Introduction to Our Improbable Existence
To exist is to be the beneficiary of an extraordinary biological and chemical conspiracy. You are composed of trillions of atoms that have assembled in an intricate, cooperative manner to create a single sentient being. These atoms are mindless and indifferent, meaning they do not know they exist, and they certainly do not know you exist. If you were picked apart with tweezers, you would leave behind a pile of fine atomic dust that has never been alive, yet was once you.
For the roughly 650,000 hours of a long human life, these particles will answer to a single impulse to keep you functioning. Eventually, for reasons scientists still do not fully understand, they will shut down, disassemble, and go off to become other things like a leaf, a raindrop, or another person. This arrangement is a rare biological miracle. The same ordinary elements found in any drugstore, such as carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, flock together on Earth to form life, yet they largely decline to do so anywhere else in the known universe.
Beyond the chemical luck of your composition lies a 3.8-billion-year streak of biological fortune. Survival on Earth is a tenuous business, considering that almost all species that have ever existed are now extinct. To be here today, your ancestors had to survive a relentless gauntlet of catastrophes, predators, and changing climates. Every single one of your forebears, reaching back to the first primordial spark of life, managed to find a mate and live long enough to reproduce.
Not one of your direct ancestors was eaten by a predator, starved, or stepped on before passing on their genetic material. You are the result of a precise, unbroken chain of hereditary combinations that stretches back to the dawn of life. Had any of those millions of ancestors deviated even slightly, you might currently be licking algae off a cave wall instead of existing as a modern human. We are the incredibly lucky survivors of a chaotic and dangerous planetary history.
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