The Lucky Ones
Thursday, October 10
Today’s quote is another from Dawkins, this one from Unweaving the Rainbow.
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”
When our sun formed, 99.9% of the matter in our solar system got pulled into its enormous furnace.
In multiple ways, it’s extremely unlikely for us to exist, from the atoms that compose our bodies to the specific DNA sequence that guided its development.
How strange it is to be anything at all!