Things Can Be Impossible

[Martin Hash]

Occasionally I'll meet a budding-sophist who likes to be provocative to show how intellectually advanced they are; I got one this morning who butted in on me when I used the word "impossible" to tell me nothing's impossible; that there's a remote chance of every possible event, no matter how small because the universe is infinite. I've faced this kind of sophomoric prattle before, here's how to respond:

"So there's a chance that a green alien named Fred with the middle name of '1' will appear right in front of me when I snap my fingers?" I asked.
"Yes," he said. "Though the odds are vanishingly small, they still exist."
"Like what odds?" I asked. "There's 150th power atoms in the universe, would it be greater or smaller than that?"
"Probably greater, probably 10,000th power or even 100,000th," he told me.
Got 'em.
"Since there’s an infinite number of aliens that are exactly the same except for their middle name, and you gave a finite number for the odds of the first one existing; any finite odds multiplied by infinity is 1.”
I snap my fingers, look confused, snap them again and again. I look back at the guy.
“Should be at least one of those green aliens with numbers for middle names," I said. "It must be impossible.”

[SuburbanFarmer]

If any element of randomness exists in an infinite universe, then the entire universe becomes random.

Ie: if some infinitesimal chance exists of a universe-destroying catastrophe, then the infinite universe should be destroyed already.

[Smitty-48]

the universe is destroying itself by expanding faster than the speed of light

this is very early on in the history of the universe now mind you

most of the history of the universe will be trillions of years of darkness

the age of black holes, then white dwarfs, then black dwarfs, etcetera, thermodynamic entropy

[Fife]

“Should be at least one of those green aliens with numbers for middle names," I said. "It must be impossible.”

I mean this in the most complimentary way, Martin. You and Rudy Rucker remind me of each other. I dig his fiction also and I bet you might like it.

Infinity and the Mind: The Science and Philosophy of the Infinite

Rucker acquaints us with staggeringly advanced levels of infinity, delves into the depths beneath daily awareness, and explains Kurt Gödel’s belief in the possibility of robot consciousness.

The Hollow Earth

In 1836, our seventeen-year-old narrator Mason Reynolds leaves his father's Virginia farm with the black Otha. He befriends the dissolute Edgar Allan Poe, and they fall through a thousand-mile-deep hole in the ice of Antarctica.