this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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Dr. Manhattan: Thermodynamic miracles...events with odds against so astronomical they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing. And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive, meeting, siring this precise son, that exact daughter...
...Until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged.
To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold...
That is the crowning unlikelihood.
The thermodynamic miracle.
Laurie: But...if me, my birth, if that's a thermodynamic miracle...I mean, you could say that about anybody in the world!
Dr. Manhattan: Yes.
Anybody in the world.
ETA: Because I'm a pedant, typical sperm count range from 15 million to 200 million, but Dr. Osterman was a physicist, not an endocrinologist.