Your Likelihood

Ran across some "Friar candy" in this post that describes how likely it is for you -- yes, you -- to exist. Or me, for that matter, or anyone else. Dr. Ali Binazir, a quirky fellow affiliated with the Harvard School of Law, played around with some odds after hearing a presenter suggest that the probability that you exist as you at being one in four hundred trillion. If you like your strings of zeros, that is 1 in 400,000,000,000,000. Scientists write that 4×10¹⁴.

That got Dr. Binazir to thinking about a Buddhist story that he had heard about the same subject matter. The odds that you are here as you are the same as if there was one turtle swimming in the world's oceans and one life preserver tossed onto the waves and the turtle, in surfacing, poked its head through the life preserver on the first try. He decided to quantify that chance using actual figures for the surface area of the world's oceans, the size of the turtle's head and the size of a standard life preserver and an ability to do math that has escaped your humble correspondent since the alphanumeric collision referenced last week. That story, he said, put the odds of any one human being existing exactly as who and what they were as one in seven hundred trillion -- 1 in 700,000,000,000,000 or 7×10¹⁴, to use the formats from above.

Obviously a difference of 300 trillion is pretty big, unless you are a scientist or a Washington politician spending other people's money. But in terms of the scale at which we're working, it's not a huge difference. The one in 400 trillion figure doesn't represent a significantly greater likelihood that you exist over the one in 700 trillion. Either way, the chances that you would show up and be you are pretty remote. Of course, the chances that somebody would show up are not all that remote -- but we're talking about you, or me, or any one specific and unique individual.

Dr. Binazir was not finished. He wondered if those figures were anything like an accurate representation of the probability of a person's existence. So he looked at the main steps that had to take place in order for people to exist, made some reasonable assumptions about how they happened and then calculated the odds that they would happen in the precise way that made you. You can read his blog entry if you want to see what all of those were, but for this post I'll just mentioned that he covered the odds of your parents meeting each other, their parents meeting each other, the particular sperm and egg cells which grew into you being the ones that were fertilized, and things like that. He didn't get into things like life experiences, where you were born and so on, figuring there's not much of a way to quantify those.

After he had finished his math -- and perhaps smoked out his hard drive -- Dr. Binazir came up with the odds that you exist: 1 in 10^2,685,000. How big is that? Well, notice that the "hundred trillions" above have 14 zeros, which is what the little "14" raised up above the other line refers to. So the number Dr. Binazir reached is a one followed by more than two million zeros. How big is that number? Compare it to the number of atoms believed to exist in the universe, which is 10⁸⁰, or a one followed by only eighty zeros. Dr. Binazir compared it to the entire city of San Diego playing a game with trillion-sided dice and rolling the exact same number at the same time.

And if you were to somehow be able to add in those fuzzy factors like your life experiences and such, the odds that you would be you increase even more. Remember, these are not the odds that you would be someone. These are the odds that you would be you.

Dr. Binazir seems to come from a perspective much more invested in Eastern philosophies than my own traditional Christian theism. But he and I agree that figures such as this might prompt us to reflect on what had to happen in order for us to be here, and that to give that "what" its proper name, we are left with only one word: "Miracle."

Perhaps the season of the year in which we find ourselves suggests to you thoughts on the miracle of a particular Birth. Perhaps you are a person who accepts the story of that Birth as reasonably true. If so, I commend to you reflections on what it might mean about the character of the Being behind that Birth creating a world in which there are seven billion of those 1 in 10^2,685,000 chances walking around today. You might wish to use the word "love."

(H/T Think Christian)