“Congratulations! I’m delighted you could make it. Getting here wasn’t easy, I know. In fact I suspect it was a little tougher than you realize. To begin with, for you to be here now, trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble into an intricate and intriguingly obliging manner to create you. It’s an arrangement so specialized and particular that it has never been tried before and will only exist this once. For the next many years, we hope, these tiny particles will uncomplainingly engage in all the billions of daft cooperative efforts necessary to keep you intact and let you experience the supremely agreeable (but generally underappreciated) state known as existence.
Why atoms take this trouble is a bit of a puzzle. Being you is not a gratifying experience at the atomic level. For all their devoted attention, you atoms don’t actually care about you – indeed, they don’t even know that you’re there. They don’t even know that they are there. They are mindless particles, after all, and not even themselves alive! It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust – none of which had ever been alive, but all of which had once been you. Yet somehow, for the period of your existence, they will answer to a single overarching impulse: to keep you you…
… You may rejoice that it happens at all! Generally speaking in the universe it doesn’t, so far as we can tell. This is decidedly odd, because the atoms that so liberally and congenially flock together to form living things on earth are exactly the same atoms that decline to do it elsewhere!
But the fact that you have atoms, and that they assemble in such an orderly manner is only part of what got you here. To be here, now, alive and in the 21st century and smart enough to know it, you’ve also had to be the beneficiary of an extraordinary string of biological good fortune. Survival on earth is a surprisingly tricky business. Of the billions of billions of living things that have existed since the dawn of time, 99.999% are no longer around. Life on earth is not only brief, but dismayingly tenuous. It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life, but even better at extinguishing it. Not only have you been lucky enough, since time immemorial, to be attached to a favoured evolutionary line, but you have also been miraculously fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, every one of your forbearers on both sides has been healthy enough to reproduce and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of forwarding a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner, at the right moment, in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result – eventually, astoundingly, and all to briefly - in you.”
- Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything
awesome book. read it.
