A while ago, a 4chan user posted a thought experiment on the internet. Here’s how it goes:
That’s an interesting concept that I would like to analyze. The first question I have is, “How dangerous is it for an individual person?” There’s currently 8.1 billion people living on Earth, which means that, every day, there would be a 0.000000012% chance that the hand would crush you. And considering the growing population of the planet, that percentage would get smaller every day.
That leads us to ask, “What are odds of the hand crushing me in my lifetime?” The average life expectancy is 73.4 years, give or take a few years depending on your sex, the place you live, your overall health, etc. 73.4 years is 26809.35 days if we account for leap years. If we multiply the aforementioned percentage with 26809.35, we get a 0.00033% chance. That’s still pretty low.
Of course, your own life wouldn’t be the only thing you would worry about. What are the odds of the hand crushing someone close to you? According to the most popular theory, a person can hold a maximum of 150 relationships at once. Let’s assume you somehow manage to reach that number and maintain it for your entire life. The odds of a friend or a family member dying from the hand are 0.05% at most. If we go for a more realistic number, such as 75, the odds drop to 0.025%.
Overall, the hand has a near non-existant chance of (physically or emotionally) hurting you during your lifetime. Unless it kills a world leader or something like that, it wouldn’t even be dangerous on a large scale. Although, people would still not be okay with a hand killing random people. To answer the poster’s question, humanity would eventually find a way to destroy or immobilize the hand. If such a thing was impossible, people would see the hand the same way they see traffic accidents or cancer. It has a chance of affecting you, but you can’t spend your whole life worrying about it.
Of course, that’s only the average person. Some wacky people would reproduce as much as possible to reduce their chances of death. Some people would try to find a pattern in the random deaths and use it to push an agenda. Some people would claim that the hand is a tool of God. Even though the origin of the hand is a mystery (that might not even have an answer), people would push their theories as facts. The hand would even starts a few religions and cults.
Huh, that one short post inspired a lot of text. I hope you found it interesting. Are my math and logic sound? Is there something more I could’ve talked about? Do you have any thoughts on the hand? I’d love to hear you out.