Читать книгу LifeLines - Malcolm Doney - Страница 15

6

Ride your Luck

You’ve got to be in it to win it.

It could be you.

The chances are you’ll play it this week. Or someone in your family will. Seventy per cent of people in the UK play the National Lottery regularly. They’re betting that their number will come up. That luck will be on their side.

It’s not logical. It’s faith. Or maybe just fun.

The odds of winning the jackpot are 1 in 45 million. You are more likely to be crushed by a meteor (1 in 700,000), die from flesh-eating bacteria (1 in 1 million) or be hit by part of a plane falling from the sky (1 in 10 million).¹

We can’t prove luck exists but we often behave as if it does. ‘Good luck,’ we say, as if it will make some kind of difference. ‘Bad luck!’ we commiserate – as if some unseen force explains why your horse fell at the last, or you unexpectedly lost your job.

Why do we think it could be us? Perhaps it’s evolutionary. Perhaps it’s because the odds of just being alive on this good earth, in this strange universe, are so much longer.

Jim Al-Khalili, a theoretical physicist and former president of the British Humanist Association (now Humanists UK), writes: ‘For me nothing makes life more worth living than the knowledge that my very existence is thanks to a colossal sequence of events since the beginning of the universe. Whether or not I was inevitable, how can I not be grateful for this privilege of being? And why would I not make the most of it?’²

Someone with a lot of time on their hands calculated the odds of any of us being born at one in ten... followed by two and three-quarter million zeroes. In other words, the odds of being alive are so improbable that winning the lottery looks quite plausible. Just by being here all our numbers came up.

And we’re luckier still.

We can send our children to school, call on a doctor when we’re sick, vote out politicians we don’t like.

Most of this good fortune was made by people who came before us, people who got lucky with their own health or education, and decided to share their winnings by working for the rights we take for granted.

Religions find luck hard to explain. Faith and fate, divinity and destiny are not always good company. But whether we believe in God or don’t, we lucked out just by being alive. Right here, right now.