Have you ever really thought about the profundity of your existence? On dark, sleepless nights has it ever all just "sunk in" No? Well, let me help you with that...
On average, two million fertile sperm cells are produced every day in the male. That’s an average forty-five billion life-containing cells in one lifetime. Every single one of these seeds has its own unique DNA and the potential to create a person with a past, a present, a future, and a calling, who will love, and suffer.You are one of those sperm, and the possibility of it turning out to be EXACTLY you is 1 in one-hundred fifteenth billion.
The possibility that your grandfathers sperm will become your father and that your fathers sperm will then go on to become you is: 1 in one-hundred and forty four quadrillion.
The possibility of your existence after 25 years, since we live in an often wicked world of disease, war, natural disasters, etc is one in six hundred vigintillion. Let alone your father surviving, or your grandfather....
Those calculations are only based on fatherhood. They don’t include such things as motherhood, death by natural causes like illness, death by unnatural causes like suicide, etc...
If those things we’re included, the possibility of your existence would be ZERO PERCENT.
Literally, ZERO PERCENT.
And yet, against all the sheer logic and numbers, here you are... existing... ONE HUNDRED PERCENT. So lets take a moment to really appreciate this moment, to appreciate every little aspect of this one particular moment.
Are you deaf? No. We have a sense of hearing, thanks to twenty-four thousand fibers you have built in each of your ears. Take a moment to hear sounds passing in through the sides of your head, listen to everything indiscriminately through your auditory field, all of the noises, loud and subtle, and think could you live without this? Count another blessing.
Are you paralyzed? No. We can move, for within us Nature has designed hundreds of muscles and two hundred bones, with seven miles of nerve fiber all synchronized to do our bidding. Take a moment to shake your body, every limb. Isn't fun?
Our lungs labor always to filter life-giving oxygen through six hundred million pockets of fresh air while they rid us of gaseous wastes. The breath is always nourishing and purifying us no matter what we do. Take a deep breath.
We have blood in our bodies and air in our lungs. Within us we have twenty two trillion blood cells and within each cell are untold millions of molecules and within each molecule is an atom oscillating at more than ten million times each second. Each second, two million of your blood cells die to be replaced by two million more in a death-rebirth cycle that has continued since day one. Never let anything hold you back: The old you is always being replaced by the new you BIOLOGICALLY, so why not make the old you be replaced by the new you PSYCHOLOGICALLY, too?You deserve it, because this screen you are reading this on is made of atoms, you are made of atoms, and I am made of atoms. We are the universe experiencing itself.
Ah yes, and free will! The steering wheel which controls this human body-mind and which we can use for good or for ill. Let us choose to master, rather than obey. Let us choose to love, not hate. Laugh, not cry. Create, not destroy. Preserve, not quit. Heal, not wound. Give, not take. Act, not procrastinate. Grow, not rot. I can see that you are all alive BIOLOGICALLY, so CHOOSE to take advantage of it by being alive COGNIZANTLY too. You didn't choose to be born, but no one but you can choose to be ALIVE.
We have brains, the most complex structure in the universe, which we may never fully understand. Within its three pounds are thirteen billion nerve cells which allow us to create, learn, and ponder. To help file away every perception, every sound, every taste, every smell, every action we have ever experienced since the day of our birth, we have implanted, within our cells, more than one thousand billion billion protein molecules.Every little incident in your life is there waiting only our recall. With this mind we can think, reason, and imagine- and we can dream. Oh yes, this world is indeed a beautiful place, but the beauty even of the universe out there is surpassed by the beauty of the universe behind our eyes and between our ears, this inner universe, that place where a man can make an idea, and that idea can change the world around him, that place where a man can go and contemplate, cry, or hide.
Truly, no work of art is greater than this work of art that made it, no machine is greater than this machine that made it - the human being.
All these things are provided to you in moment, every moment, free of charge. We have a lot to be thankful for. Its true! The best things in life really are free!
Boom de yada, boom de yada, boom de yada, boom de yada
Boom de yada, boom de yada, boom de yada, boom de yada
I love the mountains
I love the rolling hills
I love the flowers
I love the daffodils
I love the fire's glow
When all the lights are low
Boom de yada, boom de yada, boom de yada, boom de yada
Boom de yada, boom de yada, boom de yada, boom de yada
I agree wholeheartedly with the spirit of your post but for the sake of accuracy I would like to revisit the math.
ReplyDeleteThis is an area where people classically get confused about the difference between low-probability odds, and zero odds. An example: creationists often argue that the likelihood of molecular structures assuming the particular structure they have in the kind of life that currently exists on Earth that the odds are effectively zero, and that therefore it couldn't have happened by chance. Let's have a look at really low-probability odds with a simple example:
I have five coins. I toss these five coins at one go and write down, for each coin, whether I have heads or tails for each. Going from positions one to five, I might write this as:
HHTHT
Let's say I repeat this operation one hundred times. Now I have a hundred rows of notations that look like these ones:
HHTHH
TTHHT
TTTTH
HHHTT
THTHH
...
Now if I look at this column of notations in isolation and ask myself what the odds are of that particular combination happening from that particular hundred throws, the answer will be 1 in (2 & 500) or approximately 1 in 3 times 10 * 150. This denominator is astronomically huge, which makes the fraction exceedingly small. But no matter which combination we threw, the odds would be the same -- and the odds we would throw one of them (ignoring heart attacks and sudden meteor strikes, etc.) is one hundred percent. So really, there's a world of difference between a low-probability odd and zero -- over a long enough time frame, to paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke, everything not forbidden is compulsory -- given enough time, everything that is allowed to happen will happen.
Errata: 1 in (2 ^ 500); 1 in 3 times (10 ^ 150). (Typos!)
Delete(Also, "vignitillion" in the original post should be "vigintillion.")
DeleteThank you for your information and for correcting my typo :) The purpose of this article is only to put people in a state of awe and wonder at being alive, and to appreciate the fact that they are alive. Not to make any theological statements.
ReplyDelete