Your Own Cosmic Red Carpet
From the Beginning of the Universe
As you look back on the seemingly infinite series of occurrences wherein nature has surmounted unfathomably gargantuan odds so as to arrange even the most minute detail so as to make conditions favorable for your birth, you’re confronted with the astounding truth of how cosmic and ancient even a single person’s timeline is interwoven with all that exists.
From the very beginning of the Universe: from the multiple generations and regeneration of stars, by which were formed increasingly heavier elements, of which you are made; to the formation of the Earth with just the right ingredients at exactly the right temperature range so as to support and actually spawn life.
Through every step of evolution, wherein countless potential ancestral lines were constantly dying out, except for yours. Somehow, through hundreds of thousands, even millions of years, every single one of your ancestors survived. For if, in that mighty long chain of succession, but one link had been broken, you would have never existed.
Even after your bloodline had survived through millennia, there was still the great race, the last battle of stupefying odds. Out of approximately 200 million spermatozoa that fought their way to reach your mother’s egg, it was yours that triumphed. Though you still were not yet out of the woods, as pregnancy has its own perils. Nevertheless, you were guarded from life threatening complications, genetic anomalies and from your mother’s choice to abort. Against all these ineffable odds, you were born.
In retrospection on how precisely each infinitesimally small detail must have been lined up, it would seem as though there was a kind of red carpet laid out for you, stretching through time and space, all the way back to the beginning on the Universe itself, waiting for and bringing about your arrival — as if the Universe, from its very beginning, had been intentionally aligned in every aspect of reality just so you specifically would be born, as well as possibly playing a major role in your environment and the very person you would come to be. It sounds like the story of a Messiah, of One around whom the entire Universe revolves, but it’s not. All of this is your story! Because, if you are alive today, then that means you have literally, scientifically been in formation since the dawn of time.
This quote may sound like something from a prolife group, but it’s definitly not. In fact, its source could be considered quite unlikely:
“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.
“Moralists and theologians place great weight upon the moment of conception, seeing it as the instant at which the soul comes into existence. If… you are unmoved by such talk, you still must regard a particular instant, nine months before your birth, as the most decisive event in your personal fortunes. It is the moment at which your consciousness suddenly became trillions of times more foreseeable than it was a split second before. …It was then that the odds against your becoming a person dropped from astronomical to single figures.”
- Prof. Richard Dawkins, “Unweaving the Rainbow”