14 Sep Staggering Math
Imagine that a single life preserver is randomly dropped somewhere within the 139 million square miles of Earth’s oceans.
And now imagine that somewhere, in one of those oceans, a single turtle is swimming underwater.
The probability of that lone turtle sticking its head out of the water and into the middle of that life preserver, in one attempt—an event so unlikely as to be almost impossible—is comparable to the probability of each of us being born.
A scientist calculated that likelihood, and in numerical terms that likelihood is about one in 700 trillion.
Yet here you are, reading this, against all those odds.
And if we stop thinking about this in the abstract context of a life preserver and a turtle within square miles of oceans, we can instead think of the people who came before us.
For each of us to exist today, we needed:
2 parents
4 grandparents
8 great-grandparents
32 third great-grandparents
64 fourth great-grandparents
128 fifth great-grandparents
256 sixth great-grandparents
512 seventh great-grandparents
1,024 eighth great-grandparents
2,048 ninth great-grandparents
That’s a whopping total of 4,094 ancestors1—people who hoped and believed and loved and wished and overcame—spanning 12 generations over the last 400 years.
While we may have a general understanding of our family history, the staggering math puts things in perspective.
And perhaps, when we feel short on confidence, we can call it forth by remembering we have more than 3,000 people behind us.
Because as it turns out, we do.
1 This is a simplified estimation that doesn’t consider pedigree collapse, in which two people share the same ancestor.