this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2026
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Every damn year, this day sneaks up on me. I should have taken it off work, but I always forget to ask.
I don’t know whether Mum would be proud of me, but I hope so
Reminder that you're doing amazing ❤️ the fact that you're alive is one in a billion.
Googled it - The chances of you being alive right now are astronomically small, often cited as 1 in 10 to the 2.6 millionth power (1 in (10^{2,685,000})), meaning a 1 followed by nearly 2.7 million zeros, making your existence a near-impossible statistical miracle, requiring an unbroken chain of ancestral survival and reproduction over billions of years. This calculation considers the odds of your specific parents meeting, their sperm and egg combining with the right DNA, and this happening across all your ancestors, all the way back to single-celled organisms.