What Are The Odds?
link Gwyneth Paltrow Named Most Beautiful Woman by People Magazine – The Hollywood Reporter.
How sublime is that? On top of a successful and lucrative career, Miss Paltrow is named as the world’s most beautiful woman. Out of approximately 3.5 billion contenders on the planet, she is the pinnacle of pulchritude. Sneering observers should note that this is no marginal feat. The odds of being struck by lightning is reported to be 1 in 1,000,000. The odds of winning a Powerball lottery is 1 in 175,000,000. A web search reveals that the odds of being struck by a meteor is only at 1 in 250,000.
So to be that person who defies all mathematical odds to be the absolute most beautiful woman is truly a miracle. And, what are the odds that she lives in the U.S.A. and is a film actress? In fact, what are the odds that more than a handful of the last so-named people, such as Angelina Jolie, Scarlett Johansen, Jennifer Lopez, Beyonce, Julia Roberts etc, also live and work within the same 10 square miles of real estate and are also in the film business? People who don’t understand math cannot comprehend the truly astronomical odds of this occurrence. Odder still, it happens every year.
We don’t know who sits on the selection committee at People magazine, the undisputed arbiter of this award, but surely they must all be bleary eyed because of having to judge the 3.5 billion possible contenders every year. I suspect that over the years however, they have determined that since many of the winners were right from their own backyard, they’d just refine their search to exclude 99.99% of the world’s women and just look out their windows.
According to an O.Hooge, who oddly happens to live here in B.C., the odds of anyone even being born is almost zilch, specifically:
“…If you go back 1 million years or 40 000 generations (each generation is considered 25 years), your chance of being born is at most 1 in 1.8 x 10403167 or 18 with 403,166 zeros after the 1.
In other words your chances of existing is essentially zilch, even if we were considering this possibility only a short 250 years ago. Right now you do exist, so the actual chance is 100%, but the predicted likelihood in the past of you being born would be essentially zero…”
Be that as it may, Miss Paltrow is indeed lucky enough, at least statistically, to be immortal in terms of human history. And we are lucky to be here when it happened.
Excellent points my friend. If you re-work you math to have the denominator only include people photographed by People Mag then she likely had a 1:5 chance since they seem to photograph the same people for a decade or so. The odds were not so astronomical after all.
TH