0264 - 2025.12 Coincidence

Do you believe in coincidences?

I do.

My name is Manatie. I go by my surname only these days, my parents thought it amusing to name me Hugh. Old family name they said, but I got tired of the joke.

However my name sort of, obliquely, indirectly led me to where I am now. Not quite nominative determinism, but something parallel. My areas of scholarly interest, maths, probability, statistics, should have made me an actuary. But computers got too smart and I ended up at the quaintly named Department of Unlikely Coincidences.

Before you ask, coincidences can be ambiguous. It’s neither “a coincidence” nor “not a coincidence”. Sometimes there is uncertainty. Unlikely is the term we use.

An example from climate change will illustrate the point.

A South East Asian country has a one in three hundred years flood. Records don’t actually go back that far. What if there is another one in less than three hundred years? Say, just five years later, or one year later. It may be a statistical improbability, but is it a coincidence? If so, what makes it a coincidence? What, if anything, is the significance?

Now I’ve used a meteorological example, and with climate change the underlying factors were rapidly changing. So it was not a coincidence; a probability of 1:300 had changed to 1:5 because the ground rules had altered. Governments needed to prepare, not rely upon old data.

Some of you may remember comet 3I/ATLAS. For many scientists it was a very curious object; for one or two it was evidence of interstellar visitors.

It turned out to be one of the infinite variety of galactic objects we had not seen before, but what if it had been a passing alien probe doing a fly by? Here at the Department we calculated the non-binary probability of another, subsequent, similar visitor. One chance in seven we will have a similar object within the next 50 years. So high you ask? Well partly because we have become so good at detecting such objects, partly because having seen one we now know such objects exist, and partly because coincidences don’t happen as single events. Sometimes it’s just cognitive dissonance. Sometimes.

Our job, after all, is to prepare the governments of the world for surprises, and it’s better to be prepared five years early than five years late!

Let me give you another current example from my work, and how we can get it wrong. Most of what I do - or rather, my very small team does - is to examine unlikely events or discoveries and attempt to impute the likelihood of a coincidental finding.

Yes, we are mindful of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, so we quickly filter out the needles from the haystacks, the wheat from the chaff, the jewel from the crown. Most of the job is boring, boring, boring.

But then, suddenly, something so interesting happens you know you will remember it long enough to tell your grandchildren what important things you worked on!

We got a report, from the Moon no less, of a previously unknown crystal cave, with unusual properties. The media are, as usual, beside themselves with speculation. Entrepreneurs want to exploit it, scientists of every kind want to examine it, manufacturers want samples they can reverse engineer. Plus the usual bunch of skeptics don’t believe it, the doomsayers foretell the end of life as we know it, the delusional tell of everything from the second coming to an alien spy base on our doorstep.

Our job in the Department was to calculate the coincidence. With, I may say, very little hard facts to inform, this was extraordinarily unusual with no historic precedent. Usually we have squllions of data points, a grid of related and semi related nodes of information that we triangulate like surveyors of old. But this time, very little that was statistically significant.

So like a pub crowd we played games, reverted to learned experience. The team is smart and intuitive, and the crowd is sometimes more correct than the individual, and this was not something we could delegate.

The premise: If there is one cave, will there be another?

The Lascaux Cave, despite being man made, is unique due to history and location and human development. One of the few comparable discoveries we could refer to. But the Moon is not southern France.

So, if our crystals are alien in manufacture, it is, we concluded, a single creation, as mining surveys on the Moon had not detected underground cavities. To be fair they had not found this, or more correctly, had not identified it as being of significance. The area it was found in was slightly newer that it surrounds. But aliens on the Moon? They would have left other artefacts and nothing has been found.

Alternately, if natural, for the same non-detection reasons the cave is likely unique. Perhaps a meteor impact created just the right conditions, so the combination of factors - meteor, composition, mass, speed and angle of impact, geological structure of the impact zone, that sort of thing - meant it was a one in 76 million chance event. Not zero, but so unlikely that it didn’t happen twice, and with so few meteors left in the solar system it won’t happen again.

Smug is a nice word. One of those words in English that sounds like the condition it describes. We were overconfident, just plain smug. Like the odds of winning the lotto, a non zero but very remote possibility that we were wrong. Like the once in 300 year flood that recurs in 5 years. Complacent in our prediction, we were about to inform our employers.

One of the team said lets sleep on the report.

Why? I asked.

Just a feeling.

So we slept, and in the morning my gut feeling had changed. Many of the team also. Logically, mathematically we were right. Based on not enough information our collective guts were suggesting caution.

Only twelve people in the world knew what we were working on, and chastened our tardy response, our procrastination. We prevaricated some more to their annoyance; they wanted to make an informed announcement.

Then, as they say, we found our coincidence.

The second cousin of one of the team was going to a wedding. You know, in one of those out of the way places that the blissful couple adore but the invited guests have to visit their bank manager before RSVPing. The wedding, imminent in the calendar, had been postponed while a new venue was found.

Our calculations were completely and utterly useless.

There was another cave on Mars.

Not a coincidence, a worry.