You are special
PROTECTED CONTENT
If you’re a current subscriber, log in below. If you would like to subscribe, please click the subscribe tab above.
Username and Password Help
Please enter your email and we will send you a password reset link.
Sean of the South
You are special. You are infinitely, unbelievably, once-in-a-septillion-years special. That’s right, I’m talking to you, one of the nine-point-two people reading this.
You might not realize your specialness. You might not believe you are unique. You might think I am full of a plentiful substance common to barnyards and hog pens. You might think you are merely ordinary. But you’re not. You, my friend, are a regular freak of statistics. This is a fact.
Right now, there are 7.8 billion humans on the planet. The total number of humans alive right now represents 7 percent of the total number of humans who have ever lived – which is 117 billion humans. All these people, past and present, have one thing in common.
They ain’t you.
Nobody has ever been you. Nobody ever will be you again. Nobody will ever have your specific list of traits, talents, and body odor.
This is not some weird new-age schtick. I am speaking mathematically, you are an isolated occurrence. You are an arithmetical rarity so improbable that statisticians still have not figured out how you happened.
Science tells us that the likelihood of you being born was nothing short of an impossibility. We’re talking about nanoscopic odds here.
To illustrate your uniqueness, I will use the illustration of a rock and a fish:
Imagine the entire globe covered in ocean. No land. Just water. Now imagine only one fish swimming in this ocean. Let’s call this fish “Angie” because Angie Broginez is the name of the saintly teacher who struggled unsuccessfully to teach me Algebra I.
Now let’s imagine that someone standing in a random spot on the globe throws a rock into this ocean. Got it?
Now, tell me, mathematically, what are the odds that this rock will land on Earth’s only fish?
I’ll tell you what the odds are: non-existent.
It can’t happen. It’s virtually impossible. Still, no matter how unlikely this rock-and-fish scenario is, the likelihood of “Angie” getting pinged by a rock is GREATER than the odds of your conception.
So whenever you start to wonder about yourself, just remember, your birth was a huge deal. In fact, it was downright inexplicable.
After all, your conception was not just a matter of your mom and dad getting together and slow-dancing. A lot of things had to happen first.
Your mom’s and dad’s ancestors had to live long enough to have them. In a world where roughly 3 million people die each day, what were the odds that ALL your parents’ ancestors – for 150,000 generations – lived to a reproductive age and made healthy babies who then ALL LIVED long enough to squirt out you?
I’ll tell you exactly what the odds are: 1 in 10 to the 45,000th power. Or, speaking in redneck terms: 1 in 10 with 45,000 zeros after it.
This is a number so large that it is greater than the number of particles in the known universe. A number so big, it would take several notebooks just to write it down correctly.
And that’s just the beginning of your impossibility. Namely, because ALL YOUR ANCESTORS had to match exactly the right sperm with precisely the right egg.
So what kind of odds are we looking at now? Well, it’s a bigger number than the last number. The odds of several hundred thousand generations of human beings matching their sperm and eggs perfectly, then having several billion successful births that eventually produced you are about 1 in 10 to the 2,640,000th power (about 1 quadrillion multiplied times 1 quadrillion).
Simply put, you are nature’s most infrequent phenomenon. You are not average, you are not business as usual, you are not just any old body. The day you were born was an event that defied chance; there were – literally – 400 quadrillion reasons why you should not have happened. But you did happen. And here you sit. Wasting your time reading this.
So have a happy birthday, Russ.
