For this thought experiment, let’s equate a probability of 1 (100% chance, a certainty) with the diameter of the observable universe. The diameter of the observable universe is about 93 billion light-years (because, during the 13.8 billion years since it started, the universe has been steadily expanding). With this analogy, let’s consider some probabilities!

According to the National Weather Service, your odds of being struck by lightning this year (if you live in the US, that is) are 1 in 1,042,000. Less than one in a million. One part in a million of the diameter of the universe is 93,000 light-years, which is far enough to take you outside the Milky Way, but on a cosmic scale, absolutely tiny.

The odds of winning the jackpot with a single ticket in the U.S. Powerball lottery are around 1 in 292 million. That’s like 318 light-years set against the diameter of the universe. 318 light-years is a long way. Even so, it’s an almost-reasonable distance. Most of the brighter stars you see in the night sky are closer than that. That’s almost the Sun’s neighborhood. Compared to the entire universe. Maybe that’s why they say the lottery is for suckers…

The odds of being struck by lightning three times in your lifetime are, mathematically, 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000. The actual odds are even lower, since there’s a non-zero chance that you’ll be killed by a lightning strike, making getting another impossible. If your odds of dying in a lightning strike are 10%, then your odds of surviving are 9/10, and your odds of surviving the first two so you can get the third are (1 in a million) * (9/10) * (1 in a million) * (9 in 10) * (1 in a million), or about 81 in one hundred million trillion.That’s 81 in 100,000,000,000,000,000,000. That’s roughly the diameter of the Earth-moon system compared to the diameter of the universe.

The odds of putting 100 pennies in a cup, shaking them up, and scattering them so they all land flat, and then having every single coin come up heads, are 1 in 1, 267, 650, 600, 228, 229, 401, 496, 703, 205, 376. That’s the diameter of a grain of sand compared to the entire universe. Literally.

Get a standard deck of cards. Take out the jokers and the instructions. Shuffle the deck and pick a card at random. Do this 25 times. The odds of picking the jack of clubs every single time are like a proton compared to the visible universe.

If you pick 43 letters at random, the odds of forming the string

actisceneielsinoreaplatformbeforethecastlef

(that is, the first 43 letters of Hamlet) are as small as one Planck length (which is the smallest unit of distance that ever gets used in actual physics) compared to the visible universe. For reference, a Planck length is ten million trillion times smaller than a proton, which is itself a trillion times smaller than a grain of salt.

Incidentally, if you assembled random 43-letter strings, you would have to do it

32, 143, 980, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000

times to have a 99% chance of producing the first 43 letters of Hamlet in one of them. But a human bard did it in, at most, a couple hundred tries. Isn’t that weird? More probability stuff (and black hole stuff) to come!