What are the chances that you’re alive?

Valentine’s Day, Women’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s day..there’s a day celebrating all of your loved ones. Heck, people even go out and get a donut on National Donut Day! 🤣 Everyone wants to show their spouse/partner/friends/family/everyone else that they love and appreciate them. But how often do you stop and appreciate yourself? 🤔

Do you ever think of how you are a person? You are a human, with a soul and a conscience. You have blood rushing through your veins and you have a brain continuously sending signals to different parts of your body. You can think, you can sing, you can imagine, you can love. You are YOU. 🏆

Have you ever thought about how you came into being? Sure everyone knows about the birds 🐦 and the bees 🐝, but it starts from much before that!

Out of the almost 200 million women on this earth, your dad met YOUR mom. In his lifetime, let’s assume he would’ve met maybe 10,000 women. 👩👩👩 The odds that that your mom happened to be one of them is 1 in 20,000. They fell in love, and stayed together long enough to want to have a kid. The odds of that is 1 in 2,000. 💑

Your odds so far = 1 in 20,000 x 1 in 2000 = 1 in 40,000,000

A woman produces around 100,000 eggs in her lifetime. A man has around 4 trillion sperms during the years you could’ve been born. The odds that the exact egg and sperm which took to make you were the ones that combined, is 1 in 400,000,000,000,000,000 (4 quadrillion). 🤯

But it’s not that simple! What about the odds that your dad was born? Or that you mom was born? In fact, for you to have been born, every single one of your ancestors until the very first humans had to exist and live up to at least a reproductive age. 😱 But we can’t start at the humans! What about the monkeys that had to evolve into the first humans? What about the very first monkeys that had to exist for the aforementioned monkeys to come into being? 🐒 Rewind even more, and you reach the very first single celled organism that had to exist for the remaining chain of events to take place. Your existence is, in fact, the result of a 4 billion year long chain of events that took place. So now what are the odds? 😳

Odds = 1 in 10^45,000

Ok that’s HUGE. But take into account the chances of that particular egg and sperm meeting for all your ancestors, for almost 150,000 generations! So that’s 1 quadrillion multiplies by 1 quadrillion for 150,000 generations. 🤔   

Odds = 1 in 10^2,640,000

Now for the FINAL math, let’s take into account all these odds. 🙆

The Probability of You Existing = 1 in 10^2,640,000 x 10^2,640,000 x 40,000,000

                                                         = 1 in 10^2,685,000

That’s 1 in 10 followed by TWO MILLION SIX HUNDRED AND EIGHTY FIVE THOUSAND zeros. If you were to type down that number in a size 11, Times New Roman font, it would be 643 pages long. Yes, I checked. Yes, I can send you the document if you want proof. 😎

Bottom line is, the probability of you existing is basically zero. And yet, you exist. Now if that’s not a miracle, then what is? Loving your friends and family is great, but you owe it to yourself to love yourself first because you are a frikkin’ miracle, and no one can take that away from you! 💕

Sources
[1], [2], [3]

Written and Researched by Zeba Bashir.