The Improbable Odds of Our Existence
To exist is to be the beneficiary of an extraordinary, fleeting biological and chemical conspiracy. You are composed of trillions of atoms that have assembled in an intricate, cooperative manner to create a single sentient being. These atoms are mindless and indifferent; they don't know they exist, and they certainly don't know you exist. For the roughly 650,000 hours of a long human life, these particles will answer to a single impulse: to keep you "you." Eventually, for reasons unknown, they will shut down, disassemble, and go off to become other things—a leaf, a raindrop, or another person. The same ordinary elements found in any drugstore—carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen—flock together on Earth to form life, yet they largely decline to do so anywhere else in the known universe.
Beyond the chemical luck of your composition lies a 3.8-billion-year streak of biological fortune. Survival on Earth is a tenuous business; 99.99 percent of all species that have ever existed are now extinct. To be here today, every single one of your forebears, reaching back to the first primordial spark of life, managed to find a mate and live long enough to reproduce. Not one of your direct ancestors was eaten by a predator, starved, or stepped on before passing on their genetic material. You are the result of a precise, unbroken chain of hereditary combinations. Had any of those millions of ancestors deviated—had they been a second slower or a millimeter to the left—you might currently be licking algae off a cave wall instead of existing as a modern human.
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