The odds of you
The improbability of your existence, stacked from the Big Bang to the specific sperm and egg that became you.
1 min read
Start with a universe that permits life at all, then narrow: a stable galaxy, a habitable planet, life igniting once in four billion years, and an unbroken chain of ancestors — every one surviving long enough to reproduce, without a single break.
Then come the human-scale long shots. Your parents, out of everyone alive, meeting at all. And then the lottery of a single sperm and a single egg — you, and not any of the millions of siblings who could have taken your place.
One in ten to the what?
The physician Ali Binazir once multiplied these odds together and arrived at something like 1 in 10^2,685,000 — a number with more zeros than there are atoms in the observable universe. It is not a serious calculation, and it doesn't pretend to be.
The exact figure is theatre. What survives the theatre is the vertigo: every ancestor, every coincidence, every near-extinction your lineage slipped through, all had to land exactly as they did. Change one and someone else is reading this.
You are the winning ticket in a lottery so large the prize had to invent the word 'unlikely.'