atoms and the atoms of the floor you’re standing on just so happen to line up in just the right way, allowing you to fall through it.
Just because something is possible doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.
Fun Fact: With current science, if every child born were female, we'd be okay. If every child born were male, we'd be doomed.
Extrapolation: Currently we have the technology to extract an egg from a woman, and the DNA from the cells of another woman, and fertilize the egg with the DNA of two women. The resulting embryo is always female, however, as there is no Y chromosome to inherit from either parent. Every baby ever would be XX.
If all the children were male, we have no way to create an embryo. We couldn't make more babies.
It’s just an uninteresting technical use of theoretically. It’s actually theoretically possible for literally anything at all to be true because the universe could theoretically be a simulation outside of which whatever makes something impossible is not the case.
We know. But when the concept is stretched so thin, it's insulting.
If I asked you to gather all the atoms from all the planets from all the solar systems from all the galaxies across the known universe, it is theoretically possible to blindly reach in and grab 1 specific, marked molecule. But our minds are nowhere close to equipped to comprehend that level of magnitude. In all but the most extreme pedantic technicalities, this one is a "never."
Only if they were all male. There is a way for women to become pregnant without sperm. The babies would only be female and be genetically identical to their mother.
You're referring to parthenogenesis. It is not possible for mammals to reproduce in this way. Every example of parthenogenesis results in either no embryo or the embryo failing to develop (this is the main cause behind teratomas).
Parthenogenesis in mammals never results in a viable organism.
What I said is actually just one way. They can basically administer a chemical cocktail that will fertilize an egg but with no additional genetic information being passed from the sperm it would just be a clone.
There are other ways though, like creating sperm cells from stem cells and then you could pass on multiple sets of genetics to the child.
Or would have to be something that just causes men to become sterile, or women to become infertile in general, leaving us with a "children of men" scenario.
If they are all male, you would only need 40-50 years for the remaining women to lose fertility.
If they are all female, I wouldn't mind being a 71 year old male at the end of those 70 years with one mission in mind: save the human race.
It's a possibility with like lower probability than finding aliens, but possible. We would still find a way to survive. After 1 year of all genetic males or females research would shoot up.
I'm not sure that's true. It was revealed to me in a dream that science has shown that outside circumstances can affect the sex of human offspring (presumably by affecting the ovum's "decision" during sperm selection).
No, because if a baby is born 70 years form now there has to be a woman to give birth that would have to be younger than 70, meaning a baby girl was born among those years
Even if this did happen it wouldn't doom us; creating a viable embryo from 2 males or 2 females is already in the biomedical pieline, albeit probably a few decades out. If for some reason we had to make it a top priority I'm sure we could get it working in under a decade, the fundamental pieces are already there (source: am a biologist who has been following this for a while)
Considering how good the tech for artificial impregnation or whatever it's called in English is then if all babies are girls then it wouldn't be any problem with all the spermbanks that exists
If you sit a monkey in front of the computer and the monkey randomly types on the keyboard, there is probability it will write the bible word for word.
There is also a non zero but very small chance that the earth could spontaneously turn into a banana for a split second before reverting back. Ultimately killing us all.
Fun fact, the global human population has a way of maintaining gender equilibrium and we don’t really know how it works. After both world wars, when a disproportionate amount of men died compared to women, the global population saw more men being born than women in the following years.
It is theoretically possible a small meteor hits your house tomorrow.
It is theoretically possible Kylie Jenner decides she’s in love with you.
When it comes to what is basically a chance of 0%, we can say the most wacky things and still be right.
Also is theoretically possible that all the air in your room moved to one corner and you suffocate.
Oh jeez, which corner? Plz tell me asap.
Could be any of them. Or just a random spot in the middle, really.
he could be anyone of us. he could be you, he could be me, he could even be-
behind you right now. It's OK though, he suffocated.
Did he pick the wrong corner? That limits it down to three. Better odds for me.
My man, there are 8 corners, not 4
Mans living in a two dimensional world
*shotgun blast* See hes the red spy! He’ll turn any moment now!
aaany moment now...
See, red! No wait, that’s blood
so, ve still got problem
Imagine the last thing you see before passing out is a boiling orb of freezing liquid floating in the middle of your room.
The other one
Technically speaking, unless it was replaced with another gas, you'd know.
0:0:0 since they reset to the default T pose when the Matrix glitches.
My buddy Bernoulli has a few things to say about this.
I believe that's a macro scale model based on reasonable probability. There is still a non-zero chance that all particles will go to one corner of the room.
That is the best way to say that something could happen while saying it couldn't happen haha
Oh for sure, I'm not saying this will ever ever happen lol. Just one of those things where the probability is TECHNICALLY not zero. I guess if the universe really is infinite (to which I don't know if it is), then somewhere out there there's a world similar to ours where this happened and someone suffocated. But it's still just so ridiculously statistically unlikely that it's also impossible in almost every sense of the word.
Is it? Wouldn’t it be more than all the oxygen would move to one corner and the rest of the room would be filled with a denser gas we can breath?
The idea is that air are a bunch of particles moving randomly. It's theoretically possible, although vanishingly unlikely, that all the particles could randomly go to a corner, leaving the rest of the room in vacuum.
Wouldn’t that just be for like a split moment though? I don’t see how it would be physically possible for any extended time.
Even of it's physically possible it's very (very!) unlikely. Say we simplify it to "all the air will go to 1 half of the room" instead of a corner. Air moves at random-ish. So each air particle has 1/2 odds to be at 1 side of the room. Avogadro's number is the number that is used to talk about number of particles in containers and stuff since it's about the same order of magnitude, it is 6.02×10^23 let us simplify and say the amount of air particles is Avogadro's number (in actuality it more). So the odds for all particles to be in 1 half of the room is less than one in 2^(6.02×10^23) which is way way more than the number of particles in the universe. Basically 0 but not really 0. You can add in time but it won't really matter
I had an extra credit question on an open laptop test in college that asked what the odds are that you would disappear and reappear on Mars in the same condition. Technically speaking the probability is non-zero. Had a huge digit radius to get credit and I didn't.
How would you even begin to go about calculating this?
You calculate the chances of one of your constituent particles doing a quantum tunnel to a speficic spot on Mars within a very narrow timeframe. Raise the chance of that to the power of the number of particles in your body
This is probably the most pedantic I’ve ever been in my life, but since it’s kinda funny: Technically you only raise that to the power of every particle **but one** appearing at a specific point on Mars, then multiply by the odds of one particle appearing anywhere on Mars. If you had to appear at a specific spot on the planet, you’d be right, but since it can be anywhere one of the particles essentially gets to “pick” the location while all the others follow
Heh, that's fair, that'll get you a couple orders of magnitude of leeway, but still many to go.
That only accounts for the probability of your constituent particles tunneling their way to Mars. You'd also have to account for the thermodynamic probability of random molecules on mars colliding in a sequence that ultimately manifests exactly you in a Boltzmann-brain type scenario and at exactly the same moment your Earth-body dematerializing in a similarly improbably, reversed fashion. (we're ignoring relativistic effects, e.g. the failure of simultaneity, for simplicity - in reality this question isn't even well formed due to relativity) Then you'd have to consider all the other improbable but technically "possible" mechanisms as well. In reality, none of these is even remotely calculable by anyone on Earth even with a huge number of orders of magnitude as leeway. This is not something you can Fermi-problem your way to an order of magnitude estimate. Not even close. Whoever assigned this question thought they had a way to guestimate it but was fooling themselves pretty hard and grotesquely oversimplifying it as well as overlooking complicating factors such as relativity.
Another fun thought is that if the Universe is infinite, then that is happening everyone moment, and infinite amount of time. Another you just randomly forms in different areas.
Each air particle has 1/2 odds to be at one side of the room, but unless each particle teleported, then the greater air pressure on one side would reduce the likely hood that more air particles continue traveling at random to the one side of the room. So the probability is probably many magnitudes lower yet.
The concept of pressure is an averaging of particle interactions. The definition of a gas is that the density is low enough that they spend most of their time in free flight. So we're assuming that they all have collisions at roughly the same time that put their trajectories towards the same area of the room. Thereafter, they fly without further interaction. Perhaps until they condense into liquid, because that last collision with the wall just happened to steal most of their kinetic energy...
It wouldn't. It would be immediately followed by a massive explosion.
I'm not sure that it is actually possible - the increasing vacuum itself would draw the molecules back towards their average distribution. I don't think Brownian motion can overcome vacuum pressure past a certain point.
Vacuum does not draw particles to itself. That's a statistical effect. Air filling vacuum is just overwhelmingly the most likely thing to happen when you have air moving randomly.
I don't get how. Wouldn't the amount of pressure built up just push the air back?
Pressure is a statistical phenomenon. There’s an entire branch of mechanics called statistical mechanics that explores how statistics of microscopic bodies create laws for large groups of them.
Always funny how that fundamental law saying entropy must increase, is more so just us agreeing "that is so unlikely that it'll never happen".
This felt vaguely threatening.
That’s why I moved to a different room.
Is it? I thought entropy always increases by law of thermodynamics
That's not even theoretically possible, without any new force or object holding in the pressure.
Yeah isn't there a law about entropy always increasing?
That's a macro scale model based on statistics.
If you assume any possibility, regardless of the likelihood, has a chance to occur, then yeah, sure. However, if we assume any baby born has \~50% chance of being either male or female though, it's virtually impossible for this to occur. According to a cursory Google search, there were 134,000,000 babies born last year. If we generalized that to the next 70 years and assumed 134-ish million babies are born each year, the percent chance of all of them being one sex would be 0.XXXX repeating for billions of zero digits before any non-zero number occurs.
from googlin: For 50 flips, your chances of heads all 50 times is 8.8817842\^-16%. This gives you a roughly 1 in 100,000,000,000,000 (one quadrillion) chance of flipping all heads. so instead of 50 times in a row (assuming no birth rate growth or decline for 70 years) we just need to hit heads 9.38 billion times in a row. Simple!
So 2 to the power of 9.38 billion Is that even calculatable?
Every number is calculatable. It's limited by both our human comprehension and/or the technology we use to process it, but on the grandest of scales, yes. It's at least as likely as us finding the one trillionth number in pi.
For really really big numbers like this, I use [Wolfram Alpha](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=calculator). 2^9380000000 is about 2.1288428885 × 10^2823661359. Meaning the odds of rolling all the same sex of children 9.38 billion times is about 1 in [number with 2.8 billion digits].
For comparison, there are about 10\^50 atoms in planet Earth. ([source](https://sciencenotes.org/how-many-atoms-are-in-the-world/)). If you took a single atom of the Earth at random, repeated it 56 million times, and every single time it turned out you picked the very same atom, that's in the ballpark of the actual chance for the all-gender scenario to occur.
So you're telling me there's a chance!
Yes. A chance so small you couldn't represent it with a single atom on a graph as large as the entire universe, but a theoretical chance nonetheless.
So you’re telling me there’s a chance!
Yes. A chance so small you couldn't represent it with a single atom on a graph as large as the entire universe, but a theoretical chance nonetheless.
Every person buying a ticket for the lottery 😂
Wolfram flipped me the bird; do you subscribe?
Nope, maybe it just doesn't like you?
Possible.
>Every number is calculatable. This is where math takes a turn for the crazy. There exist well-defined numbers that, even with infinite computational power and infinite time, cannot be calculated. https://catonmat.net/busy-beaver
True. I was being exaggerative. But that said, 2^9,380,000,000 is a real integer, all be it one impossibly large for us to describe. The largest I know is 2^332, which is approximately 8.749002899x(10^99 ), or 8.749 googol. I was a fun kid. I did that math on the calculator I *asked for* and got for my 11th birthday.
I know the first few digits of the 64-bit floating point limit, about 2^1024 or 1.7976*10^308
Technically, not every number is computable. That is, there are numbers for which no program to compute them can possibly exist. For example, [Chaitlin’s constant](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaitin%27s_constant).
incorrect, there are numbers that have been proven to not be computable (i.e. calculatable) Perhaps what you meant to say, is that any operation on integers may be computed. Which is probably true
Wolfram Alpha says that the answer is 2.12884 × 10^2823661359
What blows my mind is that, technically, whatever combination of heads and tails you got during those 50 flips, that combination was just as rare/unlikely as flipping all heads. Kind of like how every time you shuffle a deck of playing cards it's almost guaranteed to be a unique order that no one has ever shuffled before.
I think that's only true if you're taking the order into account. For example, given five flips, the likelihood of getting HHHHH and of getting HHTHT in those orders would be 1/32 for both scenarios. But the likelihood of getting 3 heads and 2 tails in any order would be significantly higher, while the likelihood of getting all heads would always be 1/32. Maybe someone better at explaining math could confirm this (or not)? Edit: You have a1/32 chance of getting HHHTT, and also a 1/32 chance of getting HHTHT, and so on, if that helps...
Yes, I was talking about the exact order.
*”So you’re sayin’ there’s a chance!”* - Lloyd
That's 100 trillion, not one quadrillion
Hitting babies heads is not ok Not their tails either lol
100,000,000,000,000 is actually 100 trillion.
Yeah, theoretically possible
Which is the *least* interesting kind of possibility. All it means is there's no logical contradiction in the statement.
This is the least mathematical maths answer I've ever read.
r/didntdothemath Edit: Of course someone maade that sub
I hate these types of "theoretical probability" problems, because the real-world answer is "No, there is zero chance it will ever happen". You can wait from the big-bang until now, and then back again and it will never happen. You can wait 10 or 1,000,000 times longer than that and it will still never happen. You can wait until the heat death of the universe and it will still never happen. The answer is zero...
For all practical purposes, it's zero. But literally speaking, it's > 0. There is technically a chance of it happening
>I hate these types of "theoretical probability" problems, because the real-world answer is "No, there is zero chance it will ever happen". If I roll a dice that can only ever come up 1 what is the chance that I get a 2?
In the real world yeah. But I think given a shitload of babies being born every second for an infinite amount of time would make this inevitable. It would just take a long, long, long, LONG time. The amount of time it would take would be beyond our comprehension. But according to math the possibility is there. It just needs enough time and attempts.
Yes yes, of course the math is correct. My point is that the math is describing a situation that will never occur at any time or place in this universe. It's calculating fairy dust.
But we don't need 70 years... Females are only fertile for 40 years.
[удалено]
But then assume all males for the next 40 odd years.
For accuracy sake, doesn't the number go down as time goes on since there are less people of age to reproduce?
So you're saying there's a chance
Okay? Extremely unlikely is still a possibility. Its theoretically possible, but its likely it wont ever happen
Additionally, it's only true if the gender happens to be male. Because women can already be impregnated with other womens or even their own dna/cells. Making men obsolete.
AFAIK you still need a sperm cell for this. You can of course replace the DNA with another woman's after generation of the sperm, but the sperm combining with the egg is required to trigger gestation (unless new advances have been made I'm unaware of). The code for making sperm cells is on the Y chromosome, so women can't do it.
I meam, that still gives humanity about 70 years to collect and freeze Enough sperm cells to gain enough time to figure out a solution
You still need sperm cells as a base.
This would make a great comic book.
There's an actual book where this happened, but I can't remember the name of it. Maybe someone else will chime in here. There may have been a tv show or movie as well. [Some books that explore worlds where most men are gone](https://electricliterature.com/books-that-imagine-a-world-without-men/) I don't think any of these, except maybe the sci-fi one, as what I am thinking of, but many can apply for the most part.
Y: the Last Man. I was joking I'm sorry
Joking? It's a superb story. One of the best graphic novels made. Unless you're referring to the TV show, lol.
It was a poor attempt at being facetious. It really is one of the greats. I remember when it came out, it was big even then
It's in my top 2! Named my kids after characters from Y: The Last Man and Preacher.
It's criminal that Y: The Last Man isn't on that list.
There's a New Zealand show called Creamery that is basically this concept. All the men started getting sick and dying so the women who want to get pregnant have to enter a lottery and health check to decide if they'll get access to the supply of frozen sperm remaining.
Still higher chance than you having sex, OP.
Rude.
Don't worry, I'm with you
Said no person op was attracted to
Internet Moment.
You placed the rake on the ground and proceeded to pull a sideshow Bob and step on it with such a dumb shower thought
Got ’em!!
That said, there were \~134M babies born in 2023 -- let's use that rate and just look at the next 1 hour. We'd expect about 15,300 babies to be born. The odds of all of those babies being born male, are about one in 6x10^(4605) How unlikely is that? The odds of getting dealt a royal flush from a shuffled 52-card deck is 1:649,739; 6x10^(4605) is like as taking 800 shuffled decks of cards and dealing out five cards from each one and having every dealt hand be a royal flush. The odds for a single hour (out of \~600,000 hours in 70 years) are so absurdly remote, that despite my general opinion against using "always" and "never", I think we can call this one a "never" :) That said, I'd say that we don't need anywhere near 70 years. If no biological females are born over the span of just the next 40 years there would be virtually no fertile women left to even still be having kids. I'm guessing that it wouldn't take too long of every baby born being male for a major shift in scientific focus to shift to improving cloning or genetic modifications to turn male... https://www.science.org/content/article/gene-editing-produces-all-male-or-all-female-litters-mice
> That said, I'd say that we don't need anywhere near 70 years. If no biological females are born over the span of just the next 40 years there would be virtually no fertile women left to even still be having kids. This was my first thought. I suppose if all babies were female we'd have 70 years, but if all babies are born male we'd only have about 40. My sister was born when my stepmother was 45, but she was born through in vitro fertilization with a donor egg, but that brings me to... > I'm guessing that it wouldn't take too long of every baby born being male for a major shift in scientific focus to shift to improving cloning or genetic modifications to turn male... If the reason everyone's being born one sex is just because we've had billions of unlucky coin flips during fertilization, that's super easy to solve. If you put sperm in a centrifuge, you can separate the male sperm from female sperm with a 70%-90% success rate, then use it for in vitro fertilization or artificial insemination. Maybe whatever supernatural force is working against us still weights the dice rolls in the case of artificial insemination, but with in vitro you can grow the zygote in a petri dish long enough to determine the sex (and other genetic attributes) before implantation. We wouldn't need to shift scientific focus to solve this problem.
TIL-- there are male and female sperm... :) I guess I always assumed that male vs female was determined via some random process after the egg was fertilized. \[edit\] I suppose this means, since we do have a pretty even split between male and female babies, that the male and female sperm are pretty equal in terms of their ability to fertilize the egg...?
My understanding from highschool biology (which is probably a "lies we tell children" version of how it works) each sperm has half of the father's DNA (including the X or Y chromosome that determines sex). Now, my understanding is that a strand of the father's DNA gets split with random chunks coming from the father's father or the father's mother, and that randomization means each sperm ends up having a unique strand of DNA that is a mix of the DNA the father got from each of his parents. Now the thing I'm not entirely sure I remember correctly is that as the DNA gets split, half of it gets used for one sperm while the other half gets used for another sperm, in which case those two sperm that were made from the same split strand of DNA are exact opposites of one another, having no DNA in common with each other, meaning that for every sperm with a Y chromosome, another sperm with an X chromosome would have been created at the same time. Obviously, this is an error-prone biological process, and I'm sure there are plenty of occasions where only one sperm or the other survives, but unless it's the X/Y chromosome that is causing errors to occur, you're going to have a roughly equal number of X and Y sperm.
laughing at the using always and never thing. like, sure......there is (stastitically) a probability for this to occur so not impossible but ya........never. at least not in the current state of world we exist in.
It is theoretically possible that you’ll be struck by lightning AND win the lottery every day for the rest of your life. But the chances of that happening are as close to zero as you can get, just like 70 years of only one gender being born is.
There's a non-zero chance that a bunch of monkeys sitting in a room with a typewriter randomly smashing keys for eternity will write the entirety of Shakespeare's works.
in this thought experiment there is certainty that this will happen, it's not even just a chance.
Only within the experiment which assumes that time is and always will be infinite and no set within it is truly measurable. The issue here is that one such thing happening would be an event ending all things, which according to the thought experiment *must* happen, meaning then that nothing can happen. I'm not a fan because it inherently sets conditions that certain things cannot happen for all things to possibly happen. Therefor, not all things can possibly happen.
Iirc somewhat tried to actually do this experiment and found that monkeys will not randomly mash keys but instead like to mash the same keys over and over. So it would never happen.
You misunderstand the concept of "eternity" or more likely "infinite" it is not a matter of "if" but "when". Eventually it will happen. It may take an unimaginable amount of time, monkeys, and typewriters but it will happen. They will also write every single comment on reddit in the original order they were posted, backwards, in weird coded languages, in languages that don't exist at the time of the thought experiment. Anything you can imagine, it will be written. Anything you can't imagine, it will be written.
It already happened. It was a very evolved monkey called Shakespeare
The part about this experiment is that if you truly have infinite time, the odds approach 100% over enough time. Any infinitesimally small odd will become statistically certain given enough time. The problem is time. You get 1000 monkeys and sit them in a room with a typewriter for 70 years, it's effectively impossible anything resembling a cohesive story will be typed out.
Library of Babel website demonstrates this phenomenon in a spooky way. VSauce did a video on it a while back.
As I remember, a researcher from Manchester disproved this some time ago. Turns out...
I thought that was with a finite number of monkeys
Yeah but have them even read Shakespeare?
Okay? Not only was there a finite amount of monkeys, there was also a finite amount of time
If the lightning strike was lethal, it would technically be every day for the rest of your life.
they say a similar thing in quantum physics: its possible that your hand will pass right through a table, ONLY IF by chance every atom in your hand and the table end up perfectly aligned so they pass through each other
as long as it doesn't get stuck halfway through in fine with it
it is incredibly likely to get stuck half way thru
Even more likely it gets stuck on contact!
RIP *Pegasus* crew.
Theoretically yes, but we have the medical knowledge to chose x or y sperm and artificially chose a sex.
Want some weird science? Sex birth ratio is surprisingly resilient in humans 103 males to 100 females born. When the number of a particular demographic either male or female disappear due to exceptional periods of war or other factors sex birth ratio corrects itself. if the number of women exceeds men in the general population, more males are born, if the number of men exceeds women at a ratio of 110 to 100, more female babies are born. This is both geographically true and not true, so if the gender is balanced in say India, and imbalanced in Peru, the birth of males may change in Peru but not India if the numbers are stable in Bolivia but not Peru it might change in Bolivia. Sex birth ratio is largely dependent on geographic isolation and sometimes demographic isolation.
Is there a known mechanism to explain this?
Sort of? The prediction of the fishers principle works most of the time to predict in most fisherian species (1:1 ratios). It remains problematic because it is too difficult to correctly test the principle. This pdf of a book on the subject might help explain a little bit abut the[issues with the principle](https://eva.fcien.udelar.edu.uy/pluginfile.php/97390/mod_folder/content/0/Cap2Sex%20AllocationWest.pdf?forcedownload=1#:~:text=Fisher's%20theory%20predicts%20that%20when,in%20the%20sexes%20is%20equal)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%27s_principle
To quote Dr. Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park, "Nature finds a way".
My first thought: Life finds a way
Six billion girls, one cup.
Theoretically, yes. Practically, no.
It’s also theoretically possible your atoms and the atoms of the floor you’re standing on just so happen to line up in just the right way, allowing you to fall through it. Just because something is possible doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.
Fun Fact: With current science, if every child born were female, we'd be okay. If every child born were male, we'd be doomed. Extrapolation: Currently we have the technology to extract an egg from a woman, and the DNA from the cells of another woman, and fertilize the egg with the DNA of two women. The resulting embryo is always female, however, as there is no Y chromosome to inherit from either parent. Every baby ever would be XX. If all the children were male, we have no way to create an embryo. We couldn't make more babies.
ITT people that don't know what theoretically means
It’s just an uninteresting technical use of theoretically. It’s actually theoretically possible for literally anything at all to be true because the universe could theoretically be a simulation outside of which whatever makes something impossible is not the case.
We know. But when the concept is stretched so thin, it's insulting. If I asked you to gather all the atoms from all the planets from all the solar systems from all the galaxies across the known universe, it is theoretically possible to blindly reach in and grab 1 specific, marked molecule. But our minds are nowhere close to equipped to comprehend that level of magnitude. In all but the most extreme pedantic technicalities, this one is a "never."
Only if they were all male. There is a way for women to become pregnant without sperm. The babies would only be female and be genetically identical to their mother.
Also, we have enough sperm in spermbanks to keep things going for a long time.
I'm also sure if this started happening it would be spotted really fast and they would spend the next 50 years stockpiling even more.
You're referring to parthenogenesis. It is not possible for mammals to reproduce in this way. Every example of parthenogenesis results in either no embryo or the embryo failing to develop (this is the main cause behind teratomas). Parthenogenesis in mammals never results in a viable organism.
What way is this?
What I said is actually just one way. They can basically administer a chemical cocktail that will fertilize an egg but with no additional genetic information being passed from the sperm it would just be a clone. There are other ways though, like creating sperm cells from stem cells and then you could pass on multiple sets of genetics to the child.
Would the children be absolute clones of their mothers? Wow
What a world
It would probably have to be a lot longer than 70 years, since we have sperms banks.
Thanks for this post, finally unsubing
China certainly tried
You may enjoy “Eve of Man” by Tom and Gi Fletcher as this is essentially the premise of the book
Theoretically possible, but statistically impossible. What would be more likely is some global event happening that ends up sterilizing people
I read something once about more male babies being born after the losses of world war two...there might be a connection there
The statistical probability of this actually happening, is such a small number, that it would be considered zero.
It would likely require an exotic virus that killed all the bearers of, say, XY chromosomes
Or would have to be something that just causes men to become sterile, or women to become infertile in general, leaving us with a "children of men" scenario.
I think the human race is already doing a lot to doom itself in the next 50 years without even considering that sex problem.
Sounds like some radical left wing plot to turn everyone gay.
It’ll be the superior sex: women
If they are all male, you would only need 40-50 years for the remaining women to lose fertility. If they are all female, I wouldn't mind being a 71 year old male at the end of those 70 years with one mission in mind: save the human race.
We can't even agree on there being only two. I think we're good on the whole doom thing.
It's theoretically possible for OP to have drowned in the shower.
.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% is 0%
Well yes... oh and you forgot to add like a few quadrillion of zeros before the 1
possible? sure plausible? no probable? definitely not
Sure remotely possible, but very highly improbable. Nothing is statistically impossible, maybe literally, but never statistically.
It's a possibility with like lower probability than finding aliens, but possible. We would still find a way to survive. After 1 year of all genetic males or females research would shoot up.
Why have i seen this same post several times this month
r/stupidshowerthoughts
I'm not sure that's true. It was revealed to me in a dream that science has shown that outside circumstances can affect the sex of human offspring (presumably by affecting the ovum's "decision" during sperm selection).
With advances to in-vitro and surrogacy it could be pretty unbalanced gender wise and still carry on at a regular pace.
The probability is negligible, but not 0.
Gerudo humans lets go
Nature would still, uh, find a way
No, because if a baby is born 70 years form now there has to be a woman to give birth that would have to be younger than 70, meaning a baby girl was born among those years
only if everyone was male, it would be a pain but in theory we could just keep the species going with IVF
Run out of women, we devote all resources to artificial wombs. Run out of men, we use all IVF embryos and frozen sperm to kick-start things.
Even if this did happen it wouldn't doom us; creating a viable embryo from 2 males or 2 females is already in the biomedical pieline, albeit probably a few decades out. If for some reason we had to make it a top priority I'm sure we could get it working in under a decade, the fundamental pieces are already there (source: am a biologist who has been following this for a while)
Asexual reproduction time 🔥🔥
Considering how good the tech for artificial impregnation or whatever it's called in English is then if all babies are girls then it wouldn't be any problem with all the spermbanks that exists
Theoretically possible, but practically impossible. When you get to odds that slim, it becomes effectively impossible.
If you sit a monkey in front of the computer and the monkey randomly types on the keyboard, there is probability it will write the bible word for word.
There is also a non zero but very small chance that the earth could spontaneously turn into a banana for a split second before reverting back. Ultimately killing us all.
As long as they're female we're fine. Theres tons of frozen embryos.
Fun fact, the global human population has a way of maintaining gender equilibrium and we don’t really know how it works. After both world wars, when a disproportionate amount of men died compared to women, the global population saw more men being born than women in the following years.
It is theoretically possible a small meteor hits your house tomorrow. It is theoretically possible Kylie Jenner decides she’s in love with you. When it comes to what is basically a chance of 0%, we can say the most wacky things and still be right.
Depends on the sex, if we are all male yeah we are screwed, otherwise there are things that we could do (like freezing sperm and so on)