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Its a 1 in a 1,000,000 chance you will get hit by a meteor in your lifetime. Even less likely it will happen today.
So, what is the chance that at some point today something, anything, will happen to you that has a 1 in a 1,000,000 chance of happening or more? In other words, how often does a day go by where something nearly impossible happens... well, the answer is it is pretty much guaranteed.
In fact every moment you are experiencing countless events that have a one in a million chance or more of happening. Try and wrap your head around that :)
@freemo If you flip a coin 100 times, the sequence of heads and tales that results will be one of around 2*10^30 possible such sequences, so the odds will be one in 2*10^30. But you *will* get such an individually improbable sequence simply by flipping the coin 100 times.
Incidentally, this is one reason why arguing for intelligent design by way of the supposed improbability of a human genome doesn't work.
@mathlover Seems like a weak argument for intelligent desing on several fronts...
One, it assumes that there is a single configuration of ones genome that results in life. While the odds of one configuration occuring randomly is very low you'd have to collectively check the odds of **all** configurations that result in life. Which if broad enough may not be impractically rare
Two, it is naive to the fact that the simplest form of "life" that is complex enough that it can begin basic replication (and thus incremental improvement through evolution) may be much simpler than even our simplest organisms today