The Answer to Cosmic Mysteries Encoded in 225 Million Sperm

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A friend once shared with me his disappointment at being unable to father a child because of a low sperm count. As delicately as I could think to phrase the question, I asked: "Well, what is it, I mean your. . . ah. . . " "Six million per milliliter, " he replied and then added, "20 million is the magical cut off point, although there can be other problems apart from the actual numbers." I kept the next question to myself as the conversation moved on to other subjects. But it had formed an itchy patch on the surface of my frontal lobe that refused to go away. Since conception only needs one sperm, why wouldn't say three or four be sufficient, rather than 225 million, contained in the average ejaculate? I did find several interesting responses on the Internet (like this one). However, the real answer stared back at me one cloudless night as I drove beyond the light pollution of Dallas and its suburbs. The Milky Way spread out before me in all its glitter produced my "aha" moment.


The universe has no intelligent designer, finagling and adjusting its parameters. The appearance of purposefulness emanates purely from the numbers. Astronomers now say that our galaxy alone has 400 billion stars and tens of billions of potentially habitable planets. Even given those numbers, I wouldn't be at all surprised if no other life exists in the whole cosmos. Just as it takes an ejaculation of millions of sperm to fertilize one human egg and the discarding of several quadrillion unused sperm over the course of a male's lifetime, then the same may be true of life itself. The more unique and complex the phenomenon, the more opportunities have to be created in order for it to happen.

We can take little solace in a casino-driven universe, as unpredictable as any Vegas slot machine. But we can celebrate the fact that being alive in the midst of such odds means we already won the lotto.