** - given various pre-conditions.
"If you're ever sad, just remember the Earth is 4.543 billion years old and you somehow managed to exist at the same time as David Bowie"
This has been making the rounds on Facebook following Bowie's recent death. It's pretty amazing, right? Except not really. Because while I could certainly calculate an infinitesimal probability that two human lifespans overlap in a 4.5 billion year window, that's simply not the right constraint for the claim. For one, humans, and written history of particular individuals, has only existed for a few thousand years. Already our odds are a million times better than before. Furthermore, such sentiments tend to come out right when someone well-known dies, in which case there's a 100% chance that anyone reading such a sentiment is alive at the same time. And therein lies a perhaps unintuitive truth: that we only perceive when we exist, so anything we perceive sets a very significant condition on any probability we might think about. If the problem is simply "what are the odds you're alive at the same time as a famous person who just died (or while they are alive)", the real odds are something, but the odds, to you, are 100%. You only perceive in the case where you are also alive, thus limiting the conditional probability significantly.
There are a number of similar realizations. A friend recently posted a picture of her great grandmother, along with the story behind the picture. It was taken to commemorate buying a ticket for the maiden voyage of a certain ship named the Titanic. Gram had gotten out of line to tend to something with the kids who were not on the ship, and by the time she'd gone back, boarding had completed and gates were closed. She missed the ship, and therefore the iceberg, due to unlikely random circumstances. My friend effectively was saying, "look how close I came to never being here". But in the same vein, had she never been born, she wouldn't know it. Alternatively, being born guarantees that the unlikely event did occur. Again, allowing for perspective alters the odds.
Another friend's grandfather flew on bombers during WW2. If I recall right, he was one of the first to successfully complete 25 missions without being maimed or killed. He then met a nice lady, they had a son who also met a nice lady, and my friend became. How lucky he is that his grandfather was one of the few who survived! This is essentially the lottery winner concept. Someone gets lucky, and only because they got lucky are they there to evaluate it. Sure they got the winning ticket, but the ones who didn't, never found out. They never even knew tickets were being passed out.
The notion of "how lucky I am to be here" is funny too. Every single one of us has defied great odds to be here. I myself am born to a father who would be dead at age 2 weeks had a Russian bomb detonated when it hit the next building, a mother who survived some serious lung problems as a child and capsizing into a stormy lake as a teen, a grandmother who had to walk through the raging winter to get away from incoming Russian troops, another grandmother was had been ordered shot if she tried to sneak the kids away, and two grandfathers who were POWs during WW2. Many others weren't so lucky; their prospective offspring are not around to ponder their unluckiness.
Some wonder how we, as a race, have defied cosmic odds to exist in this universe. Isn't it a miracle? Maybe, to some other observer. But to us, the only possible odds are 100%.
"If you're ever sad, just remember the Earth is 4.543 billion years old and you somehow managed to exist at the same time as David Bowie"
This has been making the rounds on Facebook following Bowie's recent death. It's pretty amazing, right? Except not really. Because while I could certainly calculate an infinitesimal probability that two human lifespans overlap in a 4.5 billion year window, that's simply not the right constraint for the claim. For one, humans, and written history of particular individuals, has only existed for a few thousand years. Already our odds are a million times better than before. Furthermore, such sentiments tend to come out right when someone well-known dies, in which case there's a 100% chance that anyone reading such a sentiment is alive at the same time. And therein lies a perhaps unintuitive truth: that we only perceive when we exist, so anything we perceive sets a very significant condition on any probability we might think about. If the problem is simply "what are the odds you're alive at the same time as a famous person who just died (or while they are alive)", the real odds are something, but the odds, to you, are 100%. You only perceive in the case where you are also alive, thus limiting the conditional probability significantly.
There are a number of similar realizations. A friend recently posted a picture of her great grandmother, along with the story behind the picture. It was taken to commemorate buying a ticket for the maiden voyage of a certain ship named the Titanic. Gram had gotten out of line to tend to something with the kids who were not on the ship, and by the time she'd gone back, boarding had completed and gates were closed. She missed the ship, and therefore the iceberg, due to unlikely random circumstances. My friend effectively was saying, "look how close I came to never being here". But in the same vein, had she never been born, she wouldn't know it. Alternatively, being born guarantees that the unlikely event did occur. Again, allowing for perspective alters the odds.
Another friend's grandfather flew on bombers during WW2. If I recall right, he was one of the first to successfully complete 25 missions without being maimed or killed. He then met a nice lady, they had a son who also met a nice lady, and my friend became. How lucky he is that his grandfather was one of the few who survived! This is essentially the lottery winner concept. Someone gets lucky, and only because they got lucky are they there to evaluate it. Sure they got the winning ticket, but the ones who didn't, never found out. They never even knew tickets were being passed out.
The notion of "how lucky I am to be here" is funny too. Every single one of us has defied great odds to be here. I myself am born to a father who would be dead at age 2 weeks had a Russian bomb detonated when it hit the next building, a mother who survived some serious lung problems as a child and capsizing into a stormy lake as a teen, a grandmother who had to walk through the raging winter to get away from incoming Russian troops, another grandmother was had been ordered shot if she tried to sneak the kids away, and two grandfathers who were POWs during WW2. Many others weren't so lucky; their prospective offspring are not around to ponder their unluckiness.
Some wonder how we, as a race, have defied cosmic odds to exist in this universe. Isn't it a miracle? Maybe, to some other observer. But to us, the only possible odds are 100%.
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