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Live a life as an elephant

LegendaryOdds: 1 in 3.8 × 10¹⁵

About 465,000 elephants are left in Africa and Asia. About 465 thousand elephants are alive right now. Your odds of being reborn as one are 1 in 3.

Sources: IUCN African Elephant Status Report 2016 (~415,000) plus Asian elephants (~50,000, IUCN Red List).

Your life

  1. Day 1 · You are born in the Okavango Delta after 22 months in the womb, about 100 kilograms.
  2. Month 3 · You drink your mother’s milk. Your aunts and sisters crowd around you when danger comes.
  3. Year 3 · You practise with your trunk, which has tens of thousands of muscles.
  4. Year 9 · A drought. The rivers shrink.
  5. Year 15 · You are an adult.
  6. Year 25 · You have a calf of your own, and your family is a dozen strong.
  7. Year 45 · You lead your family now. You remember waterholes from droughts decades ago.

Get rebornEvery number and its source

Questions

What are the odds of being reborn as an elephant?

Odds: 1 in 3.8 × 10¹⁵. About 465,000 elephants are left in Africa and Asia. (IUCN African Elephant Status Report 2016 (~415,000) plus Asian elephants (~50,000, IUCN Red List).)

What are my odds of being reborn as a human?

About 1 in 210 billion if any animal can be drawn. There are roughly 8.2 billion people, but around 1.3 sextillion copepods, 440 quintillion soil nematodes and 10 quintillion insects. Among mammals and birds only, the odds improve to about 1 in 21.

What is the most common animal on Earth?

By head count, tiny crustaceans called copepods (about 1.3 × 10²¹, an order-of-magnitude estimate), then soil nematodes (about 4.4 × 10²⁰, van den Hoogen et al. 2019). That is why the true-odds draw almost always makes you something small.

The odds, animal by animal

Copepod Soil nematode Insect Ant Antarctic krill Honey bee Fish Wild bird Bat Chicken Wild rodent Human House sparrow Cow Dog Blue whale Giant panda