The question that everyone has been dying to know has been answered. Finally! What will scientists study next?

0 points

Wait …is this why AI exists? So we can type Hamlet in the face of monkey failures?

Dude. Just use a printer.

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4 points

Omg I just realized AI is the new monkeys… that is disturbing

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0 points

Maybe it’s becaue scientists have very poor imagination of the universe.

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230 points

The theorem holds true. The theorem states that the monkey has infinite time, not just the lifetime of our universe.

That’s just lazy science to change the conditions to make sensational headlines. Bad scientists!

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-25 points
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Infinite time is undefined though. We are not sure there was time before the Big Bang. Before anyone says “but there must have been,” consider that it’s just as paradoxical and mind blowing to imagine that time never had a beginning and just stretches infinitely into the past. How can that be so? It means it would have taken an infinite amount of time for us to reach this moment in time, and that means we never would have.

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13 points

Why must the concept of time before the big bang (or after our heat death) exist in our physical reality for us to speculate about theoretical infinities past those? The thought experiment is about infinite time, not all the time in our limited universe. A lot of things happen at infinity that break down as soon as you add a limit, but we’re not talking limits when we’re talking infinity.

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50 points

Infinite time is perfectly defined, it just doesn’t exist in our universe

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1 point
Deleted by creator
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4 points

I think the implications behind there being infinite time in the past are fun if you assume that the universe works like a stochastic state machine. It means that either every finite event that has happened and will happen has already happened an infinite number of times or the universe is infinitely large.

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37 points

It also makes a pretty bold claim about us actually knowing the lifespan of the universe.

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4 points

That’s not bold, we’ve known how long the universe will last for decades now.

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-5 points

Just because someone tells you something, doesn’t mean they actually know what they’re talking about. fyi

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8 points

How are they defining the end of the universe?

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0 points

We know such an infinitesimally small amount about what is actually happening in the universe that any claims to be capable of predicting it’s end are patently absurd.

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28 points

Probably very shortly after dinner has been served at that restaurant.

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16 points

The universe is believed to end just a few nanoseconds before a monkey finishes writing Hamlet.

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10 points

Heat death would be my assumption, so between about 10^100 and 10^106 years

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107 points

This just in: scientists disprove validity of thought experiment; philosophers remain concerned that they’ve missed the point.

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2 points
*

The universe is the cage and we are the monkeys. We have already written Hamlet.

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11 points

the monkey has infinite time

Use an infinite number of monkeys instead?

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27 points

it is also somewhat misleading

…what? No it isn’t. Restricting the premise from infinite to any finite amount of time completely negates it. That doesn’t prove it’s “misleading”, it proves anyone that thinks it does has no idea what they’re talking about.

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2 points

Seems to not understand the thought experiment which is a way to contemplate infinity.

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