Will a unicorn ever show up at your front door?
Is anyone going to get a clear photo of Bigfoot?
![](https://justsuperhuman.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/image-5-1024x585.png)
Technically yes to both. The best theories we have of quantum physics explain that every outcome is possible, it’s just most are unlikely. If you want to jump down a late-night rabbit hole, check out the research on The Double Slit Experiment to give an explanation as to why this is.
Your Photo with Bigfoot Exists
When you take a digital photograph, you’re saving an organized set of pixels with a specific set of colors.
Lets say we have a canvas of 256×256 pixels (65,536 dots we can paint with any color.
![](https://justsuperhuman.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/image-2-1024x1024.png)
Typically, our modern computers use a “32 bit” color palette which means we have
4,294,967,296 colors to use.
To find your specific photo let’s use a smaller number.
Let’s say we only have 8 grayscale colors in our palette.
We can get the exact number of possible images by calculating the number of permutations possible for each combination of pixels.
Permutations = P(n,r) = n! ?? (n-r)! = (256×256)! ?? (256×256- 8)!
= 340,137,008,117,998,448,138,...
...762,147,145,370,828,800
Good luck trying to say that number… but what this means is if you had a stack of photographs that large, somewhere in that stack is a small, black-and-white picture of me and you getting coffee with the Queen of England… and somewhere there’s a picture of you and Bigfoot and you’re riding a unicorn!
All this to say… technically, everything is possible, no matter how unlikely.
When You Say Never, You’re Throwing Out Photos You’ve Never Seen.
When does Santa Clause stop existing? As soon as you stop believing he does.
And when do you find out you’ll never be a movie star, you’ll never have your dream body, you’ll never conquer your fear of the ocean floor, or you’ll never be able to renew your cars extended warranty (seriously, this is your last chance)??
As soon as you say NEVER. As soon as you say never your soul relieves you of that stack of photos.
Go ahead and throw out the photos you don’t want, but please don’t throw out the ones you would dream to see.
Everything is possible until you say it isn’t ?
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