The Chances of You Being Born Are Far Lower Than You Think
Mar 25, 2021
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Sometimes life knocks you out with synchronicities that leave you thinking certain things are more probable than they really are. You meet a person randomly at your vacation only to meet them again a few years later in a different part of the world without sharing any contacts or making plans together. Or you end up marrying a person you shared a hospital with at the time of your birth. Justifiably, you start asking yourself what the odds are?You start roaming for answers, and all of a sudden you also learn that coconuts can be dangerous creatures. And so can be pianos or vending machines… You hear stories of people getting back their lost letter, sudden encounters of lovers, finding highly-valued oyster pearls or diamonds, or very rare clovers. ,. But how likely is it for things like this to happen? Let’s take a look.
Finding a Four-Leaf Clover
Who wouldn’t love to find this Irish lucky charm in the yard? For centuries this genetic rarity has been considered a herald of happiness, love, and good fortune, and you surely spent long days searching for it. And while some people reported being able to find dozens of them, like the 2008 world record holder that collected 160,000 four-leaf clovers, you, more often than not, left with empty hands. So what are the actual chances?
It has been calculated that the likelihood of finding a four-leaf clover is around 1 in 10,000. This will rise to 1 in 1,000,000 for a five-leaf clover. And you don’t even have to stop there. After decades of a dedicated search for a four-leaf clover, in 2020, one lady reported finding something even more precious - a six-leaf clover (yes, you read it right!) beating the odds in every way possible. Now, the question arises - should we start looking for a seven-leafed one.
Coconut Isn’t Real, and It Can’t Hurt You
Is this an exquisite meme material? Despite sounding more than funny, being hit by a coconut is a pretty painful thing, if not fatal. Consider that the average coconut is weighted about 3.08 lbs and dropping from a 35 m tall tree can reach 49.7 miles per hour of speed, packing more than a metric ton of force. Enough to eventually knock you out (dead). But how likely is it for this to happen?
In 1984 due to a study “Injuries Due to Falling Coconuts”, people were exaggerating concerns about the number of deaths caused by coconuts, only for this to gain momentum in 2002 after a study where George Burgess, Director of the University of Florida’s International Shark Attack File and a shark researcher said that “Falling coconuts kill 150 people worldwide each year, 15 times the number of fatalities attributable to sharks.” It went so far that the officials in Australia even removed the trees from the beaches proclaiming it as the “killer fruit”. However, in the end, these statistics showed awfully wrong. Actually, you are far, far more likely to win a jackpot playing a slot machine than to get hurt by this wonderfully nutrient fruit.
Being Struck by a Lightning
However, what really IS likely to happen is to be struck by lightning. It has been recognized as one of the main causes of weather-related fatalities. And this electrical discharge is a true hell of a natural force.
The overall odds per year are around 1 in 500.000, with regional, seasonal, and occupational factors making this number higher or lower. For example, in the USA, the southeastern states are at most risk, the casualties are highest during summer, and among people that work outside or engage in outdoor activities. More than a third of these deaths are among the farmers.
Being Visited by Aliens
One of the oldest questions in our Universe and one of the fundamental questions of science - Is there anybody out there? Or are we utterly alone in silence?
At first, we had the Drake Equation to help us understand the issue a bit better, but not to also provide us with the final answer. And it seems we are still far from making the final clear-cut judgment. However, last year, 2020, the group of scientists at the University of Nottingham suggested the new “cosmic evolution” calculation that says there are at least 36 intelligent civilizations only in our Milky Way. With 100 to 400 billion stars in the galaxy and roughly one exoplanet per star, this assumption seems highly logical. While other scientists propose opposite estimations, we can only continue to search hoping to get any signs of another intelligent life and habitable planets.
And yet, it seems like the odds of Alien existence are higher than we expected.
Your Birth IS a Miracle
We will end up at the beginning. The probability of being born.
Have you ever asked yourself - what are the chances of you being born as the person you are, in that shape and form? Taking how big the human population is, and how fast it is growing, it seems that you being born is equal to a simple fluke - roughly 1 in 400 trillion (or more).
Without you being born there is no ‘you’ able to experience the world, think about the probabilities, and read these words, to begin with. And compared to this, everything else seems trivial. It is far more likely you will meet one person multiple times accidentally in different parts of the world, get struck by a lightning, find a six-leaf clover, or die from a coconut than being born into this world. Consider yourself lucky.
Tags: English