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People are really consumed with this fact which they consider really interesting, the fact that the odds of a person being born the way they are is very slim. People go on about it and are convinced that this makes everyone really special. And it seems no one else is more occupied with these thoughts than American Lawyer, author and motivational speaker Mel Robbins
She has become well known for espousing this theory in her San Francisco Ted X talk. She pointed at a research made by scientists which said that the chances of a person being born was one in 400 trillion! Pretty interesting fact.
I've also come across this same fact put in other words by some Dr Ali Binazir whose article I found on this site. Here is how he put it:
Previously, I had heard the Buddhist version of the probability of "this precious incarnation." Imagine there was one life preserver thrown somewhere in some ocean, with exactly one turtle in all of these oceans, swimming underwater somewhere. The probability that you came about is the same as that turtle sticking its head out of the water -- into the middle of that life preserver. On one try.
Pretty, right?
Tenor
To come to the conclusion that the chances are this slim, the chances of one's ancestors down to their mum meeting their dad out of all the billions of other options, having sex and the chances of the particular sperm cell (you know there are millions of sperm cells in a drop of sperm) that fertilized the egg doing so are calculated and it all comes down to the fact that they chances that it could have been you or any one of us is very slim.
Why it Doesn't Matter one Bit
Glycat
Now I wouldn't deny that these facts are pretty interesting and overwhelming, but how does this mean any of us is special? How does this slim chances mean we are anything above the ordinary?
On closer analysis we will find out it doesn't make us anything even in the bit extraordinary. Starting from the meeting of our ancestors to procreate till we are birthed, the thing is procreation has to occur. People try to meet the opposite sex as part of everyday life, if it wasn't your great grand mum it would have been someone else, if it wasn't the particular sperm cell that fertilized the egg that turned out to be you it would have been some other sperm cell and some other egg.
The bottom line is that it had to be one. It's just like a man picking up a ball and throwing it on the beach sand, picking the ball up and saying the grains of sand the ball landed on is special because out if all the billions of grains it landed on this one. How does that make the sand special? Of course the ball had to land somewhere because it was thrown into the air, it couldn't hang in the air waiting till a worthy set of grains of sand is found. Did the particular sand it landed on do anything to get the ball to land on it? The fact that it landed on those particular grains out of the other trillions around does that make the others it didn't land on any less extraordinary?
I think you get the picture now.
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