A statistician discovers the probability of life occurring in the universe is, and always has been, 0%; life was never supposed to happen.

“Stop.” Bernard spun around, searching for the source of the voice, but found nothing. Nothing. The white walls of his lab had gone away, there was not even any terrifying engulfing darkness you might expect if the lights had gone out, it was simply the nothing a blind man that has never known sight might experience. “I apologize for what you must experience as a very, sparse, setting. Your brain just isn’t built to comprehend this place.” the voice said in what, upon thinking about it, wasn’t a voice at all. Bernard could understand what was being said with perfect clarity, but as soon as he tried to listen to any accent, he realized his ears weren’t picking up anything at all. “Let me guess,” Bernard said, “I spend my entire life working on solving the paradox of life, just trying to fix my equations that say life should be impossible. Then, after years of work, I realize that it was never a paradox after all, that my equations were right the entire time, and i’m immediately whisked off to whatever this is. That would make you…. my creator?” “Very good Bernard, I always knew you were clever enough to eventually figure it out. Though I’m afraid you’re only half right. Yes, humanity as a whole was my creation initially, though I didn’t make you specifically, or anyone currently alive for that matter. Despite this small error in logic, I believe you’ll still be able to reach the next question.” Bernard paused for a moment, or was it a lifetime? The words echoed around in his brain, teetering on the edge of realization. Then it came, he hadn’t solved the paradox after all. Though he felt certain he was not talking to god, he nevertheless encountered the classic philosophical question, if god created man, who created god? The equations he had derived proving the impossibility of life would be equally valid on this alien species, and anyone that had created these aliens, all the way up to infinity. “The probability of life in the universe is 0, so how is it that you exist?” “I knew you’d get there.” They said, with what could only be described as a smile, “The answer is the same one you just proved a moment ago. True life is impossible to occur naturally. I, and all of my species, am not, truly, alive. You see, my species used to be a lot like you. We were dogged in our pursuit of knowledge, not content until we solved every mystery of the universe. We were able to collect enough information to predict the trajectories of individual atoms within a complex system to potentially the end of entropy itself if we had been set on devoting that much computing power to it. In truth, we never went longer than a couple of your earth days as a proof that it could be done, before realizing the implications. We turned this device on ourselves, monitoring every atom in our minds to predict our own thoughts before we even had them. To our horror, we could do it. It was then we realized our minds were nothing special, we were just predictable atoms in the universe like everything else. How could we claim to be capable of choice if you could now predict everything someone would do in their lives? Naturally, we set about on trying trying to create true life, life capable of choice and not just preset on a predictable universal destiny. We tried paradoxes, having someone read their own future prediction in order to change what would happen, but the resulting confusion was always predictable by an outside observer. I believe your own experiments on the wave-particle duality of light in a double slit glimpsed a simplistic version of this result. We tried to use sources of true randomness, and thus unpredictability, like radioactive decay. While this succeeded in creating unpredictability, it was also impossible to control, so the subjects just ended up being controlled by pure randomness rather than intentional internal choice. Eventually, my people gave up, content to go about their choices lives, just passengers in the currents of fate. And that was that. We stopped pretending to be alive, we stopped dreaming of choice.” “But you didn’t?” “No I didn’t. My people had mastered science, used all sorts of complex physics in order to try and create true choice. Where I am from, I am not a physicist, I had no delusions of discovering some yet unknown rule of the universe. So I threw away science. I created humanity but made no attempt to predict anything any of you would do. Since humanity was created, you have done more than I in trying to prove or disprove the nature of your consciousness. I know that even my choosing to create you could have been predicted, and was meaningless in itself, but it is my dream, maintained through what I admit is willful ignorance, that this creation in itself might become something of true meaning.” At this point Bernard interrupted, though he was unsure as to how that was even possible given that all of this was coming to him in an indefinite amount of time that could have been equally been an instant or an eternity, “So by telling the world about my findings, you think it would set humanity on a course to discover the same thing your species discovered all that time ago?” “On the contrary, I don’t believe you will discover the same truth my species found. At least, I hope you won’t. Perhaps I have just deluded myself into believe you are truly alive out of fondness for my creation. As you can likely tell, I am not exactly the most objective judge of humanity.” “Then why did you tell me to stop? Is this not what you created us for? To find out whether you have created true choice or not? Bernard felt that smile again, but mixed with sadness this time. For a while he though the conversation was over, that he would be returned to his lab at last, this time more real than every before. Rather than some ethereal god, it felt like they were just around the corner, just as material as any person he had ever met. “I was wrong to try and stop you. My dream is, and always has been, to give someone this gift of true choice. I cannot now deny you this choice of whether to reveal your work to the world. I just…. I don’t want this to end. I don’t want to be wrong.” And then Bernard finished his stride as he walked out of his lab, oblivious to anything that had just happened, if truly anything had happened at all.