The Odds Of You Being Alive

here we are on this small Blue Rock maybe here or maybe here some even here waking up living our day-to-day lives and then going to sleep repeating this cycle till the day comes when a suddenly stops but have you ever taken a moment to truly contemplate the sheer improbability that you had a chance to experience this remarkable phenomenon called life imagine for a moment holding a die not with six sides but a billion the chances of landing on any specific number are obviously one in a billion now picture rolling that die a billion times and hoping it lands on the same number every single time sounds impossible right yet believe it or not the chances of that happening are actually greater than the odds of you being alive let's start all the way from the beginning with the creation of the universe this is by far the biggest mystery of all according to mainstream science approximately 13.8 billion years ago there was an infinite testimony small and Incredibly dense Point known as a singularity The Singularity held within it the entirety of matter energy and even the fabric of space-time itself The Singularity existing in a stay beyond our current comprehension began to rapidly expand this event which we call the big bang marked the start of the universe as we know it leading to the expansion and evolution of space time matter and the energy that continues to this day scientists have tried to explain this Cosmic event in my new detail yet the ultimate question remains unanswered what caused the big bang and what existed before the singularity many theorized that the Genesis lies in something Divine God perhaps yet this answer yields another perplexing query who created God conventional belief maintains that God resides beyond the Realms of time and space and has always somehow existed but how can that be you see whichever way you look at it it doesn't make any sense none of it does and the truth is no one really knows how it all began we find ourselves living in the universe that according to our best understanding shouldn't exist but somehow it does and the deeper you ponder about the Inception of the universe the more confusing it becomes now let's fast forward approximately 9 billion years after the supposed Big Bang during this time the planet we live on in Earth took shape it emerged from a cosmic dance of swelling gases and dust a series of fortuitous events allowed it to retain water develop an atmosphere and settle into a stable orbit in the Goldilocks zone where conditions were just right for life if Earth was a little closer to the Sun water the elixir of life would evaporate a little too far and it would freeze making Life as we know it impossible the precise alignment of conditions necessary to support life on this planet epitomizes another astonishing statistical improbability somehow a universe was born out of what seems like nothingness and within that vast expanse a planet form that could support light and on that very Planet a species emerged one capable of feeling thinking and pondering its own existence their species happens to be us humans but how did we even end up here different theories about our origin often equally captivating narratives of extraordinary chance whether you hold theistic beliefs subscribe to the theory of evolution or entertain completely different ideas it is indisputable that the emergence of humans required a series of Highly improbable nearly impossible events take for instance the prominent theory of abiogenesis particularly the primordial soup hypothesis according to this hypothesis the central building blocks of life such as amino acids nucleotides and other organic compounds spontaneously formed in the early oceans or shallow pools of Earth over time these simple organic molecules combined and gave rise to more intricate structures including self-replicating molecules ultimately leading to the emergence of the first living organisms over billions of years through careless iterations of mutation and natural selection life Diversified and grew more complex eventually our species Homo sapiens known as the wise men emerged however the truth is we still do not know precisely how or when the first organisms evolved yet 1 Thing Remains certain we all originated from the same place our biological fathers testes each one of us is the result of a specific egg and a specific sperm uniting just take a moment to contemplate it a woman is born with around one to two million undeveloped eggs while over a man's lifetime he will generate trillions of sperm during The crucial moment of fertilization amidst an immense sea of contenders you emerged as one among roughly 250 million sperm all vying for the same ultimate goal the chance to fertilize the egg and set in motion the potential for life if you ever feel down just remember you won the hardest race imaginable but let's go a step further and examine the genetic Lottery that took place during your conception each sperm and each egg carries a completely unique genetic code resulting from a process known as meiosis in which parental chromosomes are shuffled and divided to create sex cells Within a distinct set of 23 chromosomes this means that the number of potential combinations of chromosomes in each sperm or egg a human can produce is about 8.4 million when you multiply this number by itself since one sperm and one egg create a new individual you get a staggering 70 trillion different potential genetic combinations now think about your direct lineage your parents grandparents great grandparents and each generation that has passed each of them once upon a time was a single sperm that was successful in reaching the egg consider how many things had to go right for them to be alive our ancestors had to persist against the harshest conditions imaginable they navigated ice ages Dodge Predators survived disease endured famine and fought in careless Wars and battles each ancestor had to survive had to meet a specific partner and had to conceive at a precise moment to continue The Unbroken chain leading to your existence think of all the triumphs every failure every love every loss every accident everything that had to align perfectly for you to be alive right now all it would have taken is for one ancestor to falter for one link to break and you would not be here let's have a look at this infographic from visually that shows exactly how small the odds of you being alive actually are to start with the odds of your dad meeting your mum are roughly one in twenty thousand then this has to be multiplied by the odds of them talking dating and then staying together long enough to conceive children now take the probability of your mother's egg and your father's sperm having all the right DNA to make you and not a slightly different person for example like your sibling this equates to being 1 in 400 quadrillion and things get a lot crazier when you consider that those odds later happen every single Generation all the way back until you reach single-celled organisms or whatever was there at the beginning the probability of that happening is 10 followed by 2685 000 zeros for context this is what a thousand zeros looks like now imagine that number of zeros 2685 times over so basically the probability of you existing as you is pretty much zero or as close to zero as we can possibly conceive over the course of time there have been approximately a hundred billion people that have ever lived the number of people that could have lived but never will is astronomical to be alive is to win the greatest Lottery imaginable however we often take life for granted treating it as a routine rather than a miracle the magic of existence the extraordinary reality of being sentient beings in a vast Universe often slips from our Consciousness replaced with trivial concerns and preoccupations you see the sheen probability of our existence the birth of the universe the formation of a habitable planet the ever solution of life and our individual conception and birth is simply mind-blowing it really doesn't make any sense at all yet here we are as a lifelong learner myself I've always been on the lookout for resources that make learning fun and interactive and the sponsor of this video brilliant.org does exactly that they're the best platform I've found for learning math data science and computer science in an engaging and interactive way I recently finished their probability courses which journeyed from the fundamentals of conditional probability to the intricacies of exponential distribution the standout for me was the casino probability course where you break down the numbers to truly understand how much the odds till in the favor of the house however there's thousands of other lessons as well on a wide range of topics and they add new ones every single month what makes brilliant great is that they customize their content to match your skill level and interests they let you 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Channel: True Meaning

Views: 18,407

Keywords: the odds of being alive, being alive, Human Existence, Probability of Life, Life's Odds, Existence Odds, Reality of Existence, Life's Improbability, Life Against Odds, odds of life, what are the odds of being born, the chances of being born, the odds of existence, probability that you exist

Id: 5_MEUujbRF4

Length: 10min 9sec (609 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 29 2023