The Probability of Life

Earth Day isn’t just about loving nature, not wearing deodorant and pilgrimages to India – it’s about how we should celebrate the improbability of our own lives.

People are inundated by so much information these days that the only thing that receives attention is how much attention something is getting. “How many views does it have?” “How many people liked the post?” “Look at how many people commented on that instagram.” We are surrounded by numbers that try to make sense of the world. So for this generation of people who are obsessed with statistics, I have a few numbers that might make you realize just how important the Earth and the real world is to you.

Your Birthday

Every year, since the day we are born until the day we die, we celebrate that glorious first breath we took when we went from being a newborn, to eating, needing and air-breathing people. We are taught to ritualize that .2 percent of the year because without that moment, the other 99.8 percent of it wouldn’t mean anything.

But this life isn’t just about you. History tells us that there was a day and age where mankind would rejoice not just for their own lives but for the creation of everything around them. Entire populations would dedicate their lives to being thankful for the vitality that nature provided.

But for the sake of brevity and the fact that this is a short math lesson, I’m not going into details about what people were thinking about a few million years ago.

What are the Chances

What if, for one day, you pretended that you knew how and when the Earth was made, what it is made of, where all this “stuff” came from, and why it just so happened you were allowed to live to tell your tale on Facebook.

Wouldn’t you appreciate the heck out of whatever made all of that happen? Of course you would. But you don’t know the answers to all of those questions. And most people are too busy to even consider what the chances are of all those things happening at the same time. With a little thought, you might realize just how random every single thing around you is.

A conservative breakdown from Dr. Alo Binazir tells us that your chances of being born are the equivalent of “2.5 million people getting together — about the population of San Diego — each to play a game of dice with trillion-sided dice. They each roll the dice — and they all come up the exact same number.”

Since a trillion sided die is pretty tough to picture, let’s compare this to something a little more imaginable – your chances of winning the lottery. The odds are 1 in 175,223,510.Ronald L. Wasserstein of the Huffington Post helped paint a picture for us to wrap our heads around the infamous Power Ball. If you took 175 million dollar bills, with only one marked as “the lucky dollar bill,” and laid them end to end in a line with no spaces in between them, you could create a path that circles almost the entire United States, TWICE.

“Now imagine that you walk, bike or drive for as long as you want around the double loop, and when you decide to stop, you stoop over and pick up one dollar bill.” What are the chances the bill you pick up is the one called “Lucky?”

Those are our odds, and yet, people still play this impossible game. Why? Because the idea of winning is enough motivation to invest in something we’re destined to fail. Day in and day out, we convince ourselves that we’re going to be the “most improbable” person on the planet. But the truth is, you’ve already achieved that. Win the lottery 2,685,000 times and you still haven’t even achieved one fraction of the probability of taking that first breath.

Celebrate the Miracle

What does it all mean?

If we take those odds and then consider how we’re born into a world where someone else’s idea becomes our reality, we realize that virtually everything around us is a miracle. Every single thing that we see, hear, feel, taste, and smell is a miracle – and that we have the sense to use our senses and be aware that all of these things are a miracle. The water you drink, the air you breathe; the “smart people” that keep the internet flowing into our eyeballs and ears can’t make any of that. Everything comes from the same place, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week – EARTH! If we can appreciate that, we would celebrate the fact that Life as we know it only happens on this big floating rock.

Earth Day is just another day for you to celebrate your own life, for without the Earth and all of her improbabilities, you wouldn’t be here.