What Are The
Chances?
What are the chances of you
being here today?
What are the odds against you ever
being born?
It’s not easy seeing, how you
might have come into being
The statistics are staggering,
the numbers mind-boggling
So let’s check there’s no
deception regarding your conception
Let’s not be defective, but
get some perspective
The first obstacle to your birth,
is the pre-existence of Earth
Which pre-supposes the creation
of the whole Universe,
The evolution of its galaxies and
solar systems and all of that gang
The planets and even life on this
world – all the way back to The Big Bang
The conditions had to be
right, there had to be sun-light
So that single-celled
organisms might, and primeval life able to fight
Its way out of the primordial
soup - indeed out of that gloop
Came all forms of life as we
know it
Natural selection of life, in
years measured over four billions
And humanoids spanned out in the
merest two millions
And every one of your
ancestors had to last until reproductive age
For a hundred and fifty
thousand generations in an unbroken lineage
And if each one had not
happened in the right combination
Each person would have been a
different creation
And so on, and so on, back to
beginning of time, so count yourself lucky
If you want to know how it’s
done
The odds are 400 trillion to
one
That’s four times ten to the
power of fourteen, that you might never have been
Which makes the odds on football
pools, the lottery and bingo look exceedingly keen
So just a single slip, a
connection that didn’t quite meet
And you’d have possibly been
your own sibling or cousin, which is quite sweet
Although you never really
liked them, which is quite neat
The next part of this string,
is the whole boy meets girl thing,
And the possibility of your specific
parents meeting at all
The chances of talking to each
other, dating and mating
The relationship developing,
having a ball
And having sex with a suitable
exchange of…. bodily fluids…
Did you know - a fertile female
has a hundred thousand eggs
And a fertile man produces twelve
trillion sperm
Over their respective lifetimes….that’s
quite a long term
And whilst those are figures are
relatively firm,
He’d have had to have been
very firm (don’t squirm)….on the nights they made love
Including Saturday nights,
after the pub,
For her to get in the club…
Now into the workings of
reproduction we’ll peek
For each egg and each sperm is
genetically unique
And you are the result of the fusion
of one egg with one sperm
One exact unique meeting and
fertilisation coming to term
And so was each of your parents,
and each of their parents -
That’s your grandparents -
going all the way back into history
It’s therein, that lies all of
the mystery…
Now if only one of these
combinations had been different you see
Or not happened, you wouldn’t
be here listening to me!
The chances against you
existing are greater than the number of particles in the universe
Which is a very, VERY big
number, and what is much worse,
Thinking about it could make
your head explode, which would be even worse
The mathematical pinnacle of a
sequence
The frequence of which is
almost infinitesimally small
It’s nothing short of a wonder
that you’ve made it here at all…
So the chances are basically
infinite… or maybe they’re zero
Which may mean that none of us
ought to exist, and here is the gist…
Perhaps we’re figments of our
own fertile imaginations
Just pigments in paint, a
permutation that’s faint
But, either way, it’s almost a
miracle
So you are something special,
or even a hero
And it means you’re unique,
almost a zero
You’re an “only”… doesn’t that
make you feel lonely?
Except for doppelgangers of
course
And triplets and twins…but I’m
not going there
In case it does all of our
heads in…
So what are the
chances, what are the odds?
So many forks in the road never
taken
Let’s hope that you’re
suitably shaken
So many alternative paths
Well – you do the maths!
On the other hand – and here is
the fun -
The fact that you’re here
shows we’re virtually done
The probability of your existence
is actually one hundred percent
Which in mathematical terms… is
equal to one
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