Everybody is familiar with the notion that an infinite number of monkeys given an infinite number of typewriters and enough time would almost certainly produce the complete works of Shakespeare.

Before I talk about monkeys, let me discuss large numbers.

I was at the shore today eating my subway sandwich watching the waves crash against the rocks, and it occurred to me that the time it takes for waves to turn solid rocks into sandy beaches is incomprehensible to me. Looking up the age of Oahu I find that this island is 3 million years old. That seems pretty straight forward. 3,000,000. That's not too bad.

Let's compare that to my lifetime. For simplicity, let's assume that I live 100 years. So that's 30,000 lifetimes. Or maybe to recorded history, about 5,000 years. So the age of Oahu is about 600 times the length of recorded history. Imagine all of what we know about human kind (a bit more than two times as long as since Christ came to visit the first time) happening 600 times.

So, it's takes somewhat less time than 600 times the entire known history of mankind to make an island and put sand on the beach. I would still say that, in a sense, this is incomprehensible to me. I've made some comparisons and done some math, but for me to really comprehend that span of time, for it to mean something that I might actually be able to experience directly, it's pretty tough. I have trouble remembering my own childhood, and I'm not even 50 years old yet.

How about something really big? The age and size of the known universe? According to wikipedia, the fount of all knowledge, the age of the known universe is about 13.75 billion years. Let's be conservative and call it 10 billion. That's more than 3,000 times the age of Oahu. Another data point from wikipedia: "The number of atoms in the observable universe is close to 10^80" That's a number that my calculator can deal with, but it's really, really big. Theoretically I could write out a 1 followed by 80 zeros, but it's not really a number I can wrap my head around. It's beyond me to imagine that many of anything.

I suspect that when people think about the "infinite" monkeys & typewriters, they picture something on the order of 100, or 1,000 monkeys. I think I can sort of imagine 1,000 monkeys. Maybe some people can imagine 1,000,000 monkeys. So generally people hear the thing about infinite monkeys and chuckle because it just seems preposterous. Even if we replaced every human on Earth with a monkey, you're still not going to get the works of Shakespeare out of those monkeys. No matter how many monkeys you can imagine, it's incomprehensible that they could produce anything near the works of Shakespeare.

But 1,000,000 falls far, far short of infinity. 10 billion is way, way less than infinity. Infinity is really big.

Here's the kicker: The total works of Shakespeare have already been "randomly" produced by something far smaller and simpler than an infinite number of monkeys, and far quicker than an infinite amount of time. Our known universe already produced the complete works of Shakespeare.

The size and age of the known universe are both finite. They're not infinite. I think we can all agree on this. (The key here is the known universe. I'm not talking about anything beyond what we can observe.) The known universe is comprised of a finite number of atoms, tossed around with a few laws of physics. We have not plumbed all the mysteries of physics, but I think we can all agree that an atom is pretty simple compared to a full blown monkey.

I guess my point, if I have one, is that we fool ourselves when we try to think about an infinite number of anything. If a finite number of atoms in a finite amount of time can produce everything we currently find interesting, how can we pretend to imagine what an infinite number of monkeys might or might not produce?