Numbers and Madness

By now, we are already well into March, and you know what that means: watching NCAA basketball and simultaneously enjoying the madness and stressing out about how poorly your bracket is doing. To provide some perspective for the large portion of us who have chronically bad brackets, I looked at how many possible outcomes there are, and related that back to various things.

For the sake of simplicity here, we’ll assume every bracket has the same likelihood of happening. This isn’t really true, as evidenced by a 16 seed never winning (until Texas Southern does in a few days), but this is about the sheer number of possibilities, not likelihoods. So without further ado, there are over 147 quintillion possible outcomes – that means:

·         You’re about 1700 times more likely to hit the Powerball on consecutive days with only one ticket both days than have a perfect bracket.

·         If every possible bracket was printed out on a standard 8.5x11 sheet of paper, those papers could cover the entire Earth (oceans included) in over 2.8 feet of perfectly stacked sheets.

·         With those same sheets, you could make over 19 million stacks that went from Earth to the Moon. These stacks, all placed next to each other, would take up about 0.45 square miles of land.

·         With those same sheets, you could make 983 stacks that all went from Earth to Pluto when Pluto is on the opposite side of the Sun.

·         With all the sheets in a single stack, the stack would be about 0.78 light-years tall.

·         If we burned all the sheets, it would increase the temperature of the entire atmosphere by about 16°F.

·         Of course, we couldn’t burn all of the paper, because all of the oxygen in the entire atmosphere would be consumed in the combustion by the time 37% of the pages were burnt.

·         While we’re at it, the pages themselves couldn’t be made either, because if every tree in the entire world was used to make paper, it would only produce enough paper to fill out about 0.02% of the possibilities.

·         My personal favorite requires a few assumptions. First, I’ll say it takes a minute to fill out a bracket, which I’d say is quicker than reality, but it makes the numbers simple. Second, I’ll say the average lifespan of a human over the course of history is 35 years. Going off these assumptions, if every human who has ever lived on Earth spent every single waking minute of their life filling out brackets, then by this point in history, we would have filled out 0.9% of all possible brackets.

Happy picking!