hey 42 here some people are just born
lucky
take Australian trucker Bill Morgan for
example back in 1999 bill was involved
in a road accident during his recovery
he had a heart attack then suffered an
allergic reaction to the drug his
doctors gave him to treat it then he
died okay okay I know what you're
thinking this guy doesn't sound all that
lucky he's dead but bear with me a
second because 14 minutes after kicking
the bucket doctors were able to get bill
Morgan's ticker pumping again
unfortunately for Bill however whilst he
was technically alive again he had only
just made it back over the border and
into the land of the living he was in a
coma and his doctors did not expect him
to wake up but they were so confident of
his imminent demise in fact that they
advised Bill's family to pull the plug
on the life-support machine after all
electricity is expensive but
miraculously and despite being given no
chance of survival
bill woke up just 12 days later feeling
understandably fortunate to be alive he
decided to see how much further he could
push his lucky streak which is why on
being discharged from hospital he bought
himself a scratch card to his surprise
and the light it turned out to be a
winner backing him a brand new car a
remarkable story isn't it a local news
company certainly thought so having
picked up on Bill's incredible back from
the dead car winning story they decided
to interview him for their new show as
part of the interview they asked bill to
buy a scratch card so that they could
reenact his win for the benefit of their
audience happy to oblige bill scratched
off a freshly bought lottery ticket
right there in front of the rolling
cameras and warned the jackpot of
250,000 Aussie dollars then there's a
story of Frane Selak a former music
teacher from Croatia who's been called
both the luckiest and the unluckiest man
alive and for good reason things first
went wrong for poor old frame in 1962
when the train he was travelling gone
derailed crashing into a river 17 people
on board were killed
but frame made it out alive albeit with
hypothermia and a broken arm over the
next decades frame would go on to
develop a sense of the Grim Reaper was
after him because frame would go on to
face down death on no fewer than six
further occasions and come out on top
every time he claims to have been the
only survivor of a plane crash a feat he
attributed to being thrown from the
plummeting aircraft and landing in a
haystack of all things next came a bus
accident in which four of his fellow
passengers were killed then his car
caught fire twice at one point he was
hit by a horse
and not long after he swerved his car
off a cliff to avoid an oncoming vehicle
but survived by grabbing onto a tree on
the way down where he hung waiting to be
rescued one thing's for sure if this guy
offers you a lift
you get yourself the hell out of there
understandably some people have
questioned the veracity of Frain's story
but it's been featured in some of the
biggest newspapers in Europe including
this Telegraph The Scotsman under
Spiegel adding weights to is claimed and
one element of frame story is in
absolutely no doubt two days after his
73rd birthday his jewels with death
behind him for the time being the
world's luckiest / unluckiest man won
the lottery in his native parasha taking
home a little over a million dollars now
coming back from the dead to win a car
once
cash is undeniably pretty lucky house is
cheating death on seven separate
occasions before going on to win the
lottery but you yes you watching this
video have done something in your life
much much luckier than either of those
things something so lucky that if you
weren't able to prove it was true beyond
all doubt nobody would ever believe it
was actually possible but what exactly
is this remarkable miraculous feat of
luck that you aren't even aware of well
being born in the first place now being
you is probably something you take
pretty much for granted it's quite hard
not to all things considered but have
you ever taken a moment in wonder what
the actual odds of your own existence
are because when you think about it for
you to be sitting here on earth watching
this video rather a lot of things had to
happen just right for starters your
parents to individuals amongst billions
here on planet earth had to meet one
another the odds of this having happened
will vary depending on where they came
from of course maybe they grew up in the
same town or maybe they're opposite
sides of the world and met by chance
while backpacking around Southeast Asia
whatever their story if they hadn't met
you wouldn't exist and just meeting
isn't enough people meet each other all
the time and they don't necessarily go
on to have kids unless they're Mel
Gibson and fornicate with anything that
moves he has nine by the way what if on
your parents first date your dad had let
rip the world's most brutal fart in a
moment of unfortunate rectal weakness
your parents might have never put on
that Barry White CD later that night and
got down to making sweet sweet you
without getting into details about your
parents that will make your dinner
repeat on you the odds of the exact
sperm and egg combination required to
you ever bumping into one another inside
your mother's fallopian tubes are
vanishingly small estimates very unjust
how vanishingly small but according to
some you might be a one in four hundred
quadrillion shot now four hundred
quadrillion is a pretty big number I'm
sure you'll agree the Powerball one of
the world's highest paying lotteries
based in the US has prizes running to
over a billion dollars the odds of
winning the jackpot are just shy a 300
million to one
you'd probably consider someone who
wouldn't a Powerball to be incredibly
lucky right but just by being born you
won a lottery that was about 1.3 billion
times harder to win than the Powerball
and you only bought a single ticket whoa
hang on just a minute because the story
doesn't stop there
either for your parents who have made
you they needed to exist in the first
place that means that their parents your
grandparents also needed to overcome
tiny odds to find each other amongst the
billions of people on planet earth and
when your grandparents found each other
and decided to have children your unborn
parents needed to win the exact same
sperm e lottery that you did if they
hadn't they would have never been around
to have you and we can play this same
game over and over again as we move back
through the generations of your family
because for you to exist here today your
exact ancestors had to find one another
amongst all humans alive that
generation after generation then produce
exactly the right offspring from the
exact sperm egg combination required to
eventually produce you your
great-grandparents your great-great
grandparents your great-great
great-great great-great grandparents and
far far beyond foot just how far back
are we talking here well brace yourself
this might take some guessing your head
around because we're talking all the way
back not just back through the whole of
human history not just back through the
whole history of hominids but back
through the whole history of life on
Earth
you my friend are dangling on the end of
a chain that stretches back around four
billion years and through some trillion
or so generations of your ancestors
ancestors are concluded Apes lizards
fish worms and more and to be clear we
aren't talking about shared ancestors in
some general evolutionary sense here
these were your direct ancestors that
lived and breathed in your own family
tree creatures that gave birth to a long
series of other creatures the species
differing over thousands of millions of
years in a lineage that eventually
became human
produced your parents and most recently
you in order for you to be alive every
single one of these ancestors had to
dodge life's many dangers to reach
reproductive age your ape ancestors had
to fend off attackers from rivals and
avoid being eaten by leopards your
millions of fish ancestors had to avoid
disease and being eaten by sharks and
remembered they didn't just need to
reproduce they needed to mate with
exactly the right individual creature
and produce exactly the right offspring
amongst a quadrillion possibilities to
continue the specific family line that
would eventually make you
if that's absurd four billion year long
chain had been broken anywhere even once
if one single one of your worm ancestors
had gone rogue and sworn itself to a
life of celibacy disgusted by its own
general repugnance you would not exist
now the probability of all these
disparate events happening just as they
did is pretty much impossible to
calculate there are simply way too many
variables to contend with for us to come
up with a number of any real meaning but
that didn't stop Harvard Graduate to dr.
ali bin Azhar from having a crack at it
perhaps realizing just how ridiculously
huge a job he had on his hands dr.
Pinhas are decided to try and simplify
his task a bit by only including the
last 150,000 generations of ancestors
instead of the full complement of a
trillion or so in his calculation and
whilst it's easy to pick holes in the
exact numbers he chose along the way his
result does a good as job as any of
illustrating just how ridiculously
unlikely each of our existence is so
what number did he come up with well the
odds are you existing according to dr.
Pinhas are all are about one in ten to
the two million six hundred and eighty
five thousandth power that's ten
followed by two million six hundred and
eighty-five thousand zeroes now that's a
big number a very big number so big in
fact that it's utterly impossible for
our puny human brains to even attempt to
comprehend it even if we try to put some
context to it we won't get very far but
let's try anyway are you an average
human male weighing 80 kilos
congratulations you're the proud owner
of around seven times 10 to the 27th
power of atoms that's a seven followed
by 27 zeros nowhere near big enough to
help us understand the probability of
our own existence in fact where several
million zeroes short
actually the entire universe itself
isn't big enough to give us the required
context from what scientists have been
able to figure out the known universe
contains around 10 to the 80th power of
atoms a 10 followed by 80 zeros just 80
not even close
tube in Azaz number remember when I said
some people are just born lucky right at
the start of this video well the odds of
you being born are astronomically
smaller than they would be if I selected
a single item at random in the entire
near endless expanse of the known
universe with its 200 trillion galaxies
and one septillion stars and then you
without so much as a hint of where you
should be looking turned around and
picked out that very same utter on the
very first try
impossible I would have said so and yet
there you are watching this video and
thank you for that if you enjoyed this
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you