SCIENCE
Can Anybody Explain This Freaky Coincidence?
Advanced simulated reality? God? Or pure chance?
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I couldn’t sleep last night.
My mind wouldn’t stop turning over a seemingly ‘impossible’ coincidence — with mindblowing implications. The crazy thing is that I’d never really considered it before or even heard anyone else mention it, despite it being a relatively regular occurrence.
The phenomenon that had me tossing and turning for hours was the solar eclipse.
Whenever there’s a full solar eclipse anywhere around the world, it draws excitement and crowds. Always has done, throughout human history. Nowadays, though, we tend to sneer at the beliefs of olden times about giant dragons trying to eat the sun, etc. and dismiss the event as ‘just’ a celestial coincidence.
“It’s just the moon moving between the Earth and the sun.”
In this Age of Science, we’re comfortably smug about knowing that however impressive a solar eclipse might appear, it’s just rocks in space doing their thing. At least, that’s how I always thought of it.
But is that all there is to it?
When the Earth, sun and moon perfectly line up to create a total solar eclipse, the sun and moon appear exactly the same size and so the moon perfectly covers the sun. I asked ChatGPT if this was pure chance. Its initial answer made me think I was making something out of nothing:
“Yes, the fact that the Moon and the Sun appear to be roughly the same size in the sky during a total solar eclipse is indeed a fascinating coincidence, but it is not entirely random.”
‘Not entirely random’ seemed comforting, suggesting a rational explanation. However, such hopes were dashed by the next sentence:
“The Sun is about 400 times larger in diameter than the Moon, but it is also about 400 times farther away from Earth. This unique ratio means that, from our perspective on Earth, the two celestial bodies appear to be nearly the same size.”
So the sun just happens to be 400 times larger than the moon in diameter and also just happens to be 400 times further away. Which just happens to make them appear precisely the same size when in alignment. Uniquely.
That’s one hell of a coincidence. In what way is this ‘not entirely random’, I wondered.
I considered that maybe it was this unique ratio of relative weight to distance that keeps the Earth and Moon in their orbits. Perhaps it couldn’t be any other way.
So I had ChatGPT run an analysis on the other planets and moons of our solar system. If this hypothesis were true, we should see the same ratio replicated elsewhere. It turns out that’s not the case. If we were standing on Jupiter, for example, looking up at Ganymede (one of its 95 moons) eclipsing the sun, Ganymede would appear much smaller than the sun.
This applies to every other moon of every other planet in our solar system.
And if this Earth:moon:sun ratio is unique in our solar system, can I assume it’s also unique in our galaxy? Maybe even unique in our universe?
What are the chances that three random celestial bodies, locked together in a system of orbit brought about by a freak explosion an incalculably long time ago, would just happen to be precisely the right relative sizes and distances from each other to produce the illusion that body B appears exactly the same size as Body A when viewed from Body C?
And in the unlikely event that this random conjunction should occur somewhere in the universe, what are the further chances that Body C would just happen to be the only inhabited planet (as far as we know) in the entire universe, thus allowing this freakishly unique conjunction to be viewed by intelligent life?
ChatGPT seems unable to work out the chances and refuses to give me an answer. It says it cannot find any published scientific data that allows it to analyse the question deeply enough to even approximate the chances.
I’ve done a quick calculation in my head, though, and the answer I came up with is somewhere between ‘pretty infinitesimally minute’ and ‘non-fucking-existent’.
To be fair, I’m no scientist (in case you hadn’t realised), and I might be missing something. So, for the love of God, if there are any astrophysicists reading this, could you please give me a rational explanation for this phenomenon?
Because right now, it’s looking so improbable that intelligent design seems the only rational explanation.
Whether this is due to the will of ‘God’ in the traditional sense or because we are living in a simulation almost seems immaterial. In any event, are these two options really that different?
Arthur C. Clarke famously said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I would go further and say that any sufficiently advanced civilisation with the technology to create a convincing simulated reality is indistinguishable from God.
Right now, the possibility that we’re living in an advanced simulated reality or that the universe was created by God seems more plausible to me than pure random chance.
