‘Belief creates the actual fact.’ –William James
Had my parents not happened to meet when they did, and happened to conceive at the moment they did, with a specific pair of egg and sperm, I wouldn’t be here. (…)
I recently came across a lovely (if statistically questionable) visual demonstration. (…) It incorporates probabilities ranging from our parents’ first encounter to our unbroken line of ancestors to the emergence of the first single celled organism, concluding with the following analogy:
The probability that we as unique individuals came to be is equivalent to “the probability of 2 million people getting together each to play a game of dice with trillion-sided dice. They each roll the dice, and they all come up with the exact same number - for example, 550, 343, 279, 001. The odds that you exist at all are basically zero.”
