Every time I hear people ranting about life being unfair, huffing and puffing if things don’t go their way, I recall this stunning visual: “What are the odds”. It estimates our odds of being alive, showing they are just a fraction above zero, or 1 in 102,685,000 if you like math.
Imagine: 1 in 102,685,000. As someone put it, “that probability is the same as if you handed out 2 million dice, each dice with one trillion sides… then rolled those 2 million dice and had them all land on 439,505,270,846.” It seems we are damn good at gambling! At least for once. So, when next time your dumb classmate gets into Harvard and you fail as a valedectorian, please recall this absurdly slim chance of your existance, and take a moment to appreciate this unique gift of luck — to be alive as a concious human being, to share this transient journey we call life with people we love, to get a chance to understand and explore ourselves and the universe around us, to breath air and enjoy warm rays of the morning Sun — all those things we take for granted while being obsessed with the cherry on top. Because, if scientists got it right, our life is highly improbable, and it won’t last for long. Thus, luckily for us, life is tremendously unfair, if you see what I mean.
Uncovering hidden laws of evolution through studies of protein synthesis