You know what, I think I overstated the claim when it comes to probabilistic resources in the universe. In the Earth's history is probably more correct. The estimates of prevalence of functional protein folds/domains go as low as 1 in 10^77.
The timescale analysis concluded that the chance of any organism finding a c=.50 target for sequences of modest length in the entire history of the earth would be less than 1 in 10^26. Therefore, a search would have any hope of success only if over a trillion trillion targets existed. This figure dramatically exceeds the number of protein families that have been identified in all of life.
When discussing probabilities like this I like to compare it to the number of atoms in the known universe, which is ~10^80, or between10^78 to 10^82. So 1 in 10^77 is almost comparable to picking one atom out of all the atoms in the known universe.
You know what, I think I overstated the claim when it comes to probabilistic resources in the universe. In the Earth's history is probably more correct. The estimates of prevalence of functional protein folds/domains go as low as 1 in 10^77.
When discussing probabilities like this I like to compare it to the number of atoms in the known universe, which is ~10^80, or between10^78 to 10^82. So 1 in 10^77 is almost comparable to picking one atom out of all the atoms in the known universe.