A huge number of separate regions where Big Bangs occur are separated by continuously inflating space in eternal inflation. In order for our Universe to exist, it must have a finite probability of creation, given a multiverse. Image credit: Karen46 of FreeImages.

The odds of your unlikely existence were not infinitely small

If every infinite outcome were equally likely, we’d never come to be.

“Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it.”
-Ludwig Wittgenstein

In order for you to exist, a great many unlikely events needed to unfold in exactly the way that they did. The exact sperm cell and egg cell needed to meet to create you with the DNA sequence that encoded you, and brought you into existence; a one-in-250 million chance for a sperm cell alone. That needed to happen each time in an unbroken string for millions of generations of your ancestors, going back to well before they were human beings or even hominids of any type. Other unlikely events needed to occur as well: life needed to take hold on Earth, Earth needed to form as a habitable planet with the right ingredients for life out of the ashes of previously dead stars, the laws of physics needed to be such that they permitted life, and the Universe itself must have unfolded in such a way as to make all of this possible.

A standard cosmic timeline of our Universe’s history. A series of extremely unlikely events all needed to occur in order so that you would exist. Image credit: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss.

Yet there’s one thing we can be sure of in this entire series of unlikely events…