They say that no two snowflakes are alike. How true is that scientifically speaking?I asked ChatGPT how many snowflakes fall on earth in one year and it said 10^22. Let's just multiply that by a thousand so we have a thousand years worth of snowflakes. If you then took the two most similar looking snowflakes out of those 10 million quintillion snowflakes, would they still be noticeably different since supposedly no two are alike?
>>16910983there's lots of water molecules in a snowflake and so nay different arrangements they'll never be two identical ones.
>>16910983You're right there are similar snowflakes, but we would also have to say the allotrope of ice is the same microscopically as well. That the lattice of atoms are the same. Etc.But you are right the universe is so big that there are copies of planets and star systems and constellations. Even humans.I think the visible universe has been around long enough that the nonvisible universe (beyond our cosmic horizon of the past) does allow enough time to lapse in super voids for a larger hidden universes to give the statistical necessities to have repeats.
>>16910991However, if you think of the fact that all the alphabet (26 different letters) can be arranged in more than 10^25 ways, 26! ways to be exact. So it doesn't take more than that many different symbols to be able to make more than 10 million quintillion different arrangements with them. If the snowflake had something analogous to that, maybe different structures or something that could manifest in different ways or different spots, then it might be possible to have that many different snowfakes. So any pair of snowflakes would be two different snowflakes, and they could be different even macroscopically, not just microscopically.
