Destiny, you’ve got the winning number!
Imagine walking into a room full of strangers and searching to fi nd something in common, something to make a connection and feel you belong.
You discover that there is no one to whom you are related, you all have diff erent backgrounds and have chosen vastly diff erent careers.
The room is a patchwork quilt with every possible race, colour, creed, body size and shape and ages spanning from eyes just opened to eyes almost shut. There isn’t even a common language to pull you together.
Then you discover something amazing. Everyone in the room is wealthy beyond measure - including you. Would that not be incredible?
Absolutely it would.
Every room you walk into is just such a room, you may just not have realise it yet. You and I, and everyone we come into contact with has already beaten the odds of any lottery around.
The very fact that we are here at all completely defi es the odds. In his great book “Unweaving the
Rainbow” Oxford biologist Dawkins puts things in perspective:
“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual
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people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.”
Think about how slim the chance was of you actually ever even arriving at this party called life.
Firstly, every one of your ancestors had to be attractive enough to fi nd a mate, healthy enough to procreate, and lucky to live long enough to actually do so.
They had to deliver a tiny speck of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that would result in you.
Secondly, think about your timing. Most of human history is pre-agricultural. For tens of thousands of years, people lived lives that were pretty brutal. Battling the elements, hunting and scavenging to survive.
I’m not suggesting that modern life is all rainbows and unicorns. We’ve been though a tough economic recession and millions of people are still out of work and recovering from signifi cant fi nancial setbacks. Yet, almost anyone who has access to a computer or a mobile phone is enjoying a level of comfort, security and wealth undreamed of by 99.9% of those who ever lived.
Thanks largely to advances in science and technology, we have created the expansion of one of the most precious resources we have - time - with the near doubling of the average lifespan over the last hundred years.
So let’s do a bit of maths - just for fun! The chances of your ever being born are
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