For most of the history of the human race, mankind could only dream what it would be like to fly above the clouds or have the contents of the world's libraries available to be read to us by artificial intelligence on instantaneous demand. Those achievements have changed the course of civilization. However, one thing we still cannot do is predict the outcome of a basketball tournament.

We are now in the second week of the annual NCAA "March Madness" basketball tournament, and already all of this year's 34 million brackets, 1 for every 10 people in the United States, tracked by NCAA, ESPN, CBS, Yahoo, USA Today, or X.com now have errors in their predictions. That's a lot of bad guesses.

You may have heard reporting that the odds of flipping a coin to determine all winners in the field of 64 basketball teams would result in a perfectly selected bracket 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 tries. Assuming that 34 million distinct brackets are submitted each year, that should produce a winner approximately once every 271,275,648,143 years. That's 20 times longer than the universe is old.

Of course, the outcome of NCAA tournament games is not truly random, and NCAA.com reports that the real odds of picking a perfect bracket are the much more feasible 1 in 120,200,000,000. (That's 3 fewer commas!) They then go on to calculate that if every American knew enough about college basketball to complete a competent bracket that was completely unlike everyone else's bracket, we should expect to get one perfect bracket in 366 years. By comparison, that seems almost reasonable.

It's incredibly unlikely anyone reading this will live to the year 2385, so we'll likely never know what it is like to live in a post-perfect bracket world. However, Michael Jon "Booster" Carter won't even be born until 2442, fifty-seven years after the perfect NCAA March Madness bracket. For a smart, athletic, good-looking kid living in a world like that, the sky's the limit. Even time travel will be possible!

As for the rest of us, like the cavemen of yesteryear, we can only look at the stars and imagine.

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