Yep, the aura of statistics can blind us. It will most probably happen if enough numbers of people keep trying again and again for the next ten millions of years. Would be not much different as and asteroid falling on earth once an killing most animals.
Agreed. But just the same, given the number of cells, the number of a species, the amount of time...I think you see where this is going.
The occurance of something is also a function of the total universe of occurrences. This doesn't seem to be part of the "close to impossible" numbers being mentioned.
If life itself was the result of a roll of the cosmic dice then anything down stream sounds reasonable.
Is just an example of how unprobable things can still happen
Think about winning the spermatozoan race 2 millions of times in a row, as member of the most intelligent species known in the universe, one among millions of different forms of life, after surviving five consecutive massive extinctions that wipped the 90% of the life in the planet each time.
Flip a coin 100 times. The odds of getting the exact sequence of heads and tails that you got are about 0.00000000000000000000000000001% (give or take a zero). And yet, it happened!
Not accurate. It depends on how many times you play.
That matters here because we're not talking about any single cell or single strand of DNA. We're talking about millions upon gazillion. So "the game" is being played an unimaginable number of times. Clearly that changes the possibility of an outcome.
> "the game" is being played an unimaginable number of times.
Actually, it's quite imaginable. Not only is it imaginable, it's fairly straightforward to calculate an upper bound on the actual number, and from there to calculate the odds of producing the same gene completely independently more than once. If you do the math you will find that the odds are indistinguishable from zero.