Percentage Batmans / Population
So I read this article on Scientific American which extrapolates out the ‘real-world’ attributes of Batman, given the details in the film and moves.
Fun facts included are limits on the number of opponents he could take on (5 to 6, as opposed to the 10s he fights routinely), the training regime he’d need to undertake, and the ‘bone hardening’ required to survive his nocturnal crime-fighting.
However, the bit that really caught my was toward the end of the article:
How many of us do you think could become a Batman?
If you found the percentage of billionaires and multiply that by the percentage of people who become Olympic decathletes, you could probably get a close estimate.
And I thought: “And…? That’s not a number. You can’t take us this far, not calculate the odds that I could become Batman and still call yourself a true Batman Researcher.”
So I did some research.
The best I could find of the number of Olympic Decathletes is a Wikipedia entry that seems to show that 39 people competed in the 2004 Olympics. Thus the best percentage we can estimate, given the Wikipedia entry for human population estimates it to be around 6 710 154 570, is:
(39 / 6 710 154 570) * 100 = 5.81 x 10^-7
Okay. The Billionaire numbers are slightly larger (apparently it’s easier to become rich than it is to become an Olympian), totally 946 last year, according to Forbes. Thus our percentage Billionaires comes out to:
(946 / 6 710 154 570) * 100 = 1.41 x 10^-5
Great. Thus, according to our Batman Researcher, here is the truth: those two percentages, multiplied, give us the odds of a naturally occurring Batman on the current planet.
The odds of a real life Batman occuring naturally on Planet Earth is approximately 8.87 x 10^-15, meaning there is a 1 in 112 billion chance that Batman walks among us.
