Rare Probabilities

The probability that you would be struck by a meteor in a given hour is about 8.3 × 10^-15.

The age of the universe is about 13.7 billion years, or 1.2 × 10¹⁴ hours. An extreme underestimate would be that a meteorite hit the earth only once during this time span. Then the probability that such a disaster would happen in a given hour is the inverse of the above number, about 8.3 × 10^-15. This rather sloppy calculation provides a rough idea of how small the probability 10^-15 is. Iba and Hukushima recently succeeded in generating rare events with probabilities as small as 10^-60 on a computer.

From here.

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