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The probability is also some argument by increduality anyway: 10-11, or you know, an occurrence rate of 10 after a trillion attempts.

In an "average" COVID-19 infection course in an adult human, it is estimated that at peak infection a person has 10^9 to 10^11 virion particles in their body alone. Multiply by the all the people infected, + all the animals, + parallel gene transfer with other viruses in the ecosystem...

[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/118/25/e2024815118



Each virus copy isn’t a different random sequence though. They have to share most of their code to work.


Of course, but if you're going to make arguments about probability in nature, they only mean something compared to the attempt space.




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