OK back on topic with non-outsiders stuff...
That last one is male bovine feces. So, when calculating odds of an event happening, if you consider time to be infinite, the odds of something happening...once in a million years....becomes a certainty. Well, we can't have that ****....OK, time's gotta stop then to make sure we don't have to start ignoring **** that might happen in eleventytrillion years. So, guys, whaddaya think, let's come up with some numbers....I'm going with 3 and a half billion years, Bob, but I'm throwing a plus or minus of 200 million years onnat.
I mean, I get the science, and I get the statistics, but they're not really saying that the world's going to end in 3.5 billion years, they're saying that for the purposes of calculation, by putting a finite limit on time, they can discount certain things from happening ever. Like me banging Bar Rafaeli. If you put the odds at one in a trillion, and time is infinite, eventually it'll happen. But, let's be honest, it ain't happening.
<pause for me to let that sink in>
*Edit: Just to be clear, the desire for me to bang Bar Rafaeli is going to have a much shorter life span than a trillion years. Just sayin'
I love Cracked, but that's the hard part of explaining some of this stuff in real terms. It's not that they're really saying that time will stop, it's that by figuring in a probability of time stopping within a certain # of years, it makes their calculations simpler.