You've Won The Lottery… Hundreds Of Times In A Row
We choose “lucky” as the adjective of choice when describing people in certain winning circumstances. Examples would be those that get tickets to The Masters at Augusta, or if it’s more your thing, floor tickets to a BTS concert (when things like that were happening). I’m guessing those few people consider themselves pretty lucky too. What about the person that wins the Powerball or the Mega Millions lottery jackpot with odds of 1 in 302 million. Kenneth Alexander, professor of mathematics at the University of Southern California illustrates the Powerball odds like this, “My favorite description of Powerball odds is that if you'd been buying 1,800 tickets per week since the time of Jesus, there's a better-than-even chance you wouldn't have won the jackpot yet.” Those jackpot winners are part of a rare group.
How about those people who win smaller lottery prizes multiple times, like Orlene Peterson, an Idaho woman that recently won two separate scratch ticket jackpots back-to-back. For the games she won, it was a combined probability of happening once every 10 billion tries. Hope she recognizes how lucky she was, how unlikely it was to be her.
Would it feel good to be that lucky? What about you, me, the average person driving next to you on the highway, how “lucky” are we? It’s a more interesting question than it seems on the surface, especially in the midst of a pandemic.
You may already be familiar with the competitive nature of your conception. At human conception, there are an average of 280 million little challengers vying to make it into the world. Recent research that sequenced the genomes of individual sperm cells from the same person reveal significant genetic differences between them, meaning only one of them was you. That’s pretty low odds. Let’s take a step back, though. If anyone in your ancestral line didn’t make it, you would be erased. Everyone of your ancestors had roughly the same dismal odds as you of being conceived. Not only that, they then had to stay alive long enough to procreate. This is where our current pandemic stirs some interesting reflections.
Imagine if, going back just 5,000 years, your unborn self was given the list of names in your line of descent that had to be born and survive in order for you, long in the future, to have a turn at life. Then you were granted the ability to watch and root for everyone of them, not knowing the outcomes but knowing that if anyone of them failed you would never exist. First, watching at each pregnancy and hoping for the one, single name you needed would be very much like winning the Powerball, everytime. Then, after defying crippling odds as the needed names were born, you would watch with almost intolerable suspense as those children lived through periods of unthinkably high infant mortality rates, as some of those young men and women fought in and suffered though brutal wars, and as ravaging plagues visited over and over again, in some cases decimating populations*. Then you’d be on the edge of your seat as each necessary set of parents meandered through life, hoping that they would find each other so that you could play the Powerball again with their pregnancy and start the harrowing process all over.
Leaving out all other factors like causes of premature death, and accounting only for selection of the right egg/seed combination, if the chance of your grandmother having you as a grandchild is 1/280 million x 1/280 million x 1/280 million, we don’t need to do much math to see that going back all the way up your family line and considering all the ways that it could have been but wasn't cut short, create some almost unbelievable odds and that you, I, and that person driving next to us are extremely lucky having won a stint on the stage of life. This realization makes me cautious to not squander that privilege, wanting to be sure to make a positive impact, at some magnitude, with this very unlikely opportunity. Maybe, distributing this thought through these words is a tiny step in that direction.
P.S. I suppose a distant second conclusion is there’s probably a chorus of requests from the future asking for reduced average maternal age! Don't just make money, make a difference.
Partnering with you in Excellence.
*A intriguing visual of pandemics in history: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/history-of-pandemics-deadliest/
