Some things in life are possible. Others? Not even close.
Think about winning the lottery. Slim odds, but it happens. Now consider the Moon crashing into Earth next week. Zero percent chance. No debate. No miracle can change it. It’s like trying to jump to the Moon with a running start. Physics doesn’t care about your effort.
The world runs on rules. Some are flexible—like the weather. Others are unbreakable—like gravity. No amount of wishing, planning, or sheer luck will make certain things happen. Yet, we really love to imagine wild possibilities. What if time travel could rewrite history? What if a monkey actually typed out Shakespeare?
It’s fun to wonder. But when you add math, science, and logic, reality kicks in. Some things are just never going to happen. Ever!
This list explores five events that have a 0% chance of occurring. No loopholes. No hidden possibilities. Just cold, hard facts that prove these things are as impossible as dividing by zero.
And you may ask – why even making a list of things that could never happen, or have (almost) zero chance of happening.
Well, because it is amusing and curious, and those are the things we like the most here at CuriousMatrix.com.
So let’s begin…
1. A Typing Monkey Writing a Shakespeare Play
You may have heard the theory: if you give an infinite number of monkeys typewriters, one will eventually write Hamlet.
Sounds possible, right? But it’s not. At least, not in any practical sense.
The idea comes from probability theory. If something has a nonzero chance of happening, then with enough attempts, it should occur eventually. But in reality, this event is so improbable that “eventually” might as well mean never.
Let’s do the math. A keyboard has about 50 usable keys (letters, spaces, punctuation). If Hamlet has 130,000 characters, then the odds of typing it correctly in one go are:
1 in 50^130,000
That number is so huge it’s beyond human comprehension. How beyond?
Well, the number 50^130,000 has 220,867 digits. That means it would take an entire book just to write out this number on paper (or in Word document). Namely, if a standard book page fits around 2,000 digits, it would take 111 pages to write out the entire number.
Interesting, huh?
For context, the estimated number of atoms in the observable universe is around 10^80—a tiny fraction compared to the number of possible key combinations.
Even if a monkey typed at 5 keystrokes per second, continuously for the age of the universe (about 13.8 billion years, or 4.35 × 10^17 seconds), it wouldn’t even scratch the surface of meaningful text. Even if every atom in the universe became a typing monkey, the result would still be gibberish.
However, there have been real-world experiments.
Real-World Experiments
People have tested this. In 2003, a team from the University of Plymouth put a keyboard in a monkey enclosure. The result? The monkeys bashed it randomly, typed mostly the letter “S,” and eventually urinated on it.
Not exactly literary genius.
On a larger scale, computer simulations have attempted this as well. One program ran 2,737 trillion keystrokes—yet failed to produce even a single complete sentence from Shakespeare.
The longest correct sequence? 24 characters.
But, what if time were truly infinite? Could it happen then?
Yes—but only in the strictest mathematical sense. If a monkey truly had infinite time, then eventually, every possible sequence would occur.
The problem? It still wouldn’t be practical. Even with an infinite timeline, the likelihood of a Shakespeare play emerging in a human-scale amount of time remains functionally zero.
2. The Moon Crashing Into Earth Next Week
The Moon orbits Earth. That’s what it does. It’s been doing it for billions of years. And it’s not stopping anytime soon. The laws of physics won’t allow it (and many other things but let’s not get too geeky here).
For the Moon to come crashing down, something catastrophic would have to happen. Maybe a rogue planet slams into it. Or aliens attach a giant rocket to its surface and push it toward us. Neither of these scenarios is even remotely possible.
Earth’s gravity keeps the Moon in check, and its orbit is stable. The Moon is actually moving away from us at about 1.5 inches per year. That means it’s less likely to collide with Earth as time goes on, not more.
The Moon’s average distance from Earth is 238,855 miles (384,400 km). For it to hit us in one week, it would need to move at least 34,122 miles per day. That’s 1,421 miles per hour, or 2,285 km/h. The Moon doesn’t even move very fast naturally—it orbits Earth at about 2,288 miles per hour, but in a stable path, not straight at us.
For comparison, even if a massive asteroid struck the Moon with enough force to knock it toward Earth, it would take years, not days, for a collision to occur.
The force required to break the Moon’s orbit is beyond anything that could currently happen.
Interesting fact: If the Moon vanished, nights would be much darker. Tides would weaken. The Earth's tilt might shift, leading to wild climate swings. Without its stabilizing effect, Earth’s axial tilt could swing by as much as 20 degrees, drastically altering seasons over time.
3. A Random Person Becoming President Overnight
A regular person waking up one morning to find they are the leader of a country? Not happening.
Governments don’t work like that. You need elections, votes, and a campaign. Even in a coup, power doesn’t just land in the lap of some guy working at a gas station.
The idea is fun, though. Imagine waking up to find your face on the news, reporters outside your house, and a briefing waiting on your desk. But laws exist for a reason. Even in chaos, structure remains.
For example, in the U.S., the odds of a completely unknown person randomly becoming president are essentially zero. Even if you included every American over 35 who meets the citizenship requirements (about 140 million people), the chance of one of them becoming president without an election is 1 in 140 million, or 0.0000000071%.
That’s assuming all legal barriers vanished, which they won’t.
Even if someone had a 1% chance of winning each required election, through primaries and the general election, the cumulative odds would be a fraction of a fraction, shrinking to near impossibility.
Interesting fact: The U.S. Constitution has a clear line of succession. If the president and vice president were both unable to serve, a chain of command determines the next leader. A gas station worker is not on that list. The Speaker of the House and the President pro tempore of the Senate are next in line.
4. Time Traveling to Change the Past
People love the idea of fixing mistakes. What if you could go back and undo a bad decision?
Science says no. Even if time travel were possible, going back to change the past wouldn’t work. If you altered an event, it would ripple forward, likely preventing you from ever traveling back in the first place.
It’s called the grandfather paradox.
Even if paradoxes weren’t an issue, physics presents another problem. Time travel would require bending space-time in ways that no known energy source could achieve.
Scientists theorize about wormholes and quantum mechanics, but nothing solid exists.
Let’s say you wanted to build a time machine. To bend space-time enough for backward travel, you’d need exotic matter with negative mass. No such thing has been found. The energy required would be staggering—likely on the order of the entire energy output of a star. Even if you could harness all the energy from the Sun (which outputs 3.8 × 10^26 watts per second), it wouldn’t be enough to punch through time.
Interesting fact: Some physicists believe time travel to the future is possible. Just not the past. The faster you move, the slower time passes for you. If you traveled near the speed of light (186,282 miles per second), time for you would slow dramatically compared to people on Earth. This is Einstein’s theory of relativity in action.
5. An Immortal Human
We humans fear death. Well, certainly most of us. But living forever? Most likely not going to happen. Any by ‘most likely’ we mean – almost zero chance.
The body breaks down over time. Cells age. DNA accumulates damage. Even with medical advances, true immortality is beyond reach. At best, we might extend life to perhaps 200 or 300 years, but the human machine wasn’t built to run forever.
Even if science completely solved aging, something else would get you. Accidents. Disease. The universe itself. Stars die. Planets change. Eventually, nothing survives.
Consider cell division. Every time a cell replicates, its telomeres (protective caps on DNA) shorten. Humans have about 37 trillion cells, and most can only divide 50-70 times before they stop functioning.
Even if gene editing extended that limit, external threats would persist.
That is, of course, assuming we don’t digitize ourselves and upload our consciousness somewhere. But even in that case, whatever holds that consciousness in the digital world could eventually cease to exist.
And at the end of the day, are you truly alive—or immortal—if your consciousness exists only in a digital world as part of some kind of simulation?
Interesting fact: The longest-lived human on record, Jeanne Calment, lived to 122. Despite claims of secret anti-aging methods, she simply had good genes and a healthy lifestyle.
