What Is The Likelihood That You Exist? (2024)

There are currently over 7.3 billion people on Earth, and only one of them is you. If that makes you feel extremely small and insignificant, don't worry - the odds of you existing at all are even tinier.

The infographic from Visual.lybelow crunches the numbers and shows you exactly how small those odds actually are. To start with, the odds of your dad meeting your mum - about 1 in 20,000 - then has to be multiplied by the odds of them talking, dating, and then staying together long enough to have kids.

Things get even deeper, with the probability of your mother's egg and your father's sperm having all the right DNA to make you you - and not a slightly different person, like your sibling - being 1 in 400,000,000,000,000,000.

And things get a whole lot more complicated if you consider that those odds need to happen every generation all the way back until you reach single celled organisms - the actual beginning of your timeline.The probability of that happening comes out at about 1 in 10^2,685,000, or 10 followed by 2,685,000 zeros. For comparison, the Universe only has 10⁸⁰ atoms.

The infographic finishes by letting you know that the probability of you existing as you is pretty much zero. This means that you are the textbook definition of a miracle.

Enjoy the full infographic below:

Visual.ly