Lucky, lucky you!

I was going to write about how happy I am that I've finally submitted my 20,000 word philosophy dissertation. But any form of gloating seems out of step with the general mood of Britain and Europe at the moment, even with Christmas just around the corner.

Every day, the papers make another dire prediction of the misery that's on its way. Unbelievably, the Daily Mail was talking with glee the other morning about the coming European war as a result of the Euro's collapse. But the Mail has never shied away from the unbelievable, and doesn't miss an opportunity to wind up its readership, even if there are no actual facts involved. I suspect the journos at the Mail are loving the current situation.

But instead I want to talk some more about unbelievability. Rather than load you up with more depression this Christmas, I thought I'd tell you, with a little bit of maths, how unbelievably lucky you are. In fact, you are luckier than anyone who lived before you, and they were unbelievably lucky themselves.

You won the lottery of life!
The chance of your winning the lottery is extremely low, 1 in 13,983,816 to be precise (or 49!/42!7! if you've done an OU maths course). You would consider yourself very fortunate indeed if you won the jackpot, but you have already defeated much longer odds than those. You won the lottery of life.

For the sake of round numbers, let's assume that the average woman is fertile from 19 to 40 and has 2.5 children that make it to sexual maturity. With one egg per month, there is only a 1 in 100 chance that, of those available to a mother, any particular egg will grow up and have children of its own. Let's also assume that the average age to have a child, and therefore the average length of a human generation, is 33 years. It's probably less than that, and certainly used to be a lot less than that, but this number gives us a neat 'n' tidy three generations per century.

We can now go back to any given year and work out the odds of your being here from that date. Let's choose the year 1600. During that time, you have had about 12 ancestors, each with a 1/100 probability of being born, meaning that the chance of your existing since that date is 1 in 100¹² or, more simply, 1 in 10²⁴. And if that still doesn't mean much to you, it is quite a lot less likely than winning the lottery three times.

Random mutations...
If I want to calculate the odds of my being here from the year 300 AD - the year of Bruce Forsyth's birth - my expensive scientific calculator gives up. But the odds are something like 1 in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. And that was only 1,700 years ago. Modern humans are believed to have been around for 200,000 years and so your chance of being here since then is 1 in 100⁶⁰⁰⁰, which is 1 followed by 12,000 zeros.

The real miracle this Christmas? We're here!
But that is only a tiny fraction of calculation. You also have to consider all the evolution, with its random mutations, that had to occur exactly as it did over billions of years for humankind to come about in the first place, all the tectonic plate movements that isolated some populations and enabled others to be wiped out by predators, the geological makeup of the Earth and its composition as a result of condensing gases from the remnants of the early Solar System, but also the cloud from which the Solar System emerged and the earlier stars that burned their hydrogen and helium to form the heavier elements within that cloud that were eventually necessary for life.

The chance of your being here is so infinitesimally small as to be almost zero, or no chance at all. Feeling lucky? I am.

If times are hard, and this year's Christmas is not going to be as extravagant as usual, it doesn't matter that much. What is a missing present here, or another appearance for last season's party dress there? We can focus on the real miracle this Christmas - that we, and all the people we love, were ever here at all. That's something worth drinking to.

Have a magnificent Christmas and a joyous New Year! (Unless you write for the Daily Mail, in which case you can sod off.)