Mathemical Absurdities
I should be going to sleep because I have to get up at 615 tomorrow morning, but as I was lying in bed, trying to drift off, I randomly started thinking about BSG, which happens sometimes, as it's my favorite show (even if I have been neglecting it due to my current fixation on Xena: Warrior Princess).
Anyway, remember the fourth season episode Six Of One? I hope so. Adama and Roslin have that really intense/super quiet fight where Laura kind of gets on him because he's a drunk and emo? And she tells him that, due to a mathematical absurdity, she became president.
Yeah?
So I started thinking about how absurd that math really was, you know? She was 42nd in line but, more than that, only about 50,000 people survived a genocide that wiped out billions, and when you're talking billions, 50,000 is really a drop in the bucket, so everybody in that fleet was pretty much a walking mathematical absurdity. I mean, the chances of surviving through the miniseries was, well, astronomically absurd. And to have been one of the 30,000-ish people to make it to the end? Even more so!
So not only is Laura an absurdity when it comes to that, she's even more an absurdity due to the job she happened to have when the attacks happened. Really, that anybody survived that was in the line of succession was something that would only happen in TV and the movies.
But here's where my thinking started going. And keep in mind that it's late and that I can't always be held accountable for what I write in this blog at odd hours. But aren't we all mathematical absurdities?
Think about it. It took, like, a billion years+ for life to take shape on Earth and a few billion years for it to evolve into humanity. The chances of living on a planet with an atmosphere of oxygen and nitrogen and, I don't know, hydrogen? On a planet with water? That's pretty much exactly the right distance away from a perfectly sized star to always be at life sustaining temperatures? Already, we're looking at ridiculous odds.
But even when you forget about the unliklihood of life evolving to the point it has now . . . Thinking of how many eggs are in each woman. And how many millions of sperm are in each man. And think about the odds of one specific egg meeting with one specific sperm. And creating you.
I mean, isn't that kind of amazing? That I am who I am is, indeed, quite the mathematical absurdity. That any of us exist at all is pretty damn amazing. And then I think of how I'm here in this bed when I could have been born anywhere else at any other time period. But I'm here in this bed in 2010 in Michigan in the USA and my mom could have gotten pregnant earlier or later but she got pregnant when she did and here I am, somehow shaped by genetics and my environment to drift off to sleep thinking about BSG and how I'm more in the persuasion of Xena and Gabrielle than I probably even realize and how I have the Islamic Call to Prayer in my head and, yeah. Mathematical absurdity, for sure.
Anyway, remember the fourth season episode Six Of One? I hope so. Adama and Roslin have that really intense/super quiet fight where Laura kind of gets on him because he's a drunk and emo? And she tells him that, due to a mathematical absurdity, she became president.
Yeah?
So I started thinking about how absurd that math really was, you know? She was 42nd in line but, more than that, only about 50,000 people survived a genocide that wiped out billions, and when you're talking billions, 50,000 is really a drop in the bucket, so everybody in that fleet was pretty much a walking mathematical absurdity. I mean, the chances of surviving through the miniseries was, well, astronomically absurd. And to have been one of the 30,000-ish people to make it to the end? Even more so!
So not only is Laura an absurdity when it comes to that, she's even more an absurdity due to the job she happened to have when the attacks happened. Really, that anybody survived that was in the line of succession was something that would only happen in TV and the movies.
But here's where my thinking started going. And keep in mind that it's late and that I can't always be held accountable for what I write in this blog at odd hours. But aren't we all mathematical absurdities?
Think about it. It took, like, a billion years+ for life to take shape on Earth and a few billion years for it to evolve into humanity. The chances of living on a planet with an atmosphere of oxygen and nitrogen and, I don't know, hydrogen? On a planet with water? That's pretty much exactly the right distance away from a perfectly sized star to always be at life sustaining temperatures? Already, we're looking at ridiculous odds.
But even when you forget about the unliklihood of life evolving to the point it has now . . . Thinking of how many eggs are in each woman. And how many millions of sperm are in each man. And think about the odds of one specific egg meeting with one specific sperm. And creating you.
I mean, isn't that kind of amazing? That I am who I am is, indeed, quite the mathematical absurdity. That any of us exist at all is pretty damn amazing. And then I think of how I'm here in this bed when I could have been born anywhere else at any other time period. But I'm here in this bed in 2010 in Michigan in the USA and my mom could have gotten pregnant earlier or later but she got pregnant when she did and here I am, somehow shaped by genetics and my environment to drift off to sleep thinking about BSG and how I'm more in the persuasion of Xena and Gabrielle than I probably even realize and how I have the Islamic Call to Prayer in my head and, yeah. Mathematical absurdity, for sure.