Introduction: You Shouldn’t Be Here, But You Are
The odds of your existence aren’t just low; they’re so low, they make winning the lottery look like a safe bet. You are here because a cosmic chain of impossible events, from the birth of the universe to a random glance across a crowded room, somehow aligned perfectly. And yet, here you are, getting mad because the barista misspelled your name.
We live in a world of comfort and progress, yet we often find ourselves in a state of perpetual spiritual dissatisfaction. I’m guilty of it too. Sometimes I want to yell ‘Shut up and be grateful‘ and just walk away (don’t worry, I’m working on it). So, to remind myself and maybe you too, I wanted to write about the miracle of life. More specifically, I wanted to explore the thousands of small, perfect coincidences that had to happen for you to be born.
A Perfect Planet
Here’s a summary of the story of the universe. 13.8 billion years ago, the Big Bang happened. As a result, space, time, matter, and energy were compressed into a singularity, which then rapidly expanded. This expansion is still happening today. For you to be here, the universe had to form with the exact physical constants (such as gravity and electromagnetism) that allowed atoms and life to exist. 9 billion years after the Big Bang, the Sun and the Earth formed. The Earth had to form at the perfect distance from the Sun (what experts call the Goldilocks Zone), meaning Earth isn’t too hot or too cold.
Life on Earth wouldn’t be possible without variables like liquid water, a stable atmosphere, a magnetic field to shield life from solar radiation, and a moon to stabilize the planet’s tilt and seasons. If Earth were 5% closer or farther from the sun, complex life may not be possible. Another important event was the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. It had to hit at exactly the right time to pave the way for mammals to rise. You’ll see this theme again throughout this article: most events had to happen, but more importantly, they had to happen at exactly the right time.
The Chain of Life: Unbroken for 4 Billion Years
So first, let’s talk about the many things that had to align perfectly for you to be born. Life existed for around 4 billion years. At first, there were only single-celled organisms. Single-celled organisms (or unicellular organisms) are living beings with just one cell. Although humans are made of trillions of cells, these tiny life forms carry out all life functions (eating, moving, and reproducing) in a single cell. Multicellular life appeared 600 million years ago. These tiny, jelly-like creatures had no eyes, brains, or bones, yet they paved the way for plants, animals, and humans.
Modern homo sapiens appeared 300,000 years ago. The average human generation time is around 25 years, which means there have been 12,000 generations of humans to get to where you are right now. Every one of your ancestors had to survive, reproduce, and pass on their genes. In other words, had there been a broken link in the chain, you wouldn’t be here today. While you share 99.9% of your DNA with every other human, the remaining 0.1% is what makes you uniquely you.
Human Ancestry: 2 Parents x 4 Grandparents x …
Human ancestry is a fascinating topic. Each person has two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and so on. If you go back 30 generations (that’s around 900 years), you have over 1 billion direct ancestors. For you to be here, all of them had to meet, survive famine, disease, war, and fall in love, or at least procreate at the exact right moment. Like it or not, we’ll revisit that idea soon.
It’s worth bearing in mind that for the longest time, the world was a very hostile place. Now we take a lot of things for granted, but one of the most important ones (and the one we don’t appreciate enough) is the fact that our average life expectancy in the modern world is 73 years and rising. To put this in perspective, people in the 1900s had a life expectancy of 32 years.
The Odds of Your Parents Meeting
Had your mom dated someone else, you wouldn’t be here. Had your dad moved to a different town, you wouldn’t be here. And had one of your parents decided to stay friends instead of forming a family, you wouldn’t be here. I know nobody wants to think about this, but our existence is feeble in that regard. When you think about it, every little thing that happened until now led to this moment. Every missed bus. Every random party. Not to mention every time your parents nearly gave up on each other over pineapple on pizza. If one tiny thing were different, you wouldn’t exist.
Science fiction has been in love with “What if” moments forever. But while the stories tend to be elaborate (such as “What if Hitler had won WWII?”), the reality is that the world would be as different if your mom liked someone else at that random party some decades ago. Think about that next time you’re swiping right on Tinder.
Now let’s talk about everybody’s favorite topic of conversation: their parents having sex.
The Biology of Conception: One in 400 Quadrillion
Here’s some basic biology you might not remember from high school. Each ejaculation contains up to 500 million sperm. Only one sperm fertilizes the egg, and that specific sperm, combined with that specific egg, means you. Now here’s a fascinating question I’ve been thinking about forever, but never said out loud because I didn’t want people to think I was a weirdo. Would you look or be different had your parents conceived you a minute earlier or later? In short, yes, because a different sperm would have fertilized the egg, and that translates into a completely different person.
Women release one egg per month during ovulation, and that egg lives for 24 hours. This means the egg is available for fertilization during a small window. The egg carries half of your DNA. The other half comes from the one sperm (remember, one of 500 million) that wins the race to the egg and fertilizes it. While the egg has half of your DNA, the sperm is the one that drastically affects your appearance and biology.
Sperm swim at different speeds, so the race is chaotic. The sperm that fertilizes the egg determines half of your genetic makeup. Had a different sperm reached the egg, even by a few seconds, you’d have inherited different traits. Your eye color, height, face structure, and personality predispositions would have changed. You wouldn’t just look different; you’d be a completely different person.
All of this isn’t important because it means that your existence doesn’t just depend on millions of years of survival. Your existence depends on one microscopic race won by a single sperm. Think about a possible future where you were conceived slightly earlier or later. You might have the same name, but you’d be a completely different person. In other words, you’d be a remix and not the original.
Ali Binazir’s Math: A 1 in 10^2,685,000 Miracle
If your head’s not spinning with data at this point, here’s something else to consider. According to Dr. Ali Binazir, the odds of your parents meeting, mating, and producing you are about 1 in 10^2,685,000. That’s the number 1 followed by 2,685,000 zeros. Just for the sake of comparison, the number of grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth is 10^18, and the number of atoms in the observable universe is 10^80. Needless to say, your odds of existing are ridiculously small. It’s like winning a cosmic lottery not just once, but millions of times in a row.
Put another way, your existence is like winning the most impossible lottery, not once, but trillions upon trillions of times, until impossibility itself gave in and made you anyway. It’s almost embarrassing how miraculous your existence is. But it is. Stop blushing! What I mean is your existence is a miracle that defies math.
Here are more numbers to help you quantify the math we just discussed:
- Odds of your dad meeting your mom = 1 in 20,000
- Odds of them staying together = 1 in 2,000
- Odds of the right sperm meeting the right egg = 1 in 400 quadrillion
- Now multiply this for every generation for 4 billion years…
Source: Ali Binazir article on improbable existence
What This Means: Awe, Gratitude, Purpose
You’ve already won the most impossible lottery: the lottery of life. Even on bad days (even when the coffee’s cold, the boss is annoying, or the internet is slow), just remember: you’re a miracle. A statistical impossibility who got the ultimate ticket: existence.
Now I have a final question before you go: what are you going to do with it?