I generally want to post my own ideas on this blog, but after reading “unweaving the rainbow”, I feel is only just to share some of Dawkins ideas with the world. One of the most poetic concepts about humanity and the universe is simply the chance that we existed. Quoting Richard Dawkins
“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.”
Thinking about the relatively tiny chance that you exist makes the universe seem all the more greater and more complex. Yes, we lead relatively short lives in comparison to the almost infinite cosmos, yet we are lucky to be born in a universe that we can observe. Putting it simply, you should not exist. To express the chance that you will exist, try this simply experiment. Put 10 marbles of different colors in a bag. Let the blue marble represent “you”. For the blue marble to exist, it needs to be picked randomly more than 15 times in a row, or ten to the fifteenth power. Lets pretend its 10 to the tenth power, letting the chance that you exist go up a bit; but the numbers are easier to work with. Ten to the tenth power is ten billion, now remember that chance you exist is much tinier then one in ten billion. Anyways, theoretically the chance that you exist is more than the chance you would win a lottery in which every person in the world would sign up. You would probably not even spend your time to sign up for such a lottery, yet you will realize “that you very much are alive”, as Dawkins said. We may die some day, as Dawkins says, but that makes us the lucky ones, the ones to exist and spend a short time looking at this world that we have around us. Why is their such a small chance that we exist though? First of all, there is a high chance that this universe would not have the characteristics we needed to live, and instead other intelligent organisms would have developed here. Of course, we were also lucky that our solar system formed, which was in just the perfect place for our kind of life. Then we got lucky when the first organism came from the primordial soup, and eventually evolved into our kind of life. Then your family tree had to dodge numerous marriages that would have resulted in you not existing. Finally, you were not aborted early, and you have the certain genetics that make your yourself.