Lotto Millionaire!

I was reading the news the other day and saw a picture of some farmer in Iowa forking over a crisp $20 to buy some “Powerball tickets”. I began to wonder how many pigs he could have on his Iowa acreage if he won the $345,000,000 jackpot! And so I searched.

The largest single expense in growing a pig is the purchase of the piglet. An eight week old pig, weighing around 40 - 50 pounds, is approximately $80. Feed typically runs about $8 - $10 per 50 pound bag, and one bag will usually last two growing pigs about a week. You will also want to buy some straw or wood chips for your pig to sleep on. An estimate for growing a market pig (approximately 12 weeks) is $200.

Based on the cost of $200 per pig, that farmer could purchase 1,725,000 pigs to raise on his farm. But I doubt that he would remain an Iowa farmer given his newfound wealth. He’d probably opt out of farming and become a professional gambler or something. After winning the lotto with those odds, who could blame him.

That “game” the Iowa farmer was playing contained odds of 1-300,000,000 (300M). That same farmer has a better chance of being eaten by a shark while slopping his Iowa pigs as at winning that lottery. There is only 1-10,000,000(10M) chance of that happening as there are thirty attacks out of a population of about 300 million in the US.

By now, my ridicule of this lottery player may make you, incorrectly, think he is genetically defective or just plain stupid. In fact, it’s probably the opposite. By his very existence, that Iowa farmer is *very* lucky . “If you go back 10 generations (250 years) the chance of you being born at all is at most 1 divided by 6 x 10¹⁰⁰ or
1 in 60000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000000000000000

If you go back 1 million years or 40 000 generations, your chance of being born is at most 1 in 1.8 x 10403167 or 18 with 403,166 zeros after the 1.”

But now that this guys ancestors made it through the evolutionary hazards required to produce him, his odds of dying violently of the certain events are even better than his Powerball chance. A quiz for you. Which of these events are most likely to kill this potential Lotto-Millionaire?

1. A tornado.
2. A flood.
3. An asteroid.

Answer: An asteroid as we're more likely to perish from an asteroid strike (1 chance in 25,000) than we are from a flood (1 in 30,000) or a tornado (1 in 60,000).

This poor farmer, he’s also more likely to killed on the way home from buying his lotto ticket. His chances of dying from the following maladies are:

• Food poisoning: 1 in 3 million.
• Fireworks Accident: 1 in 1 million.
• Venomous Bite or Sting: 1 in 100,000
• Airplane Accident: 1 in 20,000
• Electrocution: 1 in 5,000
• Firearms Accident: 1 in 2,500.
• Fire: 1 in 800.
• Murder: 1 in 300.
• Car wreck: 1 in 100.

The sad thing is that even if this poor farmer from Iowa wins the lottery and makes it home, bad things are likely to happen to him and his family. Divorce, death, overdose, theft…it is truly sad but very likely.

Now I understand why this guy is playing the lottery…