Understood, but it just doesn't work that way.

When you flip a fair coin, the chance of a heads is 50%. Whether it comes up heads or not, the chance is still 50% that it could have come up heads. If it does come up heads, that only means the 50% chance came up. It was still only a 50/50 chance. Even if you get heads ten times in a row (a roughly 1/1000 chance), as long as it's a fair coin, and nothing else is affecting the toss, the odds for the next flip are still 50/50. And the odds against ten heads in a row are still 1024 to 1. Even after it happens.

Same thing here. Let's assign the chance of a jogger on the beach getting hit by an airplane making an emergency landing on any given day a 1 in a million chance.

So, on any given day, there's a 1/1,000,000 chance of the event. It's 1/1,000,000 the day before the event. It's 1/1,000,000 the day after the event. And even on the day it happened, the chance of it happening was still 1/1,000,000.

It's just that, on that day, it actually happened. The fact that it happened doesn't change the chance of it happening. "After the event" has no effect on the odds of the event.

So, for that day, for that particular jogger and pilot, the chance was still 1 in a million. They just got a really bad roll of the dice.


What you're talking about in the 100% is that, no matter how slim the chance, sooner or later, an event WILL happen, if you just have enough "tries". That's true. With enough attempts, no matter how unlikely, anything that's actually possible will happen sooner or later. But the odds for each individual 'attempt' are still however long they are.