I once toyed with the idea of molding young minds as a teacher - but apparently it is forbidden to impose military-style indoctrination techniques on children. I tried substitute teaching for a while before I learned that, and I had been toying with an analogy to illustrate just how precious the average day really is.
My assumptions were these:
1. There was only this world, and that we would ignore those periods when Earth was uninhabitable. This yielded a period of about 6 billion years of days like today - with a non-molten Earth and a Sun.
2. We would round up in human lifespan and assume a person had 100 years of adulthood, ignoring the first 15 when you're learning how to poop, ride a bike, speak, etc. Granted, some people and most politicians take much longer, but we wanted to base the exercise on "normal" people.
I asked a classroom of advanced chemistry students to help me with the math because, well, math.
The results were essentially these - the odds of you being alive today, able to walk and talk, on this planet are so astronomically remote that I had to compare them to a lottery for a suitable comparison.
The odds of you being here today are the equivalent of winning a standard 1:80M lottery - TWICE.
That makes this day quite literally the most precious thing you will ever have, by orders of magnitude that dwarf human intellect.
So here is my advice on what this all means: when someone tries to ruin your day, they are trying to rob you of something far greater than the winnings of TWO winning lottery tickets - so do not let them. Do not give them even one second of your precious, precious time. Flee them and turn to those whom you love - for the odds of the both of you being alive, in this moment, are so remote that it's a celestial wonder that it happens at all.
-The Gem Cutter
