Wrekking a Two Tonner: Instagram favs - The Rising Image credit & Copyright: Hillary Younger @hillary_younger <-follow! Will Minds Appear in the Cosmos? part 2 The chances of this are 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 50. That’s a huge huge number. Trust me, you’re going to need more pencils to even write it out. Actually, you could turn every atom of the Universe into a pencil and it wouldn’t be enough. Just imagine what it would be like to be that self-aware conscious entity that suddenly appeared floating in a completely empty cosmos, contemplating the mystery and wonder of all that vast nothingness. Perhaps it’s just a bunch of telepathic screaming because one thing this particular brain was missing was the ability to survive in a vacuum. Now, then imagine an entire planet, orbiting a sun-like star, filled with human beings and other life. Again, that number is even more incomprehensibly small, but it’s not zero. And so, in a Universe of infinite space, those things are popping up an infinite number of times, and in infinite time, it’ll happen an infinite number of times. And now, I shall deliver the final mind bending blow. Imagine you took all the particles and energy in the entire Universe. All the protons, photons, neutrons and hadrons. There’s a tiny, tiny chance that all those particles could suddenly appear in an infinitely dense region of space, and undergo a rapid expansion. In other words, it’s possible that another Big Bang could spontaneously appear in an infinite amount of time. How long? Physicist Sean Carroll has done the math. You’d just need to wait 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 56 years for it to happen. It’s a long time, but it’s not forever. So, in an infinite amount of time, you’ll get an infinite number of Big Bangs, spontaneously appearing in a finite Universe. Or an infinite number of Big Bangs happening all the time in an infinite Universe. by Fraiser Cain @universetoday