> How could there not be a few Death Stars inhabited by English-speaking humans somewhere in one of those galaxies?
I know this is just a tongue in cheek comment, but I actually thought it somewhat reasonable until recently when I spent a moment with the numbers and saw its impossibility.
Basically, there's only ~100 billion galaxies with ~100 billion stars each (to an approximation of several orders of magnitude...), while the space of possible societies, languages, histories, etc, grows exponentially.
Even if there were 10^100 stars, log_2(10^100) is still only about 330. This means all those stars can only accomodate 330 forks in history where it could have gone one way or the other with equal probability. Or, in computer science terminology, all those stars can only encode 330 bits of information. And describing English alone takes far, far more than 330 bits. (Depending on how inevitable language of a certain type is.)
> This means all those stars can only accomodate 330 forks in history where it could have gone one way or the other with equal probability. Or, in computer science terminology, all those stars can only encode 330 bits of information. And describing English alone takes far, far more than 330 bits.
There's a huge gap in your logic here. The number of bits to represent all the stars in the universe has nothing to do with the possibility that there is some English speaking society out there.
Note that your numbers apply to the observable universe. The universe as a whole is likely to be infinite. Not that there is much practical difference between "the universe" and "the observable universe".
I know this is just a tongue in cheek comment, but I actually thought it somewhat reasonable until recently when I spent a moment with the numbers and saw its impossibility.
Basically, there's only ~100 billion galaxies with ~100 billion stars each (to an approximation of several orders of magnitude...), while the space of possible societies, languages, histories, etc, grows exponentially.
Even if there were 10^100 stars, log_2(10^100) is still only about 330. This means all those stars can only accomodate 330 forks in history where it could have gone one way or the other with equal probability. Or, in computer science terminology, all those stars can only encode 330 bits of information. And describing English alone takes far, far more than 330 bits. (Depending on how inevitable language of a certain type is.)