Somebody asked, in another forum, whether one could prove
God by the fact that if you
randomly flipped every
pixel on the screen until you'd gone through them all, you'd see along the way the
pictures of
Heaven and
Hell and
God.... I
answered:
Well let's run the numbers on this.
An
HD screen is 1280 x 720 pixels, for a total of 921,600 pixels.
Each pixel has a color determined by a mix of
red,
green, and
blue, with a range of intensity of each going from 0 to 255. So a pixel of 0 red and 0 green and 1 blue, though probably indistinguishable to the
human eye from one of 0 red and 0 green and 2 blue, is considered a different color. The range of colors representable by any given pixel is 255 x 255 x 255, for 16,777,216 possible different colors.
Ready for the
madness?
Suppose your screen with its 921,600 pixels was entirely at 0 red and 0 green and 0 blue, except for one single pixel at 0 red and 0 green and 1 blue. You probably wouldn't even be able to find the one subtly different pixel.
Now think of it this way, if your screen had only two pixels, one of those could be any of 16,777,216, and the other one could, as well, be any of 16,777,216 colors, so between those two pixels, you have 281,475,000,000,000 possible combinations. Assuming no combination ever repeated, if you were to click through one combination per second with no time taken to eat or sleep, it would take you nearly nine million
years to go through all possible
combinations. For a screen of 921,600 pixels, you would have 16,777,216 to the 921,600th power possible combinations. The number is truly incomprehensible.
The vast majority of images which could be generated thusly would be
gibberish.
Random.
Nonsense to the eye.
But in that randomly-set set would be, as well, every picture ever taken by any person, including every still frame from every vid or animation ever made.
Every selection of text ever created that could fit on a screen.
Every page of text ever written -- including every textual argument ever made or which could be made which would definitively prove the existence of God, AND every textual argument ever made or which could be made which would definitively disprove the existence of god. And all of those repeated in every font which would fit on the screen, and in italics.
Every scene on Earth ever seen by human eyes, and every unseen scene on Earth, and on the Moon and Mars and Jupiter and every other place in our Universe, as it would have been seen had human eyes been there to see it.
Every conceivable thing able to be put on a screen.
Every inconceivable thing.
The moment of your
birth.
The moment of your
death.
The moment of your
conception.
Your
body 1,000 years after you died.
Every moment of the rise of every
empire.
Every moment after the fall of every empire.
Your ancestors from
a thousand generations back.
Your ancestors from a
hundred million generations back.
Every
deity of every
religion in such
glory as to make them undeniable.
Every
process by which every
thing came into
existence without any divine hand.
And all of those images combined would constitute a tiny
fraction of everything which would come across that screen. And in the end you would see so many
true things and so many
false things (and by
definition the false would outnumber the true by
orders of magnitude, but be indistinguishable from the true) that at the end the only thing which would make
sense would be.... madness.
And perhaps that madness is all the God there is.