Part 2, an attack on creationism

Mr Spinkles said:

By 'operational' definition, I meant one that can be used to measure the 'complexity' of something. Even if we accept this dictionary definition of complexity, it is evident that self-replicating things are not (in general) more complex than anything else. For example, a molecule of DNA (which can replicate by itself in solution) may be composed of fewer interconnected "parts" (whether defined as atoms, electrons, etc.) than molecules which cannot replicate.

Click to expand...

Outside of software (i.e. something physical), have we ever built anything that is self-replicating? What would it take? It is very complex, no matter at what scale ...

Mr Spinkles said:

I would conclude #2 or #3 to be more reasonable. But here you're appealing to calculations of probability, whereas we put aside this "improbability" argument earlier: I asked you to show me some calculation and you responded you had none.

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I know.. my argument is one of common sense and intuition. It is not possible to calculate the probability of abiogenisis.

Mr Spinkles said:

In brief: simple chemistry gives rise to many complex molecules which interact with each other in surprising ways; a molecule which forms copies of itself need only to have happened once; the number of opportunities for this to happen in the universe is astronomical; this explanation does not appeal to unevidenced or unknowable fundamental forces in the universe.

Click to expand...

Numbers can get pretty big. To me, the probability of abiogenesis is on a whole different level than the opportunities in our limited timeframe. No matter how much time is left, there is never going to be rocks that are formed like the statue of David. The probability is so slim we should consider it impossible, as long as the amount of time passed is finite. To me, it is the same thing as molecules spontaneously getting the machinery in place for self-replication.

9-10ths_Penguin said:

Depends how long you try. The more dice you have and the more times you roll them, the better your odds. Do it long enough and you'd have almost an absolute certainty.

This couple won the lottery twice in the same drawing, apparently at an odds of 1 in 24,000,000,000,000. Do you think they were lying?

How about this woman or this couple, who also won twice?

Improbably things do happen occasionally. Consider Frane Selak, who fell from an airplane and lived, survived a train derailment, escaped from a bus that crashed into a river, and then won $1,000,000 in the lottery. What do you think the odds of all that happening to one man are?

If all that can happen over the lifespan of a single person, imagine what might happen over a million or a billion years.

Click to expand...

You have to consider the amount of money these people spend on lottery tickets and how many people there are.

The odds of some things are simply inconceivable. Consider the monkey's typing on a keyboard. After a billion years with 100 monkeys (assuming each keystroke had equal probability), you would never have a sequence that matches even one page of one of Shakespear's books, much less the entire book.

It is interesting how improbable certain things are.

camanintx said:

What I'm saying is that morality actually applies to the motives of our actions, which is a completely subjective characteristic. Thousands of years ago, many societies practiced human sacrifice. Up until a couple hundred years ago many societies supported slavery. Until just a few decades ago interracial relationships were considered unnatural. If the measure of morality is constantly changing, then how can you know what the objective measure of morality really is?

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Because certain ideas of morality are wrong (e.g. human sacrifice). Also, people and different roles and authorities and different cultures have different moralities, but that doesn't mean they are subjective, as if they are just opinions. It just means their different. God is what makes them objective.

Nick Soapdish said:

The odds of some things are simply inconceivable. Consider the monkey's typing on a keyboard. After a billion years with 100 monkeys (assuming each keystroke had equal probability), you would never have a sequence that matches even one page of one of Shakespear's books, much less the entire book.
It is interesting how improbable certain things are.

Click to expand...

Improbable?
Lets say that we are dealing with a 215 letter paragraph including spaces. I am limited by calculations here. We assume that all letters and spaces are equally likely and we ignore syntax such as commas and periods.
There are 5.36*10^307 different possible combinations of letters.
There are two ways to for a desired outcome to occur. One forwards, and one backwards. If one is not picky about chronology (where the paper starts and ends) there are more, but these are the most straight forward
Lets assume that monkeys are at least somewhat competent typists and can type at 30 words per minute. Assuming 3 letters in a word, 90 letters(including spaces) per minute. So 90 words a minute. Or a document every 2.5 minutes (rounded up).
This translates to 24 documents an hour. Lets assume the monkeys are typing 8 hours a day, giving us 192 documents a day per monkey. So we have 19,200 documents a day.
The odds of those monkeys not producing a paper in one day is about 0.9999999999978684. Your 1 billion years theory is shot. I can tell just from this. The rest is just to convince you if you are skeptical.
Multiplied by 365 times a year that gives us 700,800 papers a year. The odds of them failing are down to. 0.9999999999221956
Not betting odds, but you said 1 billion years.
After 1 billion years the odds of them failing are
.459
or odds of them making a paper are 0.541
Good odds.
Note that this is just the chance of a particular paper forming. The odds of 1 page forming would be about .42 just by guesswork. The number of pages Shakespeare wrote outweighs the increase in complexity. Also note that this is not extremely large scale compared to the sheer size of what the can observe.
Unfortunately, my heavy duty calculator broke a few months ago, and I am trying to find a cheap deal. I can't go beyond 310ish decimal places on this computer, hence the 215 letter limit.
Note that this is an extremely basic and simplisitic view of this problem. There would be many other things to consider. Center keys are more likely to be tapped, and the number of desired outcomes was limited to two in this case. Given the multitude of works out there, the odds would be significantly higher for these monkeys to produce a work identical to some author.

yossarian22 said:

Improbable?
Lets say that we are dealing with a 215 letter paragraph including spaces. I am limited by calculations here. We assume that all letters and spaces are equally likely and we ignore syntax such as commas and periods.
There are 5.36*10^307 different possible combinations of letters.
There are two ways to for a desired outcome to occur. One forwards, and one backwards. If one is not picky about chronology (where the paper starts and ends) there are more, but these are the most straight forward
Lets assume that monkeys are at least somewhat competent typists and can type at 30 words per minute. Assuming 3 letters in a word, 90 letters(including spaces) per minute. So 90 words a minute. Or a document every 2.5 minutes (rounded up).
This translates to 24 documents an hour. Lets assume the monkeys are typing 8 hours a day, giving us 192 documents a day per monkey. So we have 19,200 documents a day.
The odds of those monkeys not producing a paper in one day is about 0.9999999999978684. Your 1 billion years theory is shot. I can tell just from this. The rest is just to convince you if you are skeptical.
Multiplied by 365 times a year that gives us 700,800 papers a year. The odds of them failing are down to. 0.9999999999221956
Not betting odds, but you said 1 billion years.
After 1 billion years the odds of them failing are
.459
or odds of them making a paper are 0.541
Good odds.
Note that this is just the chance of a particular paper forming. The odds of 1 page forming would be about .42 just by guesswork. The number of pages Shakespeare wrote outweighs the increase in complexity. Also note that this is not extremely large scale compared to the sheer size of what the can observe.
Unfortunately, my heavy duty calculator broke a few months ago, and I am trying to find a cheap deal. I can't go beyond 310ish decimal places on this computer, hence the 215 letter limit.
Note that this is an extremely basic and simplisitic view of this problem. There would be many other things to consider. Center keys are more likely to be tapped, and the number of desired outcomes was limited to two in this case. Given the multitude of works out there, the odds would be significantly higher for these monkeys to produce a work identical to some author.

Click to expand...

I don't follow you math... it looks like to me that the odds that a 100 monkeys can produce this 215 page document over 1 billion years is 1 in 2.12 x 10^292.. Your original probability was 1 in 5.36*10^307 for a single monkey producing a single document. That is a lot of zeros...

5,360,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Nick Soapdish said:

I don't follow you math... it looks like to me that the odds that a 100 monkeys can produce this 215 page document over 1 billion years is 1 in 2.12 x 10^292.. Your original probability was 1 in 5.36*10^307 for a single monkey producing a single document. That is a lot of zeros...

5,360,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Click to expand...

The odds of a random series of spaces and letters 215 words/spaces long forming a specific combination of letters and words is 27^215. Its actually a bit less because some are repetitions. But for simplicity's sake, we will ignore them.

The number 27 is used because there are 26 letters in the alphabet and 1 space. I am ignoring grammatical punctuation because it makes the numbers far too big for normal programs to manage. It would limit my calculations to less than 90 words, making it useless. the number 215 was chosen because that is the limit for my calculator. Anything more comes out to infinity.

27^215=5.36*10^307.

There are 5.36*10^307 possible outcomes with 27 characters (26 letters+spaces)
The odds of an event occurring is (desired outcome)/(possible outcomes)
There are 2 desired outcomes. One forward, and one backwards

So, the probability of a random paper produced matching any document of your choice is
2/5.36*10^307.

So the odds of a single monkey banging away on a type writer is so low, it is effectively zero. But that monkey is not stopping. It will hit that keyboard 215 times, then start all over again. I assume it hits the keyboard at a rate of 90 letters per minute. That monkey will produce a document every 2.36 minutes. I rounded that to 2.5 for convenience. (That decreases the odds of success, so it does not twist things in my favor). We can't be cruel, so that monkey bangs away on that keyboard for 8 hours a day, 7 days a week. No weekends for them. Every day, that monkey will produce 192 documents. now 192/5.36*10^307 is still effectively zero. But we have 100 monkeys banging away on a keyboard. So we actually have 19,200 documents a day.

This is a binomial probability. Either the document is a success, or it is a failure. They are disjoint (you can't succeed and fail at the same time) and independent of one another (assuming the monkeys do not copy each other). Disjoint means the two outcomes are mutually exclusive. Independent means the outcome of one does not effect the outcome of another.

So we can calculate the probability of this event not happening.
There are 2 outcomes which result in success. And (5.36*10^307)-2 outcomes which result in failure
So the odds of 1 paper failing are
((5.36*10^307)-2)/5.36*10^307.

We subtract 2 because that is the number of outcomes which gives us success. The result is pretty much zero.
But the odds of 19,200 randomly produced papers all failing is
(((5.36*10^307)-2)/5.36*10^307)^19200

Why did we raise the probability of 1 failing to the power of 19,200?

If events A and B are independent of one another, the odds of both occuring are P(A)*P(B), probability of A multiplied by probability of B. There are 19,200 papers, all independent. Each paper has the same chance of failing so we take the probability of 1 paper failing, and raise it to the power of 19,200.
The probability of all papers produced by monkeys in one day failing is
0.9999999999978684

Because the two outcomes of a paper are disjoint, you can subtract this probability from 1 to get the odds of success.

Those odds are extremely low, effectively zero. A snowball's chance in hell. But that is only for one day. Since we know how many papers the monkeys produce in one day, we know how many papers the monkeys will produce in a year. These guys will churn out 700,800 papers in a year. Now we have a general formula we can use.
(((5.36*10^307)-2)/5.36*10^307)^Papers.
You said 1 billion years correct?
Since we know that the monkeys will produce 700,800 papers a year, we know how many papers they will produce in 1 billion years. The monkeys will produce 7,008,000,000,000,000 papers in 1 billion years
We plug that into our nifty little formula
(((5.36*10^307)-2)/5.36*10^307)^70,080,000,000,000,000
The odds of all these papers failing to produce a success is .459.
1-.459=.541.
The odds of those monkeys making a paper of any type is 54.1% Shakespeare, whatever.

This is based off of letters and spaces. I bolded that for a reason. 215 letters and spaces. No commas, hyphens, quotes, etc. It will be a short paragraph. You need a beefy calculator or specific programs to go beyond 310ish decimal places.

edit: D'oh!
I dropped a zero on the number of papers produced. There should be another on the end. Unfortunately, that number screws up my old ti-89 and I am getting a probability of 1, which is impossible. If anybody has a powerful enough calculator, could you please enter this in?
(((5.36*10^307)-2)/5.36*10^307)^70,080,000,000,000,000
In scientific notation that is 7.008*10^16

Nick Soapdish said:

Outside of software (i.e. something physical), have we ever built anything that is self-replicating? What would it take? It is very complex, no matter at what scale ...

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Julius Rebek, Jr., the Camille Dreyfus Professor of Chemistry at MIT, produced synthetic self-replicating molecules back in 1994 so it can't be that difficult, can it?

Nick Soapdish said:

Because certain ideas of morality are wrong (e.g. human sacrifice). Also, people and different roles and authorities and different cultures have different moralities, but that doesn't mean they are subjective, as if they are just opinions. It just means their different. God is what makes them objective.

Click to expand...

So how does one measure their subjective opinion of morality against God's objective morality? You say that certain ideas such as murder and human sacrifice are wrong but you haven't shown how that is anything more than your opinion.

Nick Soapdish said:

Outside of software (i.e. something physical), have we ever built anything that is self-replicating? What would it take? It is very complex, no matter at what scale ...

Click to expand...

I wasn't aware of it, but apparently we have (see camanintx's link). Either way, I don't see how this is relevant. We haven't built volcanoes or comets. We haven't built many naturally-forming, non-self-replicating molecules which are far more complex than DNA (by your definition of 'complex'). Therefore...?

Nick Soapdish said:

I know.. my argument is one of common sense and intuition. It is not possible to calculate the probability of abiogenisis.

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But Nick, common sense and intuition--especially when your intuition disagrees with others' intuition--is not a compelling argument.

Nick Soapdish said:

Numbers can get pretty big. To me, the probability of abiogenesis is on a whole different level than the opportunities in our limited timeframe. No matter how much time is left, there is never going to be rocks that are formed like the statue of David. The probability is so slim we should consider it impossible, as long as the amount of time passed is finite. To me, it is the same thing as molecules spontaneously getting the machinery in place for self-replication.

Click to expand...

This is not an argument. It is a claim. It's the same claim you've been making, unsupported outside your own personal intuition. So...I'm not sure how to respond.

It might be useful to point out that there is no reason the "first replicators" had to be very good at replication. They could have mostly formed other molecules, and only occasionally formed a rough 'copy'.

Nick Soapdish said:

You have to consider the amount of money these people spend on lottery tickets and how many people there are.

Click to expand...

BINGO!

Now consider an early Earth: you have huge amounts of pre-biotic matter (analogous to the number of people) and huge amounts of time (analogous to how much each person spends).

The odds that life would spontaneously form from the minimum amount of elements, all introduced together exactly once are mindbogglingly low, but that's not what we're talking about: we have a planet that has huge parts of its surface covered in the raw materials for life, a constant supply of energy, and a timespan of a millions and millions of years.

As you said, you have to consider the amount of money these people spend on lottery tickets and how many people there are. The number of tries you get has a huge impact on whether you'll have one successful try out of the set.

Nick Soapdish said:

The odds of some things are simply inconceivable. Consider the monkey's typing on a keyboard. After a billion years with 100 monkeys (assuming each keystroke had equal probability), you would never have a sequence that matches even one page of one of Shakespear's books, much less the entire book.

It is interesting how improbable certain things are.

Click to expand...

Scale it up a bit: if, say, half the surface of the planet were covered with typing monkeys all sitting shoulder-to-shoulder, and they don't have to produce a Shakespeare play, but only one that's in the proper format and is generally well-written, what do you think that does to the odds? That's closer to the real situation in the origins of life on Earth.

Hey yossarian,

yossarian said:

If anybody has a powerful enough calculator, could you please enter this in?
(((5.36*10^307)-2)/5.36*10^307)^70,080,000,000,000,000

Click to expand...

I think that number is going to be 0.9999....

If I rearrange, I get:
(1+(-2/5.36*10^307))^7.008*10^16

Using the binomial approximation I get:
1-(7.008*10^16)*(2)/(5.36*10^307)

Or,
1-(2.615*10^-291)

which is 0.9999999... Right?

Since I used the binomial approximation, the actual number will be greater than or equal to this number (but obviously less than 1). But you don't need to know precisely how many 9's follow, do you?

Mr Spinkles said:

Hey yossarian,
I think that number is going to be 0.9999....

If I rearrange, I get:
(1+(-2/5.36*10^307))^7.008*10^16

Using the binomial approximation I get:
1-(7.008*10^16)*(2)/(5.36*10^307)

Or,
1-(2.615*10^-291)

which is 0.9999999... Right?

Since I used the binomial approximation, the actual number will be greater than or equal to this number (but obviously less than 1). But you don't need to know precisely how many 9's follow, do you?

Click to expand...

The odds of 7.008*10^15 random papers not matching a specific document is .46.
Unless I entered the numbers incorrectly both times I calculated the result, something is getting screwed up.
The odds of failure cannot increase with size. Unless I did my math wrong (possible)

I am not sure how reliable the bionomial approximation is in this case, as it's meant for numbers close to zero. It would be most useful to calculate the odds of success, but that screws calculations up (makes the more complicated) because we are looking for the odds of any number of successes, not just one success.

9-10ths_Penguin said:

BINGO!

Now consider an early Earth: you have huge amounts of pre-biotic matter (analogous to the number of people) and huge amounts of time (analogous to how much each person spends).

Click to expand...

That is pretty arguable. Four billion years isn't really a large number in the context of abiogenesis. And that's the total age of the Earth and not just the time after single-celled organisms showed up I think.

9-10ths_Penguin said:

Scale it up a bit: if, say, half the surface of the planet were covered with typing monkeys all sitting shoulder-to-shoulder, and they don't have to produce a Shakespeare play, but only one that's in the proper format and is generally well-written, what do you think that does to the odds? That's closer to the real situation in the origins of life on Earth.

Click to expand...

I don't think that's at all obvious.

kmkemp said:

That is pretty arguable. Four billion years isn't really a large number in the context of abiogenesis. And that's the total age of the Earth and not just the time after single-celled organisms showed up I think.

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If organic compounds like amino acids can form from methane (CH4), ammonia (NH3), hydrogen (H2), and water (H2O) in just a single week, how long do you think more complex molecules would take?

yossarian22 said:

Now we have a general formula we can use.
(((5.36*10^307)-2)/5.36*10^307)^Papers.

Click to expand...

I appreciate the attempt.. however, I believe there is an error on your formula. It should be:

(2 / 5.36*10^307 - 2) * papers

Or

(2*papers) / (5.36*10^307 - 2)

The number of papers is not an exponential function... it is a multiplication function. If you have 10 papers, you have 10 times the chance of it happening. You do not have 10,000,000,000 times the chance of it happening (which is what 10^10 is).

Based on my formula above the result is (2*7,008,000,000,000,000) / (5.36*10^307-2), which would leave the probability at 2.6149 * 10^-292. That is basically impossible. That is:

0.000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,026,149

Mr Spinkles said:

I wasn't aware of it, but apparently we have (see camanintx's link). Either way, I don't see how this is relevant. We haven't built volcanoes or comets. We haven't built many naturally-forming, non-self-replicating molecules which are far more complex than DNA (by your definition of 'complex'). Therefore...?

Click to expand...

I am trying to emphasize the complexity of something that is self replicating... it is not a trivial function.

Mr Spinkles said:

But Nick, common sense and intuition--especially when your intuition disagrees with others' intuition--is not a compelling argument.

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I agree. I would never suggest faith requires... well faith. Ultimately it is possible to doubt God's existence. But to others His existence is obvious.

This goes back to the cynical mindset the 20th century has instilled in us. I believe physics and philosophy are both held back by the notion of "if you can't prove it to me empirically, then whatever you say is worthless." There was a time when intuitions mattered and physics flourished and moved forward at an astonishing rate. I believe this has to do with the super-organism of physicists sharing ideas in a much more open community.

“The only real valuable thing is intuition.” -- Albert Einstein

We all use intuition on an ongoing basis. Logic can only get you from point A to point B. And it can be used to make sure your beliefs are consistent. However, it doesn't tell you what point A is and how to get there. We all have assumptions about the world and it is intuition, common sense and our awareness that get there.

This is not an argument. It is a claim. It's the same claim you've been making, unsupported outside your own personal intuition. So...I'm not sure how to respond.

Click to expand...

Good point. If you did it would be a yes-it-is, no-it-isn't, yes-it-is, no-it-isn't, yes-it-is, no-it-isn't kind of argument.

From my point of view, I have seen nothing that shows that self-replicating RNA structures spontaneously being created has even a slight probability of occurring within the time frame it is suggested to occur. There are things that are so improbable we might as well consider them impossible (e.g. the monkeys typing on the keyboard). That is how I view abiogenesis.

EDIT: camanintx's contribution does provide evidence of this.. I will look into it further.

9-10ths_Penguin said:

BINGO!

Now consider an early Earth: you have huge amounts of pre-biotic matter (analogous to the number of people) and huge amounts of time (analogous to how much each person spends).

The odds that life would spontaneously form from the minimum amount of elements, all introduced together exactly once are mindbogglingly low, but that's not what we're talking about: we have a planet that has huge parts of its surface covered in the raw materials for life, a constant supply of energy, and a timespan of a millions and millions of years.

As you said, you have to consider the amount of money these people spend on lottery tickets and how many people there are. The number of tries you get has a huge impact on whether you'll have one successful try out of the set.

Click to expand...

In my mind nature inventing self-replicating RNA structures is multitudes more improbable than winning the lottery. In comparison, winning the lottery is an easy gamble.

9-10ths_Penguin said:

Scale it up a bit: if, say, half the surface of the planet were covered with typing monkeys all sitting shoulder-to-shoulder, and they don't have to produce a Shakespeare play, but only one that's in the proper format and is generally well-written, what do you think that does to the odds? That's closer to the real situation in the origins of life on Earth.

Click to expand...

Let's suppose there are 1 trillion monkeys and they had 1 billion years to attempt even one page (a small one at only 215 letters)... The odds would still only be 1 in 3.7313 x 10^286. That is pretty much impossible. The odds for the entire book would be exponentially less likely.

camanintx said:

Julius Rebek, Jr., the Camille Dreyfus Professor of Chemistry at MIT, produced synthetic self-replicating molecules back in 1994 so it can't be that difficult, can it?

Click to expand...

Wow... great contribution to the discussion. It is very interesting and I would like to look into it further... for now, I will concede that perhaps my knowledge of molecular principles is deficient to be making decisions on the probability of abiogenesis. Frubles to you!

camanintx said:

So how does one measure their subjective opinion of morality against God's objective morality? You say that certain ideas such as murder and human sacrifice are wrong but you haven't shown how that is anything more than your opinion.

Click to expand...

For me, these principles rest on the Bible as my moral authority. Our interpretation does have a certain subjectivity to it (I will concede that), but God's interpretation does not, and that is were the absoluteness of morality rests.

Mr Spinkles said:

Hey yossarian,
I think that number is going to be 0.9999....

If I rearrange, I get:
(1+(-2/5.36*10^307))^7.008*10^16

Using the binomial approximation I get:
1-(7.008*10^16)*(2)/(5.36*10^307)

Or,
1-(2.615*10^-291)

which is 0.9999999... Right?

Since I used the binomial approximation, the actual number will be greater than or equal to this number (but obviously less than 1). But you don't need to know precisely how many 9's follow, do you?

Click to expand...

I plugged it into my computer (Java 1.4) and it returned "infinity".. not sure what that implies. I think the number was too great for the data structure.

Nick Soapdish said:

I appreciate the attempt.. however, I believe there is an error on your formula. It should be:
(2 / 5.36*10^307 - 2) * papers

Click to expand...

No. For one thing, where is the -2 from? But that is not the biggest flaw.
We are assuming these papers are independent.
Basic probability rules states this.
If two trials are independent the probability of outcome A occurring twice is
P(A)*P(A)
Or P(A)^2
and
The probability of an outcome ranges from 0-1 inclusive.

The number of papers is not an exponential function... it is a multiplication function. If you have 10 papers, you have 10 times the chance of it happening. You do not have 10,000,000,000 times the chance of it happening (which is what 10^10 is).

Click to expand...

Probability is calculated exponentially. Thats why lots of consecutive events are very very very rare.
the odds of two heads in two flips of a coin is
1/2*1/2.*1/2 Or (1/2)^3.
Multiplication does not work because a probability must be between 0 and 1 inclusive. Using your method, the probability of two heads in two flips of a coin is
1/2*3. Or 1.5
That is not possible. You can't get something more than 100% of the time.