Statistical Arguments For and Against the Existence of Finland
There is a 50/50 chance that Finland does not exist.
There are approximately 5.4 million Finnish people, right? That’s out of roughly 7.4 billion humans on the planet. That means Finns make up 0.0729% of the planet.
That’s not even a tenth of a percent. That means that more than 99.9% of the world isn’t Finnish. How do we know this? Government censuses.
Now the best government censuses have a margin of error of about 1%. So Finns make up 0.0729% of the planet, plus or minus 1%.
In conclusion, there’s a 50/50 chance Finland does not exist.
from Very Finnish Problems (h/t Iris J.)
Which reminds me of a passage from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams:
It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.