Probability of your existence

Probability
of One’s
Existence

TED Talk
Mel Robbins mentioned at TEDx San Francisco, that scientists calculate the probability of your
existing as you, today, at about one in 400 trillion (4×1014).
Dr Ali Binazir was in attendance and took the calculation further.
Dr. Binazir is an author and personal change specialist who studied at Harvard, received a medical degree from the University of
California, and studied philosophy at Cambridge University.

Probability Of Parents Meeting
If they met one new person of the opposite sex every day from age 15 to 40, that would be about 10,000 people.
Let’s confine the pool of possible people they could meet to 1/10 of the world’s population twenty years go (one tenth of 4
billion = 400 million) so it considers not just the population of the US but that of the places they could have visited.
Half of those people, or 200 million, will be of the opposite sex.
So let’s say the probability of your parents meeting, ever, is 10,000 divided by 200 million:
104/2×108= 2×10-4, or one in 20,000.
Probability of boy meeting girl:
1 in 20,000

Probability Of Parents Meeting
Now let’s say the chances of them actually talking to one another is one in 10.
And the chances of that turning into another meeting is about one in 10 also.
And the chances of that turning into a long-term relationship is also one in 10.
And the chances of that lasting long enough to result in offspring is one in 2.
So the probability of your parents’ chance meeting resulting in kids is about 1 in 2000.
Probability parents’ chance meeting resulting in kids :
1 in 2000
Combined probability is already around
1 in 40 million

Probability Of Conceiving
A particular individual is the result of the fusion of one particular egg with one particular sperm.
A fertile woman has 100,000 viable eggs on average. A man will produce about 12 trillion sperm over the course of his
reproductive lifetime.
Let’s say a third of those (4 trillion) are relevant to our calculation, since the sperm created after your mom hits menopause don’t
count.
So the probability of that one sperm with half your name on it hitting that one egg with the other half of your name on it is
1/(100,000)(4 trillion)= 1/(105)(4×1012)= 1 in 4 x 1017, or one in 400 quadrillion.
Probability of right sperm meeting right egg:
1 in 400 quadrillion

Probability Of The Chain Of Events
Because the existence of you here now on planet earth presupposes another supremely unlikely and utterly undeniable chain of
events. Namely, that every one of your ancestors lived to reproductive age – going all the way back not just to the first Homo
sapiens, first Homo erectus and Homo habilis, but all the way back to the first single-celled organism.
You are a representative of an unbroken lineage of life going back 4 billion years.
Let’s not get carried away here; we’ll just deal with the human lineage. Say humans or humanoids have been around for about 3
million years, and that a generation is about 20 years. That’s 150,000 generations. Say that over the course of all human
existence, the likelihood of any one human offspring to survive childhood and live to reproductive age and have at least one kid is
50:50 – 1 in 2. Then what would be the chance of your particular lineage to have remained unbroken for 150,000 generations?
Well then, that would be one in 2150,000 , which is about 1 in 1045,000– a number so staggeringly large that my head hurts just
writing it down. That number is not just larger than all of the particles in the universe – it’s larger than all the particles in the
universe if each particle were itself a universe.
Probability of every one of your ancestors reproducing successfully:
1 in 1045,000

But let’s think about this some more. Remember the sperm-meeting-egg argument for the creation of you, since each gamete is
unique? Well, the right sperm also had to meet the right egg to create your grandparents. Otherwise they’d be different people,
and so would their children, who would then have had children who were similar to you but not quite you. This is also true of
your grandparents’ parents, and their grandparents, and so on till the beginning of time. If even once the wrong sperm met the
wrong egg, you would not be sitting here noodling online reading fascinating articles like this one. It would be your cousin
Jethro, and you never really liked him anyway.
That means in every step of your lineage, the probability of the right sperm meeting the right egg such that the exact right
ancestor would be created that would end up creating you is one in 1200 trillion, which we’ll round down to 1000 trillion, or one
quadrillion.
So now we must account for that for 150,000 generations by raising 400 quadrillion to the 150,000th power:
[4×1017]150,000 ≈ 102,640,000
To get the final answer, technically we need to multiply that by the 1045,000 , 2000 and 20,000 up there, but those numbers are so
shrimpy in comparison that it almost doesn’t matter. For the sake of completeness:
(102,640,000)(1045,000)(2000)(20,000) = 4x 102,685,007 ≈ 102,685,000

Probability of your existing at all: 1 in 102,685,000
1 in 102,685,000

Buddhists Analogy“Imagine there was one life preserver thrown somewhere in some ocean and there is exactly one turtle in all of these oceans,
swimming underwater somewhere. The probability that you came about and exist today is the same as that turtle sticking its
head out of the water—in the middle of that life preserver. On one try.”
The probability of one turtle sticking its head out of the one life preserver we toss out somewhere in the ocean. That’s a pretty
straightforward calculation.
According to WolframAlpha, the total area of oceans in the world is 3.409×108 square kilometers, or 340,900,000 km2 (131.6
million square miles, for those benighted souls who still cling to user-hostile British measures). Let’s say a life preserver’s hole is
about 80cm in diameter, which would make the area inside
3.14(0.4)2=0.5024 m2
which we will conveniently round to 0.5 square meters. If one square kilometer is a million square meters, then the probability
of Mr Turtle sticking his head out of that life preserver is simply the area inside the life preserver divided by the total area of all
oceans, or
0.5m2/3.409×108x106m2 = 1.47 x 10-15
or one in 6.82×1014, or about 1 in 700 trillion

Are You Totally Improbable Or Totally Inevitable?
https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/11/18/142513598/are-you-totally-improbable-or-totally-inevitable
Author and blogger Dr. Ali Binazir did the calculations last spring and decided that the chances of anyone existing are one in
102,685,000. In other words, as this infographic figures it, you are totally improbable.
Of course, there are poets who argue exactly the opposite: that each of us is fated to exist, that there is a plan, and that all of us
are expected.
The Nobel Prize winning poet Wislawa Szymborska once wrote about two lovers who liked to think they'd met entirely by
chance, but no, she says, there was nothing chancy about it.

The Complete Picture
1. Physical
2. Geophysical
3. Biochemical
4. Biosocial

• the creation of this exact planet with the exact extinction history that it's had,
• the formation of stars and galaxies in the Milky Way to create the environment in which Earth formed,
• the creation of the original, initial density conditions of the Universe that make it possible for gravity to create us,
• the realization of the laws of nature that they would be exactly sufficient to create us,
• and that our Universe would have come to exist out of the great abyss of nothingness that came before
• The formation of the simplest known cell from molecules, energy, and random processes is a very complex event. Some of the
requirements are:
• formation of amino acids from basic elements
• combining the amino acids of only the L-configuration and not the D-configuration (the racemization problem)
• formation of long sequences of amino acids in the correct order to form proteins
• large numbers of chemical bonds to form DNA and RNA
• formation of the remaining parts of the cell
• the mutations and meiosis crossovers in the DNA of each of your ancestors,
• the survival of every one of them to reproductive age,
• the finding of the particular mate needed to give rise to the next generation of your particular ancestors,

The Big Bang
The Creator's pin has to find a tiny box, just 1 part in 1010
123
of the entire phase-space volume,
in order to create a universe with as special a Big Bang as that we actually find.
Penrose, Roger. "The Road To Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe." London:Vintage Books, 2005. p.730. Print

Geophysical

Earth May Be a
1-in-700-Quintillion
Kind of Place
http://www.apologeticspress.org/APContent.aspx?category=9&article=3726

Earth May Be a
1-in-700-Quintillion
Kind of Place
Zackrisson found that Earth appears to have been dealt a fairly lucky hand. In a galaxy like the Milky Way, for example, most of
the planets Zackrisson’s model generated looked very different than Earth — they were larger, older and very unlikely to support
life.
The study can be found on the preprint server arXiv, and has been submitted to The Astrophysical Journal.
“It’s certainly the case that there are a lot of uncertainties in a calculation like this. Our
knowledge of all of these pieces is imperfect,” co-author Andrew Benson told Scientific American. "It was only
recently that we even had enough exoplanet data to make a model of this kind possible.”

Exoplanet Census Suggests
Earth Is Special after All
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exoplanet-census-suggests-earth-is-special-after-all/

Calculating The Odds Of Life Between The Big Bang And The Final Fade
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/08/calculating-the-odds-of-life-between-the-big-bang-and-the-final-fade/
“If you ask, ‘When is life most likely to emerge?’ you might naively say, ‘Now,’” says lead author Avi Loeb of the Harvard-
Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). “But we find that the chance of life grows much higher in the
distant future.”
• Life as we know it first became possible about 30 million years after the Big Bang, when the first stars seeded the cosmos with
the necessary elements like carbon and oxygen.
• Life will end 10 trillion years from now when the last stars fade away and die.
• Loeb and his colleagues considered the relative likelihood of life between those two boundaries.

Calculating The Odds Of Life Between The Big Bang And The Final Fade
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/08/calculating-the-odds-of-life-between-the-big-bang-and-the-final-fade/
The dominant factor proved to be the lifetimes of stars. The higher a star’s mass, the shorter its life. Stars larger than about three
times our sun’s mass will expire before life has a chance to evolve. Conversely, the smallest stars weigh less than 10 percent as
much as the sun. They will glow for 10 trillion years, giving life ample time to emerge on any planets they host.
As a result, the probability of life grows over time.
In fact, chances of life are 1,000 times
higher in the distant future than now.
“So then you may ask, why aren’t we living in the future next to a low-mass star?” says Loeb.
“One possibility is we’re premature. Another possibility is that the environment around a low-mass star is
hazardous to life.”

Biochemical

Probability of One’s Existence
Evolutionist Harold Morowitz of Yale, and currently professor of biology and natural philosophy at George Mason University,
estimated the probability of the formation of the smallest and simplest living organism to be
1 in 10340,000,000
.
Source - Morowitz, Harold J. (1970), Entropy for Biologists (New York: Academic Press). p. 99
Evolutionist Carl Sagan made his own estimation of the chance that life could evolve on any given single planet:
1 in 102,000,000,000
Source - Communications with Extra-terrestrial Intelligence (Boston, MA: MIT Press).1973, p. 46)

Formation Of Amino Acids From Basic Elements
https://answersingenesis.org/evidence-against-evolution/probability/applying-probabilities-to-evolution/
Considering only the racemization aspect of 19 of the 20 amino acids, this process would require about
(400 x 19/20) x 124 = 47,120 successive selections each with probability ½.
This probability is approximately .547,120= 10-14,184
This statistic is only an estimate of the selections necessary to have the right amino acids in the right form (L) to form these 124
proteins and does not take into account the order of amino acids for the proper protein formation or other aspects of cell
formation.

The Odds Of Your Unlikely Existence
Were Not Infinitely Small
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/05/16/the-odds-of-your-unlikely-existence-were-not-infinitely-small/#6cd2281a40b0

In order for you to exist, a great many unlikely events needed to unfold in exactly the way that they did. The exact sperm cell and
egg cell needed to meet to create you with the DNA sequence that encoded you, and brought you into existence; a one-in-250
million chance for a sperm cell alone. That needed to happen each time in an unbroken string for millions of generations of your
ancestors, going back to well before they were human beings or even hominids of any type. Other unlikely events needed to
occur as well:

Yet there's one thing we can be sure of in this entire series of unlikely events, occurring one after the other: nothing that
occurred at any point had an infinitesimal likelihood. Instead, every single event, including:
• the mutations and meiosis crossovers in the DNA of each of your ancestors,
• the survival of every one of them to reproductive age,
• the finding of the particular mate needed to give rise to the next generation of your particular ancestors,
• the creation of this exact planet with the exact extinction history that it's had,
• the formation of stars and galaxies in the Milky Way to create the environment in which Earth formed,
• the creation of the original, initial density conditions of the Universe that make it possible for gravity to create us,
• the realization of the laws of nature that they would be exactly sufficient to create us,
• and that our Universe would have come to exist out of the great abyss of nothingness that came before,
must have had finite odds of occurring. Even the emergence of our Universe from the Multiverse couldn't have had an infinitely
small probability.

With every measurement we make, we can be sure that the outcome of our experiment, however unlikely, still had a finite, non-
zero probability of occurring.
So the next time something unlikely happens, or you realize that something very unlikely must have already occurred, remember
that no matter how unlikely it is, the odds of it happening weren't infinitely small. Its existence, just like our existence, already
disproves that possibility!

The Myth of Time
https://answersingenesis.org/evidence-against-evolution/probability/applying-probabilities-to-evolution/
One of the biggest myths put over on the public by Carl Sagan in his Cosmos television series was the effect time has on the
occurrence of evolutionary processes. People were so enchanted with his pronunciation of “billions and billions” that time took
on a god-like quality. In one of the latter episodes dealing with the formation of life on earth we were treated to Buddhist
philosophy, eastern religious music, and cartoon-like animations of life forms morphing into higher and higher forms.
The prominent evolutionist, George Wald, stated
“Time is in fact the hero of the plot. The time with which we
have to deal is of the order of two billion years. What we
regard as impossible on the basis of human experience is
meaningless here. Given so much time the ‘impossible’
becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable
virtually certain. One has only to wait: time itself performs
the miracles”
Wald, George. 1955. The Physics and Chemistry of Life, p. 12. Chicago, Illinois: Simon and Schuster.

Multiverse
https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/what-is-the-multiverse-and-why-do-we-think-it-exists-728bc534496e
“This means that our observable Universe, as magnificent
and large as it is, is only a tiny fraction of just one Universe
in our vast Multiverse, whose true size and scope is not only
unknown to us, but potentially unknowable. We have no ideas
at the present time how to gain information about something
that leaves no imprint or information in our observable
Universe, and therefore we don’t know how to learn about it.
So, at present for the Multiverse, all we have are
possibilities, and some wild speculations.”
Ethan Siegel
American theoretical astrophysicist and science writer
Professor at Lewis & Clark College

Ayat
َ‫ن‬ ‫ا‬َ‫ي‬ْ‫ن‬ُّ‫د‬‫ال‬ ‫ا‬َ‫ن‬ُ‫ت‬‫ا‬َ‫ي‬َ‫ح‬ ‫ا‬‫َّل‬ِ‫إ‬ َ‫ي‬ِ‫ه‬ ‫ا‬َ‫م‬ ‫وا‬ُ‫ل‬‫ا‬َ‫ق‬َ‫و‬ُ‫ك‬ِ‫ل‬ْ‫ه‬ُ‫ي‬ ‫ا‬َ‫م‬َ‫و‬ ‫ا‬َ‫ي‬ْ‫ح‬َ‫ن‬َ‫و‬ ُ‫وت‬ُ‫م‬‫ا‬َ‫ن‬
ْ‫ل‬ِ‫ع‬ ْ‫ن‬ِ‫م‬ َ‫ك‬ِ‫ل‬َٰ‫ذ‬ِ‫ب‬ ‫م‬ُ‫ه‬َ‫ل‬ ‫ا‬َ‫م‬َ‫و‬ ۚ ُ‫ر‬ْ‫ه‬‫ا‬‫د‬‫ال‬ ‫ا‬‫َّل‬ِ‫إ‬َ‫ون‬ُّ‫ن‬َُُ‫ي‬ ‫ا‬‫َّل‬ِ‫إ‬ ْ‫م‬ُ‫ه‬ ْ‫ن‬ِ‫إ‬ ٍ ‫م‬
And they say: "There is nothing but our life of this world, we die and
we live and nothing destroys us except Ad-Dahr (time). And they have
no knowledge of it: they only conjecture.
‫سمجه‬ ‫باوجود‬ ‫نے‬ ‫هللا‬ ‫اور‬ ‫گيا‬ ‫بن‬ ‫بندہ‬ ‫کا‬ ‫خواہش‬ ‫اپنی‬ ‫جو‬ ‫ديکها‬ ‫بهی‬ ‫کو‬ ‫اس‬ ‫نے‬ ‫آپ‬ ‫بهال‬
‫پر‬ ‫آنکهوں‬ ‫کی‬ ‫اس‬ ‫اور‬ ‫دی‬ ‫کر‬ ‫مہر‬ ‫پر‬ ‫دل‬ ‫اور‬ ‫کان‬ ‫کے‬ ‫اس‬ ‫اور‬ ‫ديا‬ ‫کر‬ ‫گمراہ‬ ‫اسے‬ ‫کے‬
‫نہيں‬ ‫کيوں‬ ‫تم‬ ‫پهر‬ ‫ہے‬ ‫سکتا‬ ‫کر‬ ‫ہدايت‬ ‫کون‬ ‫اسے‬ ‫بعد‬ ‫کے‬ ‫هللا‬ ‫پهر‬ ‫ديا‬ ‫ڈال‬ ‫پردہ‬‫سمجهتے‬
Sura Al-Jaathiya 45 Ayat 24

Ayat
َ‫أ‬ ٍ ‫ة‬َ‫ر‬َ‫ج‬َ‫ش‬ ‫ن‬ِ‫م‬ ِ‫ض‬ْ‫ر‬َ ْ‫اْل‬ ‫ي‬ِ‫ف‬ ‫ا‬َ‫م‬‫ا‬‫ن‬َ‫أ‬ ْ‫و‬َ‫ل‬َ‫و‬ِ‫م‬ ُ‫ہ‬ُّ‫د‬ُ‫م‬َ‫ي‬ ُ‫ر‬ْ‫ح‬َ‫ب‬ْ‫ل‬‫ا‬َ‫و‬ ٌ‫م‬ َ‫ال‬ْ‫ق‬‫ن‬
َ‫ك‬ ْ‫َت‬‫د‬ِ‫ف‬َ‫ن‬ ‫ا‬‫ا‬‫م‬ ٍ ‫ر‬ُ‫ح‬ْ‫ب‬َ‫أ‬ ُ‫ة‬َ‫ع‬ْ‫ب‬َ‫س‬ ِ‫ہ‬ِ‫د‬ْ‫ع‬َ‫ب‬ِ‫َز‬‫ع‬ َ ‫ا‬‫اَّلل‬ ‫ا‬‫ن‬ِ‫إ‬ ۗ ِ ‫ا‬‫اَّلل‬ ُ‫ات‬َ‫م‬ِ‫ل‬ٌ‫م‬‫ي‬ِ‫ك‬َ‫ح‬ ٌ‫يز‬
And if whatever trees upon the earth were pens and the sea [was ink], replenished thereafter
by seven [more] seas, the words of Allah would not be exhausted. Indeed, Allah is Exalted in
Might and Wise.
‫سياہی‬ ‫دريا‬ ‫اور‬ ‫سات‬ ‫ميں‬ ‫دريا‬ ‫اس‬ ‫بعد‬ ‫کے‬ ‫اس‬ ‫سياہی‬ ‫دريا‬ ‫اور‬ ‫گے‬ ‫ہوجائيں‬ ‫قلم‬ ‫سب‬ ‫ہيں‬ ‫درخت‬ ‫ميں‬ ‫زمين‬ ‫جو‬ ‫اوراگروہ‬
‫ہے‬ ‫واَّل‬ ‫حکمت‬ ‫زبردست‬ ‫هللا‬ ‫شک‬ ‫بے‬ ‫ہوں‬ ‫نہ‬ ‫ختم‬ ‫باتيں‬ ‫کی‬ ‫هللا‬ ‫بهی‬ ‫تو‬ ‫مليں‬ ‫آ‬ ‫کے‬
Sura Luqman 31 Ayat 27

To Inveigh Against Time
On the authority of Abu Hurayrah (radi Allahu anhu), who said
that the Messenger of Allah (sal Allahu alaihi wa sallam)
said: Allah said: “Sons of Adam inveigh against Time, and I
am Time, in My hand is the night and the day”
Sahih Al-Bukhari and Muslim
The Hadith is also Imam Malik's Muwatta, Abu Da'ood, Musnad of Imam Ahmad and Tafsir Ibn Jarir al Tabari
Other versions of the Hadith are as follows:
“Do not inveigh against time (al-dahr), for Allah is time”
“Let not any one of you say, ‘Woe to time,’ for Allah is time”
“Allah says, ‘The sons of Adam offend Me and say, Woe to time, but they should not say Woe to time. I am time, I alternate the
night and the day, and if I willed, I could seize them both.’”
The word used in the Hadith is dahr which means: time, vicissitudes of time.
https://islamqa.info/en/9571
http://hadithaday.org/hadith-qudsi/to-inveigh-against-time/

To Inveigh Against Time
http://www.islamicweb.com/beliefs/creed/abdulwahab/kt1-chap-43.htm
Benefits Derived From This Hadith
1. The forbiddance of cursing time.
2. That no actions may be attributed to time.
vicissitude
• a change of circumstances or fortune, typically one that is unwelcome or unpleasant
• alternation between opposite or contrasting things.

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