Have you ever wondered if there has ever been a moment in our history when no one was watching because every living human just happened to blink at the exact same time? This intriguing thought experiment combines the mundane act of blinking with the vastness of human population statistics. Let’s explore this idea in detail.
Humans blink about once every four seconds, and a typical blink lasts about a third of a second. This means that the chance a particular person will be blinking at any given moment is about 1 in 12. If we consider the probability that a second person will also be blinking at that same moment. It’s 1 in 12 squared, or 1 in 144.
To put this into perspective, within 1/144th of a second, we would expect to find one simultaneous blink between two people. In practical terms, this means you and a friend probably blink together every 48 seconds or so. But what happens when we consider more people?
The chances of simultaneous blinks decrease dramatically as we add more individuals. For example, five people, like the members of the Backstreet Boys, probably only blink together once a day. If we expand this to a group of 22 people, they will only blink at the same time once every six quadrillion years. The numbers become astronomically large very quickly.
Now, let’s consider the entire global population of approximately 8 billion people. The number of years we would have to wait for a simultaneous blink among all these people is a number followed by 8 billion zeros. This is an unfathomably long time, far beyond the age of the universe.
This fascinating exercise illustrates just how rare a perfectly synchronized blink would be among the entire human population. It means that at any given moment, there is always someone watching. This constant observation underscores the connectivity and awareness that exists within humanity, even in the simplest of actions.
In conclusion, the probability of every human on Earth blinking at the exact same moment is so incredibly low that it’s virtually impossible. We have never all blinked together, ensuring that there is always someone, somewhere, with their eyes open. We are always watching…
