[HN Gopher] Divers Accidentally Find a Piece of the Challenger S...
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Divers Accidentally Find a Piece of the Challenger Space Shuttle
Author : Errorcod3
Score : 89 points
Date : 2022-11-15 17:56 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| wwwtyro wrote:
| The odds of this seem astronomically small.
| vikingerik wrote:
| The odds of _this_ group of people, on _this_ day, finding
| _this_ piece of the shuttle, are of course astronomically
| small.
|
| The odds of _some_ group out of millions of people, on _some_
| day out of ten thousand since the incident, finding _some_
| piece of debris out of thousands, are considerably higher.
|
| This is the multiple-endpoints fallacy. You only notice the
| events that happened after the fact, you never notice
| everything that doesn't happen.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's a million to one.
|
| And those happen 9 times out of ten.
| Eleison23 wrote:
| THE ODDS ARE *NEVER* IN OUR FAVOR
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Once in a blue moon, for sure.
| emptybits wrote:
| No kidding. Actually, considering how mindblowingly huge but
| untouched the volume and area of our seas and seafloors are,
| "oceanically unlikely" is also a superlative I can get behind!
|
| 1.3 billion cubic km of water, the tallest mountain ranges and
| deepest canyons. Aside from occasional glimpses of the surface,
| it's forever out of sight and out of mind for nearly every
| person on the planet.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| Counterintuitively, extremely unlikely events like this happen
| very often. The odds of a specific event like this are
| astronomically small, but there is an even more astronomically
| large number of _different_ possible unlikely events. The sheer
| number of possible events is orders of magnitude greater than
| the odds of individual unlikely events, causing them to occur
| regularly.
|
| The universe is a really weird place, where really weird stuff
| happens constantly.
| hammock wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem
| ckastner wrote:
| > _Counterintuitively, extremely unlikely events like this
| happen very often._
|
| As the saying goes, "people win the lottery every day", and
| there are a lot of lotteries active on this planet.
| DieBruderBauer wrote:
| Imagine if you took the Everettian interpretation of Quantum
| Mechanics.
| skissane wrote:
| If it is true, doesn't it follow that there are (very rare)
| universes where unlikely events happen so often that anyone
| in such a universe would effectively observe a different
| probability distribution of events?
|
| The thing is, if the theory is true, how do we know we are
| not in such a universe? We can say it is extremely unlikely
| because they are very rare - but we say it is "unlikely"
| and "rare" because we assume the global (multiverse-wide)
| probability distribution is similar to the local (this
| universe) one - but isn't that assumption effectively
| equivalent to the assumption that we are not in such a
| universe? An argument which begins by assuming its
| conclusion is not much of an argument.
|
| However, if we can't rely on that assumption, it seems in
| principle impossible for us to know what the global
| probability distribution is - how is that not a lethal blow
| to the entire theory?
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| If you insist on using old fashioned logic to reason when
| in a probabilistic universe where that kind of reasoning
| is only an approximation, you can say that the universes
| you are talking about don't exist. They are such a small
| fraction of possible universes, that you can safely
| 'know' you aren't in any of them without checking.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Like separate rolls of a single dice, I thought the
| occurrence of one event has no affect on the probability of
| another?
| kelnos wrote:
| Right, but while it may only be a 1/6 chance that a single
| die roll will give you a six, rolling more and more dice
| eventually makes it a near-certainty that at least one will
| give you a six.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| Indeed, but I think you might be misunderstanding what I
| said. Think of the universe as a nearly infinite number of
| dice rolls all independent and in parallel. Any possible
| rare combination of dice rolls will actually be happening
| constantly.
| shawnz wrote:
| The person you are replying to isn't saying anything about
| the probability of individual events. They are talking
| about the probability of at least one of many events
| occurring, which does change with the number of events
| being considered
| jl6 wrote:
| What seems amazing is that it isn't covered in more sand and
| sediment. It would take such a small thickness of covering to
| hide it from view forever.
| daveslash wrote:
| I wonder if it could have gone through cycles of
| buried/uncovered? I don't know anything about the waters off
| Florida other than they experience periodic hurricane events.
| brk wrote:
| Very likely. I am in the west coast of Florida, and storms
| can really shift things around quite a bit. Passages between
| some of the small islands can open or close after a decent
| storm. Sandbars come and go, etc.
|
| The waters tend to be a little deeper on the east coast,
| which would tend to lessen the effects of large shifts, but
| over a timespan of nearly 40 years it is very likely the
| piece had been covered over at some point.
| googlryas wrote:
| It could be U shaped and not just a flat panel. Also, I assume
| the ceramic tiles have a very low coefficient of friction, so
| if it was stuck at any kind of small angle, the sediment might
| easily get carried off.
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