What are the chances that Harry Potter, unicorns, etc. actually exist? Most people would say almost none, but I’m here to tell you that the answer is actually that there is no answer. It is impossible to estimate the chances that something exists if we’ve never seen that thing before.
If anyone disagrees with me, I invite them to answer the question: How do you calculate or estimate the % chance that any particular thing exists beyond our known bubble of space-time?
It would boil down to the # of expected particles needed for that thing to randomly come into being, and the total # of particles that are beyond our known bubble of space-time. We can estimate the first, which would be astronomically large. How do we even begin to estimate the latter? What if it is also astronomically large? How do we know if there are other bubbles of space-time, and if so, how many particles a “typical” one has?
If the “typical universe” has an unfathomably huge # of particles, way beyond what’s in our present-day universe (say graham’s number or some other ludicrously high number), then everything we can conceive would exist, via nothing other than the Infinite Monkeys Theorem*. Given a large enough amount of random stuff, eventually the amazing thing will be found somewhere inside that mess. A related idea is the Boltzmann Brain.
You can only estimate probability based on data if you have prior data. When you try to answer questions like “are there other universes” or “how much stuff is in a typical universe”, your sample size is literally 1. We have no way of knowing.
*There is nothing that triggers me more than someone derailing my argument by pointing out that literal infinity is impossible, or that the infinite monkey theorem needs monkeys. The infinite monkeys theorem only requires a large enough amount of stuff (monkeys is only an analogy) for the near-impossible to become probable, and does not require literal infinity unless the probability is literally zero.
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