Laughing in the Face of Impossible Odds

How 4 Billion Years of Defiance Have Prepared Us for This Moment

The situation? Grim. The odds? Hopeless. “Give up”, a voice in your head whispers.

“We will never build a better world. It is too hard. The politicians— too corrupt. The people— too divided. The power of the technocrats— absolute. You— a mere ant, meddling with forces too big for it to even comprehend. You will be crushed!

Give up. Don’t you see how foolish your task is?”

What do we say to this voice? How do we stop our courage from faltering in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds? Do we pray? Trust in a higher power? What if faith doesn’t come easily? What if you, like me, are too rational, too left-brained? Is there any hope for the faithless?

Maybe, just maybe. Consider the fact of your existence. The sheer mind-boggling impossibility of you sitting here reading these words. From out of the 4 trillion sperm and 100,000 eggs produced by your parents, you won the right to exist. What odds did you beat? 1 in 400 quadrillion. That is 4 followed by 00000000000000000.

Consider then the number of things that had to go right for you to even have a chance to win that genetic race. Your parents had to be born. They had to survive. They had to meet. They had to stay together.

Now, imagine that process repeating for all your humanoid ancestors stretching back 2 million years. 40,000 generations of them beating the same odds.

Can you fathom how absolutely, incredulously tiny the chance of all those things going right is? 1 in 10^{2.7 million}.¹ I can think of no adequate comparison that would make it possible to comprehend those odds.

Picture the world’s oceans. In this endless expanse, imagine a single turtle swimming somewhere in its depths. Now imagine, that you throw a single lifebuoy overboard anywhere in the ocean. The odds of you existing are akin to that solitary turtle popping its head through the buoy at the same moment.²

But let’s go further. Remember, the calculation above only accounts for your humanoid ancestors. Now extend it to the beginning of life to include the apes, the fish, and the first cells. Your existence is a thread thinner than a quantum string, stretching unbroken through 4 billion years of apocalypses.

Carry on this exercise till the beginning of the Universe. What are the odds that the Universe contains the conditions conducive to our existence? 1 in 10^{(10^123)}. That is 10 raised to the power of 10 followed by 122 zeros.³ The sheer absurdity of that number is beyond anything we can think of. If you were to write down all the zeros in 10¹²³, you would need a paper larger than the size of the observable Universe. Because the observable Universe, by comparison, has just 10⁸⁰ atoms.⁴

That is how low your chance of even being here is. And this voice talks about impossible odds? Ha.

You are the culmination of 4 billion years of unbroken defiance. A miracle made incarnate. You do not need faith. You have proof of a million victories snatched from the jaws of defeat. Proof that you can throw in the face of despair next time it comes knocking. It is an old foe that you have beaten a million times.

You, who have marched through the ice ages. You, who have battled with the mammoths. You, who were born in springs of sulfur hot enough to melt bones. You, who even the asteroids failed to vanquish. These probabilities of doom do not apply to you.

You feel the pain. Oh yes, you feel it deep in your bones. Some days, all you know is pain. This feeling that you can’t possibly go on. The grief and fear that seem to have made your body a permanent home. But why should this stop you after all the foes you have vanquished?

You, who have stared into the depths of abysses too numerous to count. You, who have passed the torch through unfathomable darkness. You, the child of apocalypses. You were not made to give up meekly in the face of these “challenges”. To go out with a whimper. You outlived the bubonic plague. You fought off invaders trying to erase your history and burn your homes. You have fallen more times than history remembers. But each time, you have risen— stronger, braver, wiser, harder.

It is an insult to even call these things challenges after what you have beaten. So no, you do not give in to despair. You fight. You fight as though your life depends on it. Because, by god, it does.

But as you fight, as the darkness gathers anew, you face a choice. Let fear turn you inward and divide you from your neighbours? Or to face it with love and courage and grow your understanding and compassion? To repeat the patterns of the past? Or show those who dare try to extinguish you that a better way is possible? To tear down the old world? Or channel your energy into building something new—to heal, to tell the truth, to find the others who defy the odds?

With each step you take, you choose the world you wish to live in. You do not know what the road entails, but you march on. For you remember that no matter its perils, you have already overcome worse.

Your head is bloodied and your brow is furrowed. But there is no going back, not for you. You see too clearly. You feel too deeply. You, the survivor of a million battles. You, who belong to the line of the unbroken. No, you do not know the meaning of the words impossible odds.

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1. This calculation is based on Dr. Ali Binazir’s widely cited estimate of the probability of any individual being born. His original post is now archived, but you can find a reference to his assumptions and numbers in this blog post: https://blog.adw.org/2018/08/probability-existing-unbelievably-low-yet-lets-look-numbers/

The exact figure depends on many assumptions, but no matter how conservatively you estimate it, the odds are astronomically low. Dr. Ali Binazir also provided the turtle analogy I use

2. A Reddit post offered another potentially useful comparison. Imagine 300,000 people (the population of Pittsburgh) getting together, each to roll a dice with one trillion sides. The probability of you being alive is the same as all 300,000 people rolling their die and each one landing on the same number—say 550,343,279,001. https://www.reddit.com/r/getdisciplined/comments/tym59x/the_luck_of_being_alive_makes_you_not_want_to/

3. The estimate of 1 in 10^(10^123) comes from Nobel prize winning physicist Sir Roger Penrose, who calculated the improbability of the universe starting in a low-entropy state compatible with life. His original paper can be found here: https://epaper.kek.jp/e06/PAPERS/THESPA01.PDF

4. Writing 10 zeros takes 10 characters. 1,000 zeros takes about one-third of a page. 100,000 zeros fills roughly 30 pages. To help visualize this exponential scale-up, I created a Google Doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NwlWzZyCKuq4JzNuc2ShbbHtWWh_Ujsp_rG528jTNOI/edit?usp=sharing