The Incredible Luck of Being

Like me you’ve probably seen the countless “do you know how insane the odds were against you even ever existing?” articles out there, and they’re all great/spot on and go like this:

Each human female has about 300,000 eggs during the fertile period of her life. Each male ejaculation has about 300 million sperm. Thus each conception contains about a hundred thousand billion different possible combinations of DNA. In other words, there are a hundred thousand billion unique and different human beings that could result from each procreation event. Only one of those possible combinations led to each of you reading this article at this moment. Here’s a way to visualize that extremely tiny fraction. If you took a very long ruler that stretched from here to the planet Pluto, one inch of that distance would be you. The rest of the distance would be other possible human beings that could have been, but never were. Each of us has won a lottery with a hundred thousand billion different players.

But the article does have a nice little add-on I’ve rarely seen:

 

From the distant past, billions of years ago, to the distant future, billions of years ahead, the universe will never see another one of you.

The writer goes on to (lazily) mimic the old standard trope “you have a responsibility to make your life mean something!”, which actually flies directly in the face of its overarching sentiment of how vast both our cosmos and histories are.

In general I try to not be ruled by “make this life means something!” and instead try to live in reverence of any moment I can pause to remind myself how lucky I am to even be sitting here typing this; when it comes to questions about LIFE!! and what it all means I prefer to alternate between amusement and bemusement as much as possible while remembering what I said a few years ago:

Usually I’m comforted by the vastness of the Universe rendering my very being literally meaningless, but then sometimes I can’t help but wonder if maybe I really am the center of the Universe; why else would I even be here? 

In the end your life will mean absolutely nothing to anybody and anything; what is important is what it means right now.