03/23/2020
What are the odds??
We as humans often totally misperceive the chances of a given event happening to us - all so often skewed by what we perceive as "common" based on what we see focused on in the mass media.
Here are some interesting probabilities for certain events - many of them genealogy related.
1) Chances of being hit by the anecdotal Lightning strike in a given year: about 1 in 1.2 million
2) Chances of being a twin: 1 in 250 births is a twin birth
3) Chances of having an auto accident during the period of driving 1000 miles: 1 in 366
4) Chances of being killed in an airplane accident: 1 in 5 million
5) Chances of having one million people in your family tree: 100% - though whether we can name them or not is another question.
6) Chances of being descended from English Royalty. Almost 100% if we do have English Ancestry. though that doesnt mean we know the names from us to them.
7) Chances of Identity Theft within a given year in US for a given person: about 6%. Of all Identity theft - less than 20% is based on the Internet and other digital technologies.
9) Identity Theft is much much more common as a result of using a credit card, people stealing mail from the mail box, answering the phone from someone we don't know (and believing what they tell us), or even leaving a purse in the car - - all of these together are much more commonly the source of identity theft - then whether or not we posted out email on line, or have a social media account, or have our genealogy tree on line, or because some company got hacked.
9) Chance of sharing a birth date with someone specific we meet: only 0.03%. However, if you have a group of 23 friends there is a 50-50 chance someone shares the same birthdate..
10) Chances of sharing a common ancestor with someone else as recorded in the Relative Finder app or in FamilySearch. I dont know the exact chance - - but among a group of like 50 people or so - the chances are actually extremely high that various people among the group will have common ancestry.
11) Probabilities that a 5th cousin of yours – has a clear DNA match with you (if you both took the test) about 1 in 10.
12) Two men In Britain with the same surname actually having a common recent ancestor within 20 generations: about 1 in 4.
13) The chances of someone with English ancestors being a descendant of the famous Lady Godiva who rode naked through the streets of England. Not sure – but extremely high – probably above 95%.
14) Odds of people in 1918 being infected by the Spanish Flu. 1 in 4 of dying from it: between 2 and 4 percent
15) Chances of having one million descendants.If your first few generations don't die out without descendants, chances are that, you would reach 1 million descendants within less then 10 generations - depending on birth rates
16) Chances of living to age 100 (for someone age 25 today)
projected to be about 6.1%, 10.2% based on current trends.
17) Chances of someone in China dying from the Coronavirus (to date) total population: 1.3 billion - total deaths to date: 3261
3261/1.3 B = 0.00025%
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