Defining Endless Probabilities
Probabilities are what people rely on, a lot of times. If something is going the same way for years, it is very unlikely to go another way all of a sudden. Using probabilities is a way to predict the future in a sense. But it is not fully true. The world as we see it, is not based on probabilities; it is based on facts. Facts and stats are two different things. A probability may be formulated from the underlying stats, but facts are facts.
Scalability is a term in the software industry that is generally used to describe how well a software or app is usable to a larger extent. Asymptotic notations and the concept of Big-Theta is applied for calculating the best-case and the worst-case time complexity of an algorithm. Also, the power of the server obviously determines most of the things in scalability. A lot of times, we see that web servers crash. The website of Epic Games was down on the first day they declared the free purchase of the massive hit game GTA V for one week. The web server of Dhaka University crashed during their online admission process in 2021. These things happened due to a lot of load on the servers of those websites. It is to be noted that those websites had been working really well before the declaration of the free purchase or before the admission process had started. So, these things weren’t probable from that perspective. But from another perspective, was it probable to crash in case of such high traffic? The condition of higher traffic adds more logic to the probability.
Combining probabilities with facts is a better approach to estimate the future more accurately. But then, the only point that remains is the random audacity of one’s mind. Choices, preferences, and alternate-endings to things are mainly a branch of that ideology. Something happens someway because it just happens. I may suddenly choose to go home by Uber on a sudden day just because I wasn’t feeling well and I didn’t want to take the bus that day. It is to be noted that I don’t often feel unwell, and it can be totally random, the time when I would be feeling unwell. In some movies, the concept of manipulating someone’s decisions was shown. It’s like you went to a horse race and bet on the number 9 horse because you were shown the number ‘9’ a lot of times throughout the day, and it somehow manipulated your mind to unknowingly and unwillingly doing that.
This theory, in fact, questions whether the concepts we see of time travel in movies are true. Time travel, however fictional it may be, let’s assume it was true. And there are also actual theories that state that if some object achieves more speed than the speed of light, backwards time travel would be possible for that object or whoever was in that object. But there are other conditions to this theory as well. To simplify things, let us assume that there was a way to achieve time travel. The idea of changing something in the past can change many things of the future, is broader than we expect it to be. Because of one reason that no one really talks about. The occurrence of a random event. Just because something happened some way in the past doesn’t mean it will happen the same way if the past was to be repeated again. And the world as it is, is a consequence of acts or, more simply put, a chain of random events. Anything happening anywhere somehow leads to something later happening somewhere else. The main outcome of this is an unexpected change in the future due to the altered event going back in time, even though the change seemingly had nothing to do with the altered event.
All of this is why a probability wouldn’t always be the reality even though the probability is calculated to be at 100%. And this is oddly very natural and common if the probability is only based on stats, while still true if the probability is based on both stats and facts.
The world as we call it, is a place of endless probabilities and infinite possibilities. The future, in a very wide sense, will always be unpredictable. And that too is a prediction that can go wrong.