22 May The Miracle of YOU

By Ian Robinson

As appalling as the thought conjures, the procreation of your parents created the inaugural and very special unique YOU.  The micro-biology of that event alone is around one in 76.7 million, but I solemnly swear that I will not provide any further details on sperm counts within this article at the risk of losing you as a reader.

The Background

Now let’s backtrack and place some real universal context to your existence.  Your parents had to survive their own versions of environmental and economic peril since their birth, then call upon a chance meeting amongst a global population of 5.288 billion people (circa 1990) before copulating you as a screaming springlet into this world.  For the nerds, by multiplying the world’s population with the average male sperm count you can work out the odds of your existence as an event confined to this one occurrence (which equals 4.06 to the power of 17).  We will call this the 1^st Generation event.

But your parents did not just drop from a tree.  They too had parents whom had to survive the world’s calamities bestowed upon their lives, orchestrate a chance meeting amongst a global population of 3.032 billion (circa 1965) without social media, fall hopelessly in love and spawn the birth right of your parents.  We will claim this as the 2nd Generation computation event.

Let’s assume there is a generation event every 25 years (noting that historical adults had children much younger than today).  The maths to determine the number of procreating adults involved in your historical family tree is then simply 2 to the power of “n”, with n = the generational number.

Here Comes The Good Stuff

The mathematics on your very existence.  To make it interesting let us go back to the birth of Christ.  This timeline means we have 2019 years divided by 25 = 81 generational events (rounded up)

Two to the power of 81 = 2,417,851,639,229,260,000,000,000 adults successfully procreating 1,208,925,819,614,630,000,000,000 times.  Since the birth of Christ, each of these adults prior to their successful act of fornication had to survive the crusades, the bubonic plague, slave trading, civil and global wars, holocausts and ethnic genocides, tsunamis, diseases, famine, floods, fires, colonisations, and economic depressions.  If only ONE of these adults did not make it to their procreation event, then you would NOT exist.

Remember, this exercise only goes back to year 1AD.  There is another 38,000 years of modern man to inserted into this calculation.

Now are you beginning to see how special and important YOU are?

So, what is the conclusion of all this?

Be kind to your peers in business. 

Be kind in life.

Everyone here is a miracle and life seems to be one incredible mathematical impossibility.