“That you sit down, and you feel everything. And I cry in these moments. I have this urge of crying, but not crying for joy, not crying for sadness, no reason for crying — crying of being amazed for being alive.” – Paulo Coelho, author of many books including The Alchemist

2001 babyIt took some digging to find this, and I have absolutely no idea of the veracity of the numbers, but one guy calculated the probability of Earth forming in its present life-sustaining state to be less than 1 in 10282(million trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion), but let’s not bicker over a couple a few trillion trillion.

So there’s that.

The article above gets into some of the events that have had to happen to make life possible on our third rock from the sun, like:

  • At 93,000,000 miles, it’s just the right distance from the sun
  • Its molten core generates a magnetic fields protecting us from things called “solar coronal mass ejections” that could kill us, or at least fry our electric grid, then we’d kill each other over no wi-fi
  • Our moon creates life-sustaining tides
  • Oh, and Jupiter and Saturn? Their gravitation pull sucks in many a stray asteroid that could otherwise make us dinosaurs

Speaking of dinosaurs, this BBC article reminds us that it’s unlikely we’d be here if the dinosaurs were not wiped out by an asteroid 65 million years ago, or if some frozen comets didn’t deliver water to the planet 4 billion years ago, or if a smaller rogue planet passed on a cosmic slam dance with us, resulting in its bouncing off and becoming our moon…

So there you go. We have a life sustaining planet with a very photogenic moon for romance, but how did we get here, and more specifically, how did you get here?

Well, another guy, Ali Binazir works that out for us. Of course, there are some suppositions here too, but again, let’s not quibble over a few quadrillion. Here’s how Mr. Binazir arrives at the probability of that romantic moon resulting in you or me existing:

  • Probability of your parents meeting: 1 in 20,000
  • They actually talk and have a child: 1 in 2000. (Obviously they did more than talk, but you really don’t need that image, do you?)
  • Probability of the exact swimmer meeting your sperms better half egg needed to produce you: 1 in 400 quadrillion.

At this point, you have to ask yourself just one question: Do you feel lucky?

Of course before Mr. Sperm and Ms. Egg improbably met, all of your ancestors would have had to do their wild thing successfully. The probability of that: 1 in 1045,000.  Ah, but then again we have to do the right sperm/right egg thing for every ancestor in your lineage or you wouldn’t be you… And there’s a 1 in 102,640,000 chance of that. OK, you’re probably not doing math in your head right now, but when you do, the final tally for you existing is 1 in 102,685,000.  You know, ten to the two million, six-hundred and eighty-five thousandth power. Or as Mr. Binazir puts it, “That’s a ten followed by 2,685,000 zeroes.”  Yeah, pretty freakin’ remote.

So when you combine the odds of the planet existing to accommodate all the heroic sex that resulted in you winning the human lottery, you’ve got to be wondering if you’re really taking advantage of this near infinitely improbable gift you’ve been given.

I know I am.