Eli5: What’s the difference between something with 1 in a million odds and 0 in a million odds?

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I was thinking about lottery odds, and how so much of the pitch is, essentially, you miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take, with the thought that you should at least enter because your odds go up so much with just one ticket. The odds were non existent before, and now they exist even if they’re vanishingly small.

Is the difference between 1 in a million and 0 in a million actually somehow more than the difference between 1 in a million and 2 in a million, or between 492,368 in a million vs 492,369 in a million? Or are all three of these functionally the same?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Imagine a room with 1 million atoms of air and you are one them. There’s a machine that makes 2 atoms bump into other. Even though there’s a lot of atoms the chance of you as the atom being picked is tiny. 0 in a million is like you’re not even in the room

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