Life is just dumb luck
And that can be good
Life is just dumb luck. A small phrase, lots of information.
Dumb. I say dumb, meaning that the what controls us is not intelligent or with a rational purpose.
Luck. I say luck not in the sense that we cannot control our lives at all. I can choose the next action I take. The background I used to select my choice has an enormous “chance” factor. So the past is out of my control and so is the future reaction to what I do.
Life
Let’s take life for starters. You are reading this, so you are a search engine bot or an alive person (please leave a comment if you are neither). You are a person on a country planet of 7 thousand millions of people. People throw this number out and I guess numbers lose meaning after abuse. So let me point out something. If you put 7 billion people in a row so you could shake their hand, let us say you invest a whole second to shake their hand (you should take 2–3 seconds). You’d need 230 years to greet everyone.
That seems a big number
Let’s push this forward, you are 1 in 7 billion. But all these people are in a single planet in a specific solar system, one of 8 (Pluto you’ll always have a special dwarf-sized space in our heart). We don’t even have to go to the next planet, let’s focus with the moon.
Touching the Moon
We’ve all seen it, and some of us have even written poetry about it. This two sided (if you allow me) stellar body is always at over 350.000 kilometers. How far is that? Well, since it’s going up, let’s call it “how tall” and that be 350.000.000 meters. Did that simplify things? No? OK, new perspective. Let’s say everyone is about 6 feet tall (or 180 cm). It’d take over 190 million people making a tower head-to-feet to graze the moon from the highest mountain. For context, 190 million is about the population of western Europe, and more than half the population of the entire US.
More numbers?
Numbers are beautiful, but I might lose readers, so let speed things up: you are 1 in 7 billion; the closest thing to us is a frozen rock; the distance from that rock to us 20 times the diameter of Earth. Let’s also add that your planet is one out of 8, in a solar system in a galaxy with billions of other planets. And then we add how many galaxies there are, the distance between them…
I don’t feel so well about this now
Are you feeling small or unspecial? It is normal to feel small. We are minuscule in the astrological sense in lifespan, space we occupy and effect we can have in the whole of space-time. But unspecial? Never, not a single one of us is unspecial.
The special case that is you
You know the odds of you being you? The odds that your genetic code was born? You come from a single ovule and one spermatozoid. Ovules are single each period, but a man can shoot over 15 million sperms in each “action”. That means that when your parents did the thing (whether it was at the sound of Leonard Cohen or in vitro) there was a 1 in 15 million chance that the combination that is you was a result, and that is without accounting odds of pregnancy per se.
Every bit of you is special
You have 100 trillion cells in your body. Every single one of them has a complex organization of parts. All of those 100 trillion cells are fed by a system that delivers the nutrients from a single point of extraction. That is right, the taco you eat, you digested it, scrapped it for useful parts and distributed said parts everywhere, even to the base of your nails.
How special can those cells can be? Allow me to tell you. Almost all of your cells include an energy factory which has a genetic code different from yours! You know why? Because it came from two! A long time ago a “dumb cell” ate a hard working completely different cell and instead of digesting it, they both survived and became symbiotic.
What. Are. The. Odds? Few, very few.
You are special, we are. As Margaret Mead said:
Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.
We are here because we were lucky.
Departure note
You cannot shake hands with everyone in the world (in these times, avoid shaking hands altogether), but you can lend a hand to the person next to you.
Because life is just dumb luck, but it doesn’t mean we cannot share our luck with each other.
Who knows, maybe we get lucky again and leave thing better afterwards.
