Against the Odds

We're all aware at some level that "The universe is big." Our brains, however, are not quite made to easily grasp its sheer magnitude. So, science writers attempt to conceptualize it by way of analogy: "The universe is so big that the number of stars is 10 times the number of grains of sand in all the world's beaches and deserts." Describing the universe in more human-relatable terms allows us to suddenly switch from a vague sense of "big" to absolutely breath-taking.

I recently came across a collection of quotes attempting to quantify another statistical wonder, the towering odds against existence that everyone now reading this has overcome. In Hitch 22, Hitchens uses this Richard Dawkins quote to preface his prologue:

"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 the Sahara [I guess "grains of sand" is science's cliche for comprehending large numbers -jh] 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 outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

Then, a few days later, I came across a piece by Dick Cavett in the New York Times Opinionator blog. He describes a rather unique annual Hollywood party in which actors, writers, professors, scientists, etc. all gather to give lectures, exchange ideas, and drink. (I wanted to attend, but learned it cost a cool 1000 bucks. It's basically a smaller version of TED, I guess). Cavett writes about a lecture he attends:

He pointed out that we each have millions of ancestors and that, at conception, your sex is determined randomly. If any single one of that galaxy of ancestors had chanced to have a different sex, you would not be here to read this. (Presumably, someone else would. Unless of course one of my millions of ancestors met with a mishap.)

Keep that word “galaxy” in mind. Do we have more “ancestors” than there are atoms in several galaxies? Just how many of your forebears were there, that the wrong gender accident could have happened to, thereby snuffing any chance of your existence? Brace yourself.

Alvarez led us gently to the wowing fact: An imaginary space ship travels through our galaxy. Each of the millions of heavenly bodies in our galaxy represents one ancestor. But it gets better. (Or worse.)

The ship leaves our galaxy and journeys through the next. And the next.

And …

Even typing this next bit makes me glad I’m sitting down. Not only does each planet, star, Milky Way and what-have-you in every galaxy represent numerically a member of your family tree, so does each atom in all those galaxies. Every one representing a chance for each of us not to exist.

Had any one of those parents died before maturing, or been sterile, or not met the wife by chance in handing her a dropped glove, or shared a woolly mammoth bone with her on a date leading to bed, or been carried off in the plague or killed by some forerunner of a New York bicycle rider on the sidewalk . . . the mind boggles. (Not to mention the near-infinite number of people who might have been born down through the end of time but weren’t — because your particular chain went on unbroken.)

Can any mind this side of Einstein’s accommodate this thought?

How many ancestors, going back millions and millions of years — each of whose specific wiggly was in each case the only one among millions that got through to make you . . . how many of those ancestors are there?

It is in these realizations that I consistently discover the numinous and awe-inspiring. Another quote from a Sullivan reader, apropos to autumn:

The weather is changing here … big breezes at sundown blow away the clouds and humidity, leaving a fresh feeling to the air on your skin … and it lasts until dawn, when it's a joy just to be able to walk outside … and so I'm outside a lot, daylight and dark … and that's where I think about all this: What are the chances that my specific collection of atoms should have been allowed to coalesce into a being constructed not only to support thought but also self-awareness? A being capable of apprehending the beauty all around and concluding that the apprehending of it is probably the point of being here at all … I think if you are religious in the general sense, you probably perceive this as a form of worship -- the apprehension of and thankfulness for all that beauty which is experienced as a divine gift … I may not call it that, but I think I appreciate it in much the same way: through sheer wonder and gratitude.

Lastly, an excerpt from Alan Moore's Watchmen:

The Darkness of Mere Being

Thermodynamic Miracles... Events with odds against so astronomical they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing.

And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive, meeting, siring this precise son, that exact daughter...

Until your mother loves a man, she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged.

To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold, that is the crowning unlikelihood.

The thermodynamic miracle.

Come... dry your eyes, for you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly.

Dry your eyes... and let's go home.