User blog comment:LurkerLordB/Real-Life People born after a POD/@comment-1375165-20120803044713

LLB, you make it sound like there's a 1 in 12 billion probability that a certain person will be born from that father or that the results of copulation unconnected to the POD will somehow be affected by a far-off difference.

First, most of the differences between sperm cells are inconsequential and even the major physical differences won't affect: A. what name they got or B. how they grew up, if other circumstances are the same. So yes, there may be 12 billion sperm but that doesn't mean there are 12 billion possible children or that different children will be extremely distinct.

Second, those statistics are the same as saying that there's a 1 in 6 probability of rolling a 5 when you throw a die. There may be six equally likely possibilities but the results of the throw are predetermined from, at the very least, the moment it leaves your hand and, for all intents and purposes, from well before you decided to throw it. Outcomes involving macroscopic objects such as dice and, yes, even sperm are not some quantum wavefunction waiting to collapse and don't operate probabilistically the way this post describes.

I'd even say that going back 250 years ago, the likelihood of you being born is ~100% or close to one hundred percent since probabilistic influences play such a small role in human affairs. The fun thing I find with alternate history is that it's a chance to do a hypothetical, "what if this happened instead?" then follow this determinate domino effect into its future. It loses some of its lustre when you take these probabilistic events too seriously.

For what it's worth, those points at the end about how many people would die from natural causes bring up a very interesting point and I completely agree that seeing more than a few people well ahead of a POD, in an area clearly affected by the POD, can be infuriating.