this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2024
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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!
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.
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.