{"id":28,"date":"2012-07-04T11:05:12","date_gmt":"2012-07-04T18:05:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kaser.com\/BlogicallyYours\/?p=28"},"modified":"2012-07-04T11:16:31","modified_gmt":"2012-07-04T18:16:31","slug":"we-are-so-lucky","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/kaser.com\/BlogicallyYours\/2012\/07\/04\/we-are-so-lucky\/","title":{"rendered":"We Are So Lucky"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Some events are so<\/em> statistically unlikely, so<\/em> far-fetched, that we sometimes have to just shake our heads in amazement when they actually happen. The odds of winning the Powerball Lottery is only 1 in over 175 MILLION.\u00a0 That’s a number that’s hard for us mere humans to REALLY comprehend.\u00a0 If you worked 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 52 weeks a year (ie, no vacations, no holidays), and earned $100 per hour (don’t we wish!), you would work 2,080 hours per year and earn $208,000 per year.\u00a0 At that rate, you’d have to work 841 years to earn $175 million.\u00a0 You’d better start when you’re very young, Methuselah.<\/p>\n

175 million is MORE than HALF of the population of the United States today.\u00a0 If you lined up that may people in a single line with each person taking up only 2 feet of space in the line, the line would be over 16,500 MILES long.\u00a0 That’s 2\/3 of the way around the earth’s equator!<\/p>\n

And yet, on a regular basis, someone<\/em> ‘beats’ those long odds.<\/p>\n

I’ve been a genealogist (a “family historian” for you unwashed masses) since I was a teenager.\u00a0 My father was the last of seven children, born when his mother was 42.\u00a0 I was the last of four children.\u00a0 I’ve researched my paternal line, which goes back to the Bern Canton of Switzerland around 1870 and stays there clear back to the 1590s (Kaser<\/em>, or as it was before getting Americanized, K\u00e4ser<\/em>, was an occupational surname which meant cheese maker<\/em>; maybe that’s why I have such a cheesy sense of humor).\u00a0 It’s quite fascinating to see the long list of your ancestors and their children over the centuries, to see in each generation how many children were lost before reaching adulthood, to see how many times your direct ancestor was the last<\/em> child in their generation.\u00a0 It was not uncommon for 3 to 5 children dying young out of a family of 8 to 12.\u00a0 We often take our mere existence for granted, so I found myself amazed at the simple fact that I was here<\/em>.\u00a0 What were the odds?<\/p>\n

And yet, someone<\/em> always has to be the last.<\/p>\n

If my parents would’ve had one more child, then that child would have been the amazing final child, and all of the descendants of that child would have been the lucky ones, the ones who just BARELY clung to existence.\u00a0 Or if I’d not been born, then my sister would have been the lucky one, and her descendents hanging on the bottom rung of the ladder.\u00a0 But regardless of which position on the familial ladder we each cling to, it’s actually amazingly lucky that any<\/em> of us are here.\u00a0 If you take an average generation as 25 years, that’s 4 generations per century, 40 generations per millennium, 40,000 generations per million years, at least! The further back we go, the shorter and shorter the time it takes for the generations to reproduce.\u00a0 We’re talking hundreds of millions of generations stretching back to our earliest ancestors at the beginning of life on this planet.<\/p>\n

And in each generation, our<\/em> ancestor survived and reproduced while many, many others died with no offspring.<\/p>\n

We, as individuals, are <\/strong>so<\/em><\/strong><\/em> lucky to be here!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some events are so statistically unlikely, so far-fetched, that we sometimes have to just shake our heads in amazement when they actually happen. The odds of winning the Powerball Lottery is only 1 in over 175 MILLION.\u00a0 That’s a number … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/kaser.com\/BlogicallyYours\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/kaser.com\/BlogicallyYours\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/kaser.com\/BlogicallyYours\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kaser.com\/BlogicallyYours\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kaser.com\/BlogicallyYours\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/kaser.com\/BlogicallyYours\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32,"href":"http:\/\/kaser.com\/BlogicallyYours\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28\/revisions\/32"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/kaser.com\/BlogicallyYours\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kaser.com\/BlogicallyYours\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kaser.com\/BlogicallyYours\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}