What Are The Odds That You Exist?

This blog is about you. You reading this in the here and now. So let’s dig in about you.

The odds that your mom simply met your dad have been calculated at about 1 in 20,000. That they stayed together long enough to have you: 1 in 2,000. Your immediate existence, then, just from one generation, is now at 1 in 40,000,000. By comparison, the odds of you being hit by lightning are 1 in 500,000.

But that’s just your immediate now. Things are about to get really crazy. Because every single one of your ancestors, without fail, had to have lived long enough to have children and pass on their genes. A single break in that chain — death, not meeting, infertility, etc., and poof, you never existed. What are those odds? 1 in 10 to the 45,000th. A 10 with 45,000 zeroes after it. And the exact right sperm had to meet the exact right egg every time. Which now puts us at 1 in 10 to the 2,685,000th. I couldn’t type that many zeroes in my lifetime, by a long measure.

Let’s put that in comparison for a second. I just went for a walk in the early morning. The stars in the visible sky number around a couple of thousand. What about what makes up you? This is an excerpt from my forthcoming book Why We Suffer:

“Atoms that make you who you are: 10 to the 29th, or 10 followed by 28 zeroes. Ten octillion, a number too long for me to type out and too large for any human mind to conceptualize as individual dots. To quote Walt Whitman, in Song of Myself, ‘I am large, I contain multitudes.”

In fact, the number of atoms in the known universe are estimated to be about 10 to the 80th.

Here’s an example of how unlikely, then, that you are here today, provided by Dr. Ali Binazir in an article from Business Insider: Think of it like this. The probability of 2 million people getting together each with a trillion sided dice. To be clear, every single one of those people has a die that has a trillion sides. They all roll their respective dice at the same time, and every single one of the 2 million people comes up with the same exact number at the same time. Say, 555,343,279,001.

The odds that you exist and are reading this right now are basically zero. You shouldn’t be here. But you are, so please never think you haven’t persevered. That you are not resilient. You are the most resilient thing that has ever existed that we know of.

Mike Spivey 1/27/22

We are our own griefs. We are our own happinesses. We are our own remedies.