Re: What would make you believe?

Michael Ash wrote:

> (This sort of thinking would actually explain pretty well why so many 
> people play. Maybe some of them know that they have little chance of 
> winning but are banking on being wrong about it.)

I seriously doubt it's quite that clever.  It's more like the kind of 
reasoning you see all the time, including in rec.arts.sf.science from 
time to time:  arguments like, "Well, someone's got to win," or "If you 
play regularly you'll win eventually."

> There's another wrench to throw into the probabilities: after all the 
> wrangling over whether it's possible and whether they would pick you,
you 
> have the question of whether this project would happen. This is so far 
> into the future that the disaster is a distant memory. They know that
the 
> end result was happy (they're still around, right?) and could have
easily 
> gone bad (a thousand individuals could easily become zero) so why mess 
> with success? Imagine if time travel were invented today. I could easily

> see things like people going back to mess with the Holocaust (despite
the 
> risk of inadvertently creating a world where everyone is white, blue
eyed, 
> blond haired, and speaking German) but how about going back to an ice
age 
> and trying to prevent a population bottleneck then?

Actually I was working my way up to mentioning this in my next reply. 
If you assume that this is an American lottery, the chances of you being 
selected are one in a few hundred million.  That's _less_ than the 
official chances of you winning the lottery right there!  And that's 
_combined_ with the probabilities that you think he's actually a time 
traveller.

-- 
Erik Max Francis && max@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 && http://www.alcyone.com/max/
  San Jose, CA, USA && 37 18 N 121 57 W && AIM, Y!M erikmaxfrancis
   Eppur, si muove! [But still it moves!]
    -- Galileo Galilei