[Request] What are the odds that I am to get struck by lighting everyday for the the rest of my life?

Let's assume you live exactly 58 more years, dying at 80 years and 248 days. 58*365+14 [to account for leap years] = 21,184. So you're looking at a little over 21,000 more days of life. I'm going to ignore any and all consequences of you getting hit by lightning and presume you are Electroman, the new superhero I made up just now.

A Google search for 'odds of being struck by lightning' provides a figure from National Geographic stating the odds of being a victim of a lightning strike in the USA in any given year are about 1 in 700,000. I'm using this figure because it's nice and round and I feel like it.

Let's say the figure of 1 in 700,000 is for you getting hit on any given day; assume your likelihood for being a human lightning rod are equal every day of the year because screw weather patterns and stuff. The odds of you getting hit 2 days in a row is (1/700,000)(1/700,000) = 1/(700,0002). That's 1/490,000,000,000. For 3 days in a row, your odds would be (1/700,000)(1/490,000,000,000). I'm not writing that out because it's a ridiculously huge denominator. But this gives is a standard formula to use for this equation: 1/(700,000[number of consecutive days]). So your odds of getting struck by lightning every single day for the next 21,184 days are approximately 1/(700,00021,184).

To understand just how large that denominator is, I found a calculator of huge numbers online (defuse.ca/big-number-calculator.htm) and entered 700,00021,184. I copied the output into Microsoft Word and checked the word count to see how many characters there were (without spaces, of course). The 51 page output was 123,823 characters long (without spaces). The odds are, therefore, lower than 10-122,822); ou're looking at 1/(1 followed by 122,822 zeroes) and that still isn't low enough.

So what can possibly come close to that denominator? Well, for reference, the estimated number of atoms in the entire known universe is around 1080, which is a 1 followed by 80 zeroes. Nowhere near what you're looking at in terms of hugeness. If you're familiar with the concept of a Planck volume in quantum physics and such (I'm not, but Google taught me just enough to totally act like an expert if nobody asks me about the concept), then you know it's a ridiculously tiny number (~1.610-35). Google tells me that there are about 8.510185 Planck volumes in the known universe. Still not close, even if it is unbelievably massive beyond human comprehension. Getting larger than this is just asinine because it's like trying to devise a huge number for the sake of saying 'hey, look at how many digits I can write!' If you want to see the largest number ever used in any context even remotely practical, look up Graham's number. It's ridiculous.

Anyways, what this giant wall of text and numbers means is that, realistically, your odds of being struck by lightning every day for the rest of your life are beyond infinitesimally small, because the number we're discussing is exponentially larger than your personal concept of infinity because the human brain cannot physically comprehend something of such magnitude except through abstract mathematical notation. If you somehow forced your brain to process the quantity of data we're discussing, your head would turn into a black hole. Possibly literally, let the physics and astronomy people figure that part out. I hope this answers your question.

/r/theydidthemath Thread