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The Survivability of Random Locations


How common are locations where you could survive?

Suppose someone offers to teleport you to a randomly selected location. Don't acccept that offer without making strict conditions, or you will almost certainly die horribly in a randomly selected location.

1) If a human was magically teleported to a randomly selected location in the universe, the odds would be gazillions to one that they would die almost instantly. The vast majority of the universe's volume is the vacuum of outer space. I have never calculated the proportion of the universe's volume which is within the biospheres of various habitable planets, but it is extremely and incredibly tiny.

2) It would be much safer for a human to be teleported to a rendomly chosen location at the planet Earth, or any planet known to be habitable for humans. However, the human would still have only a very, very, very small chance of surviving. The biosphere of Earth where life can survive is an extremely thin shell; the vast majority of the volume of Earth is densely packed rock beneath the biosphere.

3) It would be much safer for a human to be teleported to a randomly chosesn location within the biosphere of Earth, the part of Earth where various lifeforms live. But even in that case the human would probably die, since humans can not survive in most of the biosphere of Earth. The biosphere extends several kilometers or miles high into the atmosphere and several kilometers or miles deep beneath the oceans and deep within the rocks of Earth's crust.

4) It would be much safer for a human to be teleported to a randomly selected spot on the surface of the Earth. However, the majority of the surface of the planet Earth is ocean surface out of sight of land and too far for a human to swim to shore before drowning.

5) It would be much safer for a human to be teleported to a rendomly selected spot on the land surface of the Earth. However, large parts of the land surface of planet Earth are too hostile for a human to survive more than a few days or even hours without the right clothing and sufficient supplies of water and food and knowledge of which way to go to reach a more hospitable location.

And of course if someone offered to send you to an alternate or parellel universe where the laws of science were different, the odds of ending up in a habitable location would probably be even more infinitesimal than in our universe.

What does that have to do with Wizards of Waverly Place?

In the third season episode "Third Wheel", (April 30, 2010). Harper tells Alex Russo that Stephanie "Stevie" Nichols, a new girl at school, is a wizard like Alex. When they ask Stevie she admits it and demonstrates her magic by causing a portal to somewhere else to appear beneath the feet of a passing student who plunges into it.

Alex askes Stevie where she sent the boy, and Stevie says she doesn't know. Alex says that's the kind of irresponsible magic she approves of and she and Stevie bond with each other, making Harper fear that Stevie is a threat her friendship with Alex.

When the boy disappears into the portal beneath his feet, Harper says something like "Oh no! that was Jeremy from science. He was going to ask me to the dance next week." But she doesn't say or do anything else about Jeremy like asking the girl wizards to reverse the spell & bring jeremy back.

Stevie says she doesn't know where she sent Jeremy to, so she can't know whether it is safe or lethal for humans. But as said above, the odds are astronomically high that any randomly chosen location will be lethal to a human sent there.

Alex doesn't ask Stevie to return Jeremy to the school and doesn't try to bring Jeremy back herself.

Continued.

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"The Survivabilty of Random Locations" Continued:

Alex and Harper seem to consider Stevie as innocent as a typical kid despite her casual disposal of a schoolmate, and Harper becomes jealous of Alex and Stevie's growing friendship. Some fans consider the Alex-Harper and/or the Alex-Stevie relationship to be somewhat lesbian, and thus that there is a romantic triangle between Alex, Harber, and Stevie in "Third Wheel".

It is not until "the Good, the Bad, and the Alex", May 7, 2010, that something much less serious gets Stevie branded "evil" by the wizards in training. After defeating Stevie's "evil" scheme, which might actually be a good scheme, the protagonists talk and joke while the shattered pieces of Stevie's corpse lie on the floor around them, with no effort to use their vast magical powers to bring Stevie back to life.

The next and final scene in the episode could have shown Stevie brought back to life and in wizard prison, perhaps with lines criss crossing her face and hands where her pieces were reattached, but instead showed a totally unrelated joke.

As far as the canon of Wizards of Waverly Place goes, Stevie was killed and her corpse was mutilated, and there is no evidence whether or not those events were reversd.

In the fourth season episode "Ghost Roommate", October 14, 2011, Alex tries to locate someone lost for 60 years. When Alex says "I found him!", Harper wakes up and thinks it is Jeremy, and says that would be bad now that she has a new boyfriend.

So Harper apparently considered Jeremy her boyfriend, and yet was never seen trying to get the wizards to return Jeremy.

In "Wizards Unleashed", October 1, 2010, Alex negotiates with "wizbillys", hillbilly wizards, and offers them the Russo family portal to the Wizard World. But instead Aelx traps them in what she calls a void. A void in our universe would almost certainly be swiftly fatal to humans and wizards, while one in a different universe with different laws of nature would be even more likely to be lethal.

So the main characters in Wizards of Waverly Place seem to be indifferent to the deaths of both strangers and people they know and like such as Stevie (who Alex might have had a crush on) and Jeremy (who Harper apparently had a crush on).

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