Tonight's showerthought (lifted from Reddit):
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Have you ever considered how incredibly rare music actually is?
Music is basically organized sound (let's ignore Cage for now...) For sound to travel we need a medium, any matter, gas, liquid or solid. Relatively speaking though, the universe is composed of about 0.0000000000000000000042 percent of matter.
That means that the only places in the universe that contain sound energy is astronomically small. Now we can debate the definition of music all we want, but it basically comes down to one thing; it needs to be experienced by a conscious entity. And of that tiny percentage in the universe that contains matter, how much of it do you think has intelligent life on it?
Furthermore, that intelligent life needs to actually want to express itself in various ways, not just eat, procreate and die. Musical expression can come in many ways, but music is unique in the way that it relies on the rarest of all forms of energy we know of. It not only needs kinetic energy but also matter to create sound waves.
How lucky are we to exist in a point in time, on a tiny blue planet, absolutely filled to the brim with music. And literally in everywhere you look, for millions of miles, it's absolutely dead silent.
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So this got me thinking about The Drake Equation, and I decided to run some numbers.
Drake proposes that, given the projected deviation of his equation, there are potentially between 0 and 36.4 million intelligent life supporting planets in the observable universe.
And with at least 200 billion galaxies (and possibly even more), we're very likely talking about a Universe filled with around 10^24 planet in our observable Universe.
Let's be bold and go crazy - we'll say that there are really that maximum potential number of planets Drake's Equation suggests may support intelligent life. As a percentage of our projected total number of planets in the universe, that would mean that at best, 3.64 x 10-15% of the universe's planets could potentially have music.
And finally, let's view that percentage of the original value representing the percentage of the universe which contains matter.
0.0000000000000000364 * 0.000000000000000000000042
which equals
0.00000000000000000000000000000000000015288% of the universe.
That's fifteen thousand, two hundred eighty-eight hundred-duodecillionths of 1%.
At this juncture it is only fitting to cite a wonderfully appropriate Douglas Adams' quote:
Quote:
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It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.
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― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Now I'm going to bed.