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Live a life as a blue whale

LegendaryOdds: 1 in 1.8 × 10¹⁷

The largest animal that has ever lived, and one of the rarest. About 10 thousand blue whales are alive right now. Your odds of being reborn as one are 1 in 1.

Sources: IUCN Red List: 5,000–15,000 mature blue whales (order of magnitude only).

Your life

  1. Day 1 · You are born in the eastern Pacific, 7 metres long and around 2.5 tonnes.
  2. Month 3 · You drink hundreds of litres of milk a day and gain about 90 kilograms daily.
  3. Year 1 · Time to travel.
  4. Year 5 · You feed on krill, engulfing a swarm in a single lunge. A blue whale can eat around 16 tonnes in a day.
  5. Year 10 · Your low call can carry hundreds of kilometres underwater.
  6. Year 30 · The sea is louder than it used to be. Ships pass overhead.
  7. Year 60 · You are one of the oldest whales in the ocean.

Get rebornEvery number and its source

Questions

What are the odds of being reborn as a blue whale?

Odds: 1 in 1.8 × 10¹⁷. The largest animal that has ever lived, and one of the rarest. (IUCN Red List: 5,000–15,000 mature blue whales.)

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 Elephant Giant panda