Dying Another Day: The Miraculous Career of James Bond

God loves James Bond.

Well, OK, He loves all of us. But in spite of Bond’s killing, womanizing, martini-swilling ways, God must really dig 007. I mean, given the guy’s longevity in perhaps the world’s most dangerous career, supernatural grace might be the most logical conclusion we can come to.

For 26 films (including Spectre, released today), Bond has dodged bullets, knives, explosives, lasers, poisonous spiders and angry attack sharks. And while much of his survivability could be attributed to Bond’s super skills, his nifty gadgets and his opponents’ strange yen for needlessly complicated execution schemes, sometimes his escapes feel, shall we say, flat-out miraculous.

Like the time he made like Pitfall Harry and made his escape on the backs of hungry crocodiles.

Or when he parasurfs clear of a massive tsunami.

Or when he lucks out of a premature cremation (sorry about the profanity).

Think the Daniel Craig Bond movies are a tad more realistic? Well, according to medical experts, Bond really should’ve died seven minutes into Skyfall, when he was shot with a depleted uranium shell.

In 2012, enterprising fan Gordon Stanger calculated that 007’s been shot at an astounding 4,662 times—and that’s not counting the unofficial entrants in the James Bond cannon (the 1967 spoof Casino Royale and 1983’s Never Say Never Again) or the two latest movies, Skyfall and Spectre. Stanger figures that, with each exchange of gunfire, there’s about a 5 percent chance of Bond being fatally wounded. Squish those calculations together, and the chance of Bond dodging all 4,662 bullets is around 1.4 × 10 to the negative 104th power, “which is as close to zero as makes no difference,” Stanger writes.

Now granted, James Bond is a fictional character. The only way he can die is if Sony Pictures decides that he should.

But still, Bond’s on-screen luck does remind me how we sometimes blithely ignore the miracles in our own lives—beginning with, well, our own lives.

According to some figures from author Ali Binazir, we are all highly improbable creatures. The odds of you being you—that your mom and dad would’ve gotten together and (ahem) gotten together with just the right timing to create the person you are—is 1 in 400 quadrillion. Then when you pile on all the other incredibly improbable events that led to you—that all our many, many ancestors made it to reproductive age—that’s a one-in-10 shot to the negative 45,000th power. Binazir says that’s like 2 million people each rolling a trillion-sided die … and each getting the very same number.

In other words, the fact that you’re alive and here, reading this, is waaaaay more improbable than Bond’s amazing survivability. (And we’re not even getting into the crazy improbability that the universe supports life at all.)

Most of our lives can feel pretty miraculous, when you think about it—meeting certain people at just the right time in our lives, strange opportunities that came along just when we needed them, et cetera. Many people would say that those moments are simple products of chance or luck, but I’m not convinced.

In Spectre—just after James Bond tells Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux) that his career choices came down to either being a spy or a priest— Swann suggests that it must be difficult to always be doing this sort of work “always alone.”

“I’m never alone,” Bond says.

It’s a strange comment, but one—given his ludicrous survivability—may be more true than even he knows. And maybe the same could be said of us.