So I was pondering one of our local frequent poster's comment on the anthropic principal. This principal posits that the universe seems to be finely tuned for human life. It further posits that if the early universe had one single extra atom or was just a teency bit cooler/hotter/larger/smaller/more antimatter/less antimatter etc... that life (heck, even matter itself) would not form.
That got me to thinking about my each of our incredibly unique place in this universe. What did it take for someone like me to be sitting here giving you good people grief about all this heady stuff? So many things were stacked against me being here. Why me?
Matter was created, galaxies formed, stars exploded creating the heavy elements that eventually comprised my atoms. Then life had to begin on this particular planet in this galaxy in this forgotten part of the universe. No matter what your religion tells you, I think we can all agree that life on this planet had a beginning. After that, a billion trillion circumstances had to happen in exactly the right order for me to be sitting here today.
If the very first RNA replication had generated 3 instead of 2 copies of itself, I would not be here
If my shrew-like ancestor had been eaten by a small dinosaur 64 millions years ago, I would not be here.
If a tree that grew 10 million years ago had not sprouted the branch in exactly the right spot to be in reach of my ape-like ancestor as she fell from the canopy of the fruit tree I would not be here.
Millions of generations later, a neanderthal survived a brutal ice-age winter and was able to mate with a homo-erectus that eventually produced the homo sapien that produced my great great grandfather who survived a one of the bloodiest civil wars in in modern history, was captured by the enemy, sent to federal prison camp, falsely accused of desertion by his Confederacy, came back home and fathered my grandfather who eventually gave rise to my father who just happened to fall in love with my mother.
The chain if events leading up to the formation of my mother was equally insanely improbable.
Of all those billions of possible combinations of sperm and egg - each producing a vastly different "me" than the me that I see in the mirror - one single sperm and one single egg combined to make the unique individual that you all have the displeasure of getting to know.
Your and my genetic lineage can be traced back 3.5 billion years ago. The chain of events leading up to me (and you and you and you, of course) actually started 13.5 billion years ago. Perhaps even longer ago than that if one accept the premise of the Big Squeeze theories.
Yet despite all those hundreds of trillions of sextillions of improbabilities, here I am. Right here. Right now. In this pivotal, fortunate era.
Think about it.
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