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Comment by ploum | Hacker News Reader

I met my wife because she saw on facebook a screenshot someone has taken from a tweet I did about a terrorist attack. (Charlie Hebdo 2015- Paris).

This encouraged her to read my blog then to get in touch, etc…

So meeting my wife happened because:

1. There was a terrorist attack 2. I tweeted about it 3. The tweet became popular 4. A random someone took the time to screenshot it to share it on Facebook 5. That random screenshot managed to get through my future wife timeline.

To this day, when I look at my son, I wonder how odds were that he exists.

(I told the story in French here for those really curious: https://ploum.net/comment-les-reseaux-sociaux-ont-transforme... )

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I shuffled a deck of cards, then spread it on the table. I looked at the cards and though to myself: what are the odds!

Same as the odds of every other child that was ever conceived. It's really easy to look backwards in time, think of every single "if this never happened..." moment, and conclude that the probability is near zero. And you would be right.

And they say engineers aren’t romantics

exactly. think about your existence. You wouldn't exist if your parents hadn't met and reproduced, and if their parents hadn't met and reproduced, and so on until you get to our monocellular ancestor. Everyone here is the product of a very long, unbroken line of ancestry spanning back billions of years! If any of those ancestors had not chosen to reproduce, you don't exist. It's mindblowing to me. Actually one of the main reasons I wanted children was to continue this line, why should I be the one to break it?

I had a friend who would say the following the middle aged female friends who didn’t have daughters:

Did your mom have a daughter? Female answers “yes”

Did her mom have a daughter? Yes

This lineage of course extends beyond even human history back to Proto life forms.

And then you end it with “after all that, you’re ending the legacy by not having a daughter”.

Are they still friends?

You could have a son instead, it wouldn't make a difference

For most of human history, spouses probably met from a fairly limited pool of suitors in their small band or village. Of course it became different in large cities, or once international travel became possible, and especially now when you can "meet" someone on the other side of the world without leaving your mom's basement.

The odds your son exists are about the same as the chance that the last extant turtle on Earth, swimming alone through the Earth's barren oceans, should happen to swim right through a particular wooden ring, tossed at random into the sea from some vessel a million years earlier.

If something has to happen, it will happen.

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