And The Lord said unto John, "Come forth and receive eternal life," but John came in fifth and won a toaster.

Simplest self-replicating organism (mycoplasma genitalium) has 580073 base pairs (ATCG, 4 values, can be stored in 2-bits). Obviously it has finite complexity associated with it, and in terms of information it can be stored in about 142 kBytes, something downloaded by modern cheap consumer internet connections in a fraction of a second. Human DNA consists of about 3 billion base pairs, and there are certain plants that have as much as 50 times longer DNA than humans. Obviously simply in terms of the organisms ability to replicate itself their genomes are highly redundant, change a few nucleotides here and there and it'll still live.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycoplasma_genitalium
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/bioproject?cmd=Retrieve&dopt=Overview&list_uids=97

Now of course the naive argument goes that since all the possible combinations of a 500 kbp (kilo-base-pair) genome is rather large, ~10^300000 being the number of different possible "programs" (but still finite might I point), then there must have been a designer. This of course is fallacious in many ways, but for the sake of argument, lets say the probabilities were correct. What does this have to do with a designer? Does it get us anywhere? After all, who designed the designer? The most important question would be still unanswered and it would be simpler to just answer the question in the first place, how did this unlikely organism come about.

Another perhaps interesting thought related to this number is that perhaps we shouldn't look at it in such a way at all. Even if the worst case estimate was correct, perhaps it would simply tell us something about the size of the multiverse, the number of different multiverses that must exist. After all, we must find ourselves in such a universe where life came about in order for us to be able to think about questions such as this.

In practice these numbers would be brought down to lower value due to many reasons such as certain configurations being much less likely than other, also the universe possibly having many suitable planets for life, and possible many different types of life that could exist, some perhaps even pure energy rather than organic matter.

Something else which is somewhat related...

Given a low level programming language such as C, a simple self-replicating computer program can be as short as the following:

main(){char *c="main(){char *c=%c%s%c;printf(c,34,c,34);}";printf(c,34,c,34);}

Self-replicating computer programs are called quines:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing)

Also...

It seems that someone found an interesting example of self-replicating machine in a simple rule based "universe" - the game of life. Coincidentally this machine consists of a number of game-cells which is on the same order as the number of base pairs in the simplest organic self-replicating organism.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627653.800-first-replicating-creature-spawned-in-life-simulator.html

http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/index.php?title=Gemini

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life

Seems to me that the effective search-space is unlikely to be very large if a human being can so easily find such a program. That is of course background dependent. Never the less, wouldn't it be impressive if we could simply simulate the emergence and evolution of intelligent life in a simple computer program. Evolution we perhaps already can to some extent and I doubt emergence is very far either. What will their excuse be then?

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Most of mankind take themselves and life way too seriously in my opinion and I don't really like such people too much. Also, by the words of the late great comedian George Carlin, people are stupid, full of shit, and fucking nuts.

I have no absolute faith in anything, not even that the sun will rise tomorrow, it's just that it is very unlikely that I'm wrong about it based on my knowledge about physics and history. You make the best choice you can based on your limited facts. That is the best thing one can ever hope to do.

God is not a good model for any phenomena. It has no predictive power which would exceed simpler theories.

Mankind should plan ahead a bit more. Perhaps progress will be stopped due to shortsighted use of non-renewables. We might learn one day that we have wasted all resources on mostly unimportant and unproductive things like ipads etc. when we should have saved them for scientific research. Maybe the society should have regulated the use of non-renewables so that they last at least 100 generations of humans during which time they would have discovered the science needed to free themselves from scarcity, but now... perhaps one day we find our society collapsing when we simply run out of everything. Not to mention that we should have probably regulated procreation as well.

We are born, we live and we die. What is there to tell?

Your species is weird.

"There is no such thing as over analyzing. They are just doing it wrong."

Did you know that a spoonful of black hole would weigh more than planet earth? But depending on which black hole it was taken from it might also weigh less than equivalent amount of water.

"Confidence comes not from always being right but not fearing to be wrong."

One can to some extent perhaps conceive a spacetime where the Planck's constant is zero, but can one conceive no spacetime at all? I would claim the answer is no. You can never conceive absolute nothingness, it is incoherent concept to the human mind. We always tend to think space and time will go on forever, yet that conception is clearly incoherent and even contradicted by observations.

When asked if he knew the speed of sound, Einstein said he "didn't carry such information in my mind since it's readily available in books."

Human, I believe, in principle, is born perfect. Adding something to it, or removing something from it, only makes them less perfect. If we want to extend ourselves, we should do it in a way which retains the original.

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"I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of their own."

"People may forget what you said but they'll never forget how you made them feel."

"Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something." - Plato

"Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people." - Eleanor Roosevelt

"I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it."

"Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot." - Charlie Chaplin

"A little nonsense now and then is cherished by the wisest men."

"They just recite it everyday in an attempt to have any connection to the world since the real world is too painful and spotted where most people's wishes are resigned. Would we be happier to live life not remembering how many of the things we gave up hope on that we may have truly loved or going on to the very end of life continually recollecting all the things we didn't have the will or determination to see all the way through because of our own personal flaws and fears about what we have the potential to accomplish?"

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." - Leonardo da Vinci

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Everything is possible. That's why all talk is really only about probabilities. If one is unlucky enough, the world might just end unpredictably at any nanosecond without any particular reason. Collapse of false vacuum by tunneling perhaps. Scientists expect it to happen, perhaps 10 billion years from now, but nothing guarantees that it doesn't occur tomorrow.

We all have goals, some people just settle for less and some people never reach their goals. What is worth it and what is noble is a matter of opinion. Personally I'm not afraid of what people think of me, that is irrelevant. What I might be afraid of though, is that I might never get what I want. And yet to pretend that I don't want it, would be self-deception.

Due to practical reasons language is formed by those who use it and not by defining and planning bodies. To acknowledge this reality is important. Natural language is hopelessly imprecise anyway and it would be foolish to assume everyone understands or uses its words identically or coherently. The only way to use natural language with any precision is to engage in active feedback process and continuously define the words that are used in order to converge the information exchange process of the two parties. It is not a fallacy to appear to having been reasoned wrong, but a fallacy will be revealed if after several rounds of feedback the reasoning cannot be justified.

God is free to voice his opinion anytime he wishes and I would love to hear from god, but I'm not going to hold my breath and the reason is the same why I don't play the lottery.

I would be interested to know how a god would intend to demonstrate to me that it is a god.