Josiah's Thoughts - Trial and Error
Thoughts | Josiah Friesen
Writer’s block is a near-insurmountable obstacle. It cripples poets, maims novelists, and paralyses autobiographers. But fear not, dear readers: for I, your humble thoughts producer, am immune to writer’s block. Is this because I am simply so skilled and creative that nothing can hinder me from achieving greatness in the form of mediocre philosophical pondering in a convenient size 12 font? No, the truth is far simpler. I am immune to writer’s block because I can hardly be considered a writer. I’m just a guy with a laptop. Now that I’ve established your confidence in me, the author-who-is-not-a-writer of the piece you’re currently reading, enjoy my thoughts!
Look at the device you’re using right now. You can see the words on the screen. How are the words being displayed on this sheet of glass? How does the website you visited in order to read this article know which words to show you? How does the device you’re using know how to get to the website this article is published on? How does that device work? If you’re part of the 0.0001% of the population that knows the exact answers to these questions, shut up and keep your nerdiness to yourself. Your device (and every other modern piece of machinery) is incredibly complex. For the sake of specificity, consider smartphones, which are composed of a screen, a battery, a motherboard, and a couple other little bobs and bips that no one cares about. Disregarding the fact that each of these components is an enigma by itself, even if you were handed all the working pieces, you probably couldn’t create a working smartphone. Unless of course, you’re part of the aforementioned 0.0001%, in which case, go away because no one wants to hear from you.
Allow me to explain how, despite your profound lack of knowledge surrounding the inner workings of a smartphone, you could actually make one. Your guide through this process will be the Law of Infinite Probability. This law states that as long as an event has a non-zero probability, if you try to do it enough times, the chance of it happening successfully will get very close to 100%. Of course, nothing is guaranteed, so the probability will never actually be 100%. How on Earth is this supposed to help me build a smartphone?, I sense you asking. Bear with me.
Imagine that I take a smartphone and disassemble it into its most basic components. I take out all the screws, I remove every wire from every circuit, and I give all the pieces to you, and maybe a bottle of Elmer’s glue for some witty comedic effect. If you sit down and try to put it all together, there’s realistically a 99.999% chance that you’ll fail, meaning there’s a 0.001% chance that you will be able to make it work. Let’s be real here. There's no way in hell you’re making it work. But how about 2 tries? Things get interesting here, because the Law of Infinite Probability says that with every try, the chance that one of the tries will result in a functioning phone raises ever so slightly. Now let’s say that I put you in a room with no doors or windows, you’re immortal, your burning passion on this earth is to get this smartphone to work again, and you’re also superhuman so you don’t need sleep or food or, um, the basic hygienic practices that are afforded to fortunate people. You will devote every second for the rest of eternity to fixing this phone. I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a wicked Friday night. Now, in your 2384123934829th year of smartphone exile, you finally do it. You fix the phone through sheer luck. You proceed to to play flappy bird for the rest of eternity, or, since there’s no plugs in your prison-cell, until the phone’s battery dies. Whichever comes first.
Technically, we could apply this concept to any of humanity's technological or mechanical breakthroughs. However, I’m going to push your brain just a little bit further. What about what mankind hasn’t made yet? We haven’t yet created a rocket capable of reaching Pluto in 24 hours. A rocket that is capable of this would need to be able to travel 49979 kilometres per second. The speed of light (otherwise known as the speed limit of the universe, due to the fact that nothing can travel faster than it) is a whopping 299792 kilometres per second. Basically, blah blah numbers blah blah math. This rocket would be much slower than the speed of light, meaning it doesn’t violate any physical laws. In other words, this rocket is technically feasible. Applying the same concept as with the smartphone, you could potentially build this. It would take many many many more years than making a smartphone, but you could do it.
By this logic, mankind is limitless. All we need is time. With enough time, any individual can make anything that doesn’t violate physical laws. With enough time, mankind could become a super-society. We could harvest stars and populate the galaxy. We could cure all diseases and prosper as a cohesive whole. This brings us to mankind’s downfall: we don’t have enough time. The universe will eventually die in the form of heat-death. A bunch of nerds figured out that, because entropy (the level of disorder in a system) always increases, eventually, the universe will have such high levels of disorder that all energy in the universe will become heat energy. There will be no useful energy, just a bunch of hot stuff. If we survive all other calamities which may plague our existence, this will be the inevitable end. The bottom line is that there’s a timer on mankind. We don’t have the time to rely on trial-and-error creations that you cook up in a room by yourself for billions of years. We’re limited by what we are able to create in an informed, timely, and efficient manner, which leads me to the conclusion that we’re forced to rely on the 0.0001% of society that knows how to build a smartphone. God help us all.