Strange Math Part 5: Being You
Strange Math - Part 5 The Probability of Being You How probability, ancestry, genetics and chance converge into one human life Strange Opening Question What are the odds that you specifically would exist? Not merely a human being . Not merely someone born in the twenty-first century . But you -- with your particular genetic combination, your particular parents, your particular ancestry, your particular circumstances, and your particular place in history. What if history had taken a slightly different turn? What if one ancestor had travelled somewhere else? What if two people had never met? What if a different sperm had fertilised the egg? What if one event thousands of years ago had happened differently? Would you still be here? And if the universe ran the entire story again... would you appear in the same form? That is where mathematics meets one of life's deepest mysteries. The Amazing Fact There is a popular claim that the probability of being born as y...