Today I have a fun post from Richard Frodshom about how likely it is for unlikely things to happen. 🙂
What Are The Chances?
The odds of guessing either heads or tails correctly on a coin toss are pretty simple to work out, but what about figuring out the odds of what may happen to yourself or your child in the future? Ladbrokes has the answer to this and many other oddball odds queries…
1) Winning the lottery
This is one that will seem unbelievable to anyone who doesn’t play the lottery and…well pretty unbelievable to most of those who do as well. You have a 1 in 14,000,000 chance of winning it, with buying as many tickets as possible pretty much the only way of cutting the odds in your favour.
2) Getting stuck in a lift
This seems like another relatively commonplace scenario, but odds of 1 in 24,528 suggest it is much less likely to happen than you might think. It mainly applies to those who live or work in multi-floor buildings and they can increase their chances – should they want to – by using a lifts in need of a repair.
3) Having identical triplets
This is unbelievable, as even identical twins are rare, and the 1 in 2,000,000 odds show that you will probably end up being able to tell your children apart. This will mainly be something people preparing for parenthood will speculate about, but there isn’t much you can do to make it more likely.
4) Becoming an astronaut
Given the amount of training required for this job – plus the small number of people who actually make it into space – this is an unbelievable thing to wonder about. There is a 1 in 13,200,000 chance of your child making it, although the odds are obviously shortened for those who actively pursue this as a career instead of a pipe dream.
5) Being struck by lightning
This is a macabre thing to speculate about, and probably most applies to people working outdoors, but happily you only have a 1 in 12,000 chance of it happening to you. You can of course reduce those odds by standing in lightning hold metal objects (probably not something you want to do though).
We might never experience the thrill of becoming an astronaut, but at least the odds show us we aren’t alone in that.
