The Astounding Improbable You

You are incredible. The chances that you exist and are reading this are astounding. You are a massive statement that says to the universe, "I get it, it's so unlikely I exist, but here I am!"

The improbability of your parents meeting, making you, and you surviving long enough to be here, right now is mind blowing enough. Then we factor in that your grandparents had the same improbability of meeting and having your two (biological) parents makes the brain tickle even more. And then back to your great-grandparents, and their parents, and back all the way to ... where it all started?

All this on a planet that is currently unique in being able to support what we call life, and therefore you. A planet that is part a universe that has to have the physics to create planets and stars from the oh so tight settings of it's own fundamental building blocks.

Seems it's something like 1 in 10 to the power of 2,685,000 ... that’s a 10 with 2,685,000 zeros after it.

And yet, here you are.

Amongst other equally improbable and astounding human folk you call your family, your friends, your work colleagues.

It's truly awe inspiring.

Research on awe suggests that it involves both a feeling of personal smallness and a sense of connectedness with something larger than the self. Awe-prone individuals–those who tend to have their minds blown more often than most–tend to define themselves as belonging to more universal categories (e.g., "an inhabitant of the earth").

(source: The Probability of Your Existence by Juliana Breines Ph.D.)

That's you ... I think you deserve to give yaself a hug, don't you?

Graphic source: What Are The Odds of You Existing At All? by Siobhan Harmer | big version (opens in new window)

You’re astonishing! is a fantastic article on this very subject and "Let me be clear that the emotion I am focusing on here is astonishment, and that the object of astonishment under discussion is the fact that one came to exist when one so easily might not have." is exactly the emotion I have:

That every living person has won the existence lottery might be a major motivator for one’s taking for granted the fact of one’s own existence. But the data set of 7 or 8 billion existing humans is, in the present context, too small a sample size. The proper comparison is not to those who share this planet with you, but to all those who might have been born instead of you, had the world gone a different way. All those who have ever lived are but an incomprehensibly tiny fraction of those possible persons who might have lived but never will.