You Have Already Won the Lottery

Attempting to quantify the approximate odds of your sheer existence as a human is a daunting task. The following essay is my pursuit to argue that an individual’s birth and life, although conceptionally measurable, relies on something grander than simply luck.

​First, we must calculate the odds that your father met your mother. In 2019, the average lifespan of an individual who lives in the United States is 78.9 years (Roser), but we will round up that number to 79 for the sake of clarity. If an individual meets a new person every day for their entire life (without factoring leap years), the person who lives the average lifespan will meet 28,835 people throughout the course of their earthly existence. For this example, I am referring to genuine interactions between two people, not simply individuals you enter proximity.  For if you attend a concert or sports game, you do not meet everyone in attendance, but you may interact with the person sitting next to you. 

Of course, this statistic is difficult to precisely measure due to a multitude of outlying factors including demographic and occupation. Some studies have shown this number to be closer to 80,000, but if you are born in an isolated village with a population of 1,000 people at any given time, the number of people you will meet throughout your life will be far lower than the average human.  In addition to this sentiment, we are for obvious reasons not including interactions we have as an infant. For this purpose, let us consider that we meet an average of 30,000 people throughout our lives.

How many of those individuals are met during sexual maturity? Barring teenage pregnancy (pre-18) and acknowledging that menopause occurs on average at the age of 51 (Northern American Menopause Society), this leaves 33 years of sexual maturity between the ages of 18 and 51 in females; approximately 42.3% of the average human life. For simplicity, let us mirror this statistic in the male sex. By using our statistic of 30,000 individuals we meet during our lifetime, we can infer that 12,690 of these individuals are met during sexual maturity. Therefore, the odds that your mother and father met each other during sexual maturity (presuming demographic is not a factor) is 1 in 25,380.  However, now we must consider the odds that your father and mother did not only meet during sexual maturity, but they also grew close enough to have a child. According to the University of Bath, the average rate of anomalous mutual attraction between two individuals near the same age is 18 out of 100.  The average odds that this mutual attraction results in a long enough relationship where offspring may be produced is 1 out of 100, meaning that the odds that the meeting between your parents resulted in children is 9 out of 5000. So far, according to these figures, the odds of your existence based on your specific parents meeting and mating is less than 1 out of 14,000,000.

The average age of conception is 27 according to the CDC. At the age of 27, the average egg count for a woman is over 150,000 (Watson).  According to Medical News Today, the average sperm count for a male lies between 40 million and 300 million per milliliter (Nall). In the interest of this example, we will use the former statistic of 40 million. For couples avidly trying to conceive, the odds a woman becomes pregnant is approximately 1 in 5 during any given ovulation cycle (Nazario). Keeping these figures in mind, the odds of the exact sperm encountering the exact egg during the exact time resulting in your precise conception is 1 in 30 trillion.

Factoring in that it was your specific parents who conceived you, the genetic odds of you being born is less than one in 420 quintillion. This may seem like an astronomical number, but it can be broken down even further if you continue to consider the generations of genetic influence prior to you parents. They had to be conceived at these odds as well. Therefore, the chances that you are alive exponentially diminish as you calculate your ancestry. Even though these figures are not accurate because of the speculative nature to this argument, the data itself upon observation reveals the seemingly impossible chances that life should exist in the individual without some other unbeknownst influence aside from luck. 

According to a CNBC reporter’s interview with a Harvard statistics professor, the chance of winning the Mega Millions is 1 in 302,500,000 (Huddleston).  Considering my argument above along with the fact that you live and breathe as a conscious and self-thinking person, you as an individual have already beaten the odds of winning the lottery several billion times over. You have won the opportunity to be alive. So, tell me this my friend: what are you going to do with your winnings? 

References:

FastStats - births and Natality. (2021, March 02). Retrieved from https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/births.htm

Huddleston Jr., T. (2021, January 21). Mega millions is up to $970 MILLION-THERE'S one way to up the odds of winning, according to a Harvard statistics professor. Retrieved from https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/21/how-to-up-the-odds-of-winning-a-lottery-harvard-professor.html

Nall, R. (2019, March 28). Normal sperm count: A guide to semen analysis. Retrieved from https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/324821

Nazario, B. (2020, February 19). Thinking about getting pregnant? How to prepare for pregnancy. Retrieved from https://www.webmd.com/baby/guide/getting-started-on-getting-pregnant#1

Northern American Menopause Society. Are we there yet? Navigate now with our guided menopause tour. Retrieved from https://www.menopause.org/for-women/menopauseflashes/menopause-symptoms-and-treatments/are-we-there-yet-navigate-now-with-our-guided-menopause-tour

Roser, M., Ortiz-Ospina, E., & Ritchie, H. (2013, May 23). Life expectancy. Retrieved April 25, 2021, from https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy

Watson, S. (2018, June 6). Age and Fertility: What to know in your 20s, 30s, and 40s. Retrieved from https://www.healthline.com/health/pregnancy/best-age-to-get-pregnant