“I remember thinking ‘Jesus, what a terrible thing to lay on someone with a head full of acid’.” – Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
If you were looking for good jokes, it’s nacho day.
Wednesday is a day that I normally cover economics, but I’m going in a different direction today. As Wilder, Wealthy and Wise has had over 300 Wednesday posts since I cranked it up in this format back in 2017, that’s 300 comments on wealth and related economic topics, something like 1,500 memes, and so tonight, I’ll only briefly talk about economics: we’re screwed. Pic related.
Okay, that looks like a mountain that Yosemite Sam® has to climb to catch a varmint.
Okay, with that over with, let’s shift gears entirely. Why? Because, why not?
Let’s talk about Life.
I’m going to start with a number. 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
I wrote it out with all the zeros because that’s a lot of zeros, and bloggers get paid by the character. I could have written it out as 1×10300, and it would have been the same, but not had the same emotional impact. What, exactly does 1×10300 represent?
Yeah, if I divide most anything by 1×10300 I get zero.
Let’s take a step back. RuBisCO (short for ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase-oxygenase, not Russian Biscuit Company) is probably the most common protein on Earth, making up about 30% of the protein in a plant leaf. When you eat lettuce, you’re chowing down on lots of RuBisCO. It looks like the picture below, sorta, but is much more tasty with some ranch dressing or a nice raspberry vinegarette:
When I was weightlifting I bought expired protein powder. There was no other whey.
By Ericlin1337 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67176768
This pile of spaghetti is a mass of amino acids, but it has a really important task – it rips apart sweet, sweet CO2 so grass can eat CO2 and can grow to be eaten by a cow and turned into a ribeye. Or so tobacco can grow and turn into a nice Macanudo™. Or so grain can grow and turn into scotch. A day without RuBisCO is a day without a decent dinner.
Planet Earth without RuBisCO is probably a barren rock.
If you stretched it out, it’s nothing more than a chain of amino acids that are the building blocks of the RuBisCO protein. RuBisCO doesn’t turn CO2 into steak without being mashed together, just right. The protein (which is just a bunch of amino acids connected up) has to be folded up. If it doesn’t fold up perfectly, it doesn’t work.
The Japanese gang member responsible for keeping the crime boss’s beer cold is called the Yakoozie.
That’s where all the zeros come in. The proteins that turn into RuBisCO can fold up in to make that spaghetti-looking thing in quite a few ways. 1×10300 of them, approximately. There are more ways that single protein can fold up than there are planets in the entire observable universe. There are only 100,000,000,000 total planets (our best guess) in the Milky Way. Again, our best guess is that the ones that aren’t too hot (Mercury) or too cold (Pluto, still a planet in my book, screw you Neil DeGrasse Tyson) are about 300,000,000.
Now compare with the number of different ways just one protein required for life can fold and be useful. Keep in mind, that when proteins fold wrong, bad things happen, like they don’t work. There are even worse consequences, like having brains rot – mad cow disease is a misfolded protein that replicates in the brain and causes people (and cow) brains to turn into brain sponge. And not the good kind of brain sponge.
Now, as much as I love Bulgarian Mall Lawyers and their ability to be tenacious in personal injury suits and ability to do rudimentary divorce work, if they’re allowed to use shotguns. No, having Bulgarian Mall Lawyers attempt to fix a Bulgarian Mall Lawyer copy machine in their law office that used to be a Spencer’s™ gifts (right between the place that used to sell cheese and sticks of meat and Waldenbooks®) by poking at it with pencils is far more likely than having a protein folded correctly. But let’s see a protein convince my ex-wife to sign the papers.
How do you get two Canadian brothers off a couch in a hurry? Say, “please get off the couch.”
So, we have 1×10300 ways to fold a protein wrong, and 300,000,000 planets. I’ll even spot you that there have been several billion years. And billion years is a long time, almost as long as my first marriage. But 1×10300 is so large that it’s more likely that I put in several pallets of 2x4s, drywall, nails, paint, shingles, carpet, doors, wiring, outlets, and plumbing components into a box and shake the hell out of it and get a house I could live in than have RuBisCO form.
And RuBisCO is important because it is so basic – it’s the building block for extracting energy from sunlight. No RuBisCO? No Nabisco™. To top it off, it forms and folds in milliseconds inside the leaves of every tree on Earth when the temperature and chemistry is right. We have no idea how it does this, and couldn’t computationally predict this.
This is just one protein that needs to be folded up properly for everything to work out so I can have a decent steak, scotch, and cigar. When looking further at things like the storage of information on DNA, it starts to look like the ultimate information storage device ever created – the DNA in one cell of a typical human is over six feet (seventeen milliliters) long. The DNA in all of the cells of your body is twice the diameter of the Solar System, but if you were to stretch all of it out, it’s unlikely you’d be able to go to work on Monday. Each cell contains three billion base pairs of DNA, or almost the number of words in the average Stephen King novel.
RuBisCO is improbable. DNA? Wow. The squish bits that make us up are at the smallest level more complicated than anything man has ever created, with the exception of the way that a VCR needed to be adjusted so it didn’t flash 12:00.
David Bowie’s VCR always flashed 12:00, too. Time may change him, but he can’t change time.
One of the ideas of those who would contemplate that life on Earth in general, and humanity in particular, came from random chance must confront are the mathematical impossibilities of things like RuBisCO appearing at random out of only 300,000,000 planets times 8,000,000,000 years. Further, they have to accept that the number and types of elements available for this are all, randomly, in the proper proportions and properties to support life.
This doesn’t even deal with the observed rates of genetic drift, or the creation of amazingly improbable structures like the human eye or the brain. The brain exhibits non-trivial quantum effects, so from the smallest possible structures of humanity to the largest imaginable structures of the Universe their appears to be an intent. Random chance cannot remotely explain what we are, and how we have been created, or this marvel we call consciousness, or what Bulgarian Mall Lawyers call, “a new client”.
It is readily apparent, based on logic and mathematics alone that there are only a few possibilities:
- That the Universe has been created with intent and a pattern (the big G God),
- this is all a simulation (the little g god),
- that life (and thus humanity) was designed and seeded among the stars (which begs, by who or what?)
- that the purpose of the Universe may be solely for the creation of the Ultimate PEZ® dispenser which may take the form of Yosemite Sam®, or
- that there are forces that exist in realms in which we cannot yet discern through any physical means.
Random choice is out, mathematically. Every single time I see it resorted to, it’s a kludge and requires more faith than that which would be required for God.
How else would you explain Yosemite Sam™ or Bulgarian Mall Lawyers?
