Why I should buy a lottery ticket:
Buying a lottery ticket makes no sense. To begin with there is the near certainty of losing. The chance of winning is so small compared with any possible prize that it is an abysmally poor investment. And of course there is the consideration that winning guarantees you that you will be surrounded by vultures. Another point is that given a windfall for a time a dollar does not mean as much to you as it does before the windfall; you are gambling high value dollars for low value dollars.
On the other hand look at what I am trying to do. I am trying to save civilization and possibly humanity itself by bringing attention to a law of nature: living things must limit their gene pool size if they use sex for reproduction.
So what are my chances? Of the seven billion people in the world, let’s call it ten billion, the chance of it falling to my lot is one in ten billion. There is a chance I am wrong, that there is no such law, but that chance is vanishingly small. The weight of the evidence is that irreversible disaster will strike in the next hundred years, if it has not already struck. People have been able to cross open ocean for at least a million years (they were Homo erectus) and that ability implies a substantial social order; they have to be able to cooperate well enough to navigate. To me that implies a society big enough to be destroyed by this law; there was evidence enough at that time for people to figure it out. So the chance that it be figured out in the final century, assuming it is figured out at all, is one in a hundred thousand, which multiplied by one in ten billion comes out to a chance in quadrillion. The chance that it is figured out and made use of must be very low, considering how long we have failed. It cannot be greater than one in a thousand, so that means success in this project must be one in quintillion or worse, probably a lot worse.
So the chance of success here makes winning the lottery seem a virtual certainty by comparison.
With the winnings from a major lottery prize I could easily offer enough grants to enough starving scientists to be assured that the truth would become known. That means the lottery is a better chance than I would have using all other means at my disposal.
So why don’t I? Sad to say, that would mean multiplying the already terrible odds by one in something of a few orders of magnitude. I might do it for amusement, but seriously it is not a real hope.
There have been 70,781 visitors so far. There have been 115,459 total visits and 224,101artilces have been opened. I check the stats every time I post anything. Unfortunately it appears that the statistics package Godaddy.com uses is going to change. You know what that means. The whole history is going to be lost and they’ll start over from scratch. Pity. I paid for the package. Maybe I am being pessimistic and that won’t happen. Let’s hope it doesn’t. It’s kind of fun to compare current traffic with the total history.
I have received a courteous note from John Hamre indicating he did receive my email and looked it over with care. I would like to share my deep appreciation for his attention.