What are the chances of your coming into being?
A rather fitting article for my birthday, I think, a sort of silly, but quite interesting, look at the probability of me being born:
First, let’s talk about the probability of your 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.
The odds at the end were much lower than I would have thought!
What are the chances of your coming into being?
4 December 2011 02:00pm UTC • 49 views • 1 comment
Tagged with probability, birth, born
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1 comment
Seamonster Mom
4 December 2011 08:01pm UTC
What are the chances of your being born on a futon, quickly, 3 weeks early, in a snowstorm in Salt Lake City??