We are going to die and that makes us lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to born. The potential people that could have been in our place, but in-fact will never see the light of day far outnumber the sand grains of the Sahara. Certainly, those unborn ghosts include greater scientists then Newton and Einstein, poets greater then Keats. We know this because the set of people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumber actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I that are here in our ordinariness. We live on a planet which is all but perfect for our kind of life; not too warm, not too cold, basking in kindly sunshine, softly watered, a gently spinning green and gold harvest festival of a planet.
Yes, alas there are deserts and slums, there is starvation and racking misery to be found. But take a look at the competition, compared the other planets earth is paradise and parts of earth are still paradise. What are the odds that a planet picked at random would have these complaisant properties? Even the most optimistic calculation would put it at less than one in a million.
Imagine a space ship full of sleeping explorers, deep-frozen would-be colonists of some distant world. Perhaps the ship is on a forlorn mission to save the species from an unstoppable comet, like the one that killed the dinosaurs, hits the home planet. The voyagers go into a deep-freeze soberly reckoning the odds against their spaceship’s chancing upon a planet friendly to life. If one in a million planets in suitable at best, and it takes centuries to travel from each star to the next, the spaceship is pathetically unlikely to find a tolerable, lead alone safe haven, for it’s sleeping cargo. But imagine if the ship’s robot pilot turns out to be unthinkably lucky. After a million years the ship does find a planet capable of sustaining life: a planet of equable temperature, bathed in warm star shine, refreshed by oxygen and water. The passengers wake stumbling in the light. After a million years of sleep, here a whole new fertile globe, alush planet of warm pastures, sparkling streams and water falls, a world bountiful of creatures, darting through the alien green felicity. Our travelers walk entranced, stupefied, unable to believe their unaccustomed senses or their luck.
The story asks for too much luck; it would never happen. And yet, isn’t it what has happened to each one of us? We have woken after hundreds of millions of years asleep, defying astronomical odds. Admittedly we didn’t arrive by spaceship, we arrived by being born and we didn’t burst conscious into the world but accumulated awareness gradually through babyhood. The fact that we gradually apprehend our world, rather then suddenly discovering it, should not subtract from it’s wonder. It is no accident that our kind of life finds itself on a planet whose temperature, rainfall and everything are exactly right. If the planet were suitable for another kind of life, it is that other kind of life that would evolved here. But we, as individuals, are hugely blessed, privileged, and not just privileged to enjoy our planet, more, we are granted the opportunity to understand why our eyes open, and why they see what they do, in the short time before they close forever.