UNIVERSE TODAY
The number of near misses, false starts, and legitimate disasters that have befallen our species since the day we took our first upright steps all those generations ago is too large to count and could honestly take up this entire book. I’ll give us humans this much, though: we’re survivors, through and through.
We are, to put it bluntly, remarkable. There is nothing in this cosmos that even begins to approach anything resembling the complexity of the human brain. There is no other world that we have discovered, within our solar system or without, that can support the dizzying array of chemical reactions that we call life, let alone consciousness.
Sure, with enough planets around enough stars within enough galaxies, life is probably bound to happen one way or another, but it appears that life only happened here, once, billions of years ago, when it didn’t appear – or was snuffed out – even in our own solar backyard.
The Seeming Impossibility of Life
The number of near misses, false starts, and legitimate disasters that have befallen our species since the day we took our first upright steps all those generations ago is too large to count and could honestly take up this entire book. I’ll give us humans this much, though: we’re survivors, through and through.
We are, to put it bluntly, remarkable. There is nothing in this cosmos that even begins to approach anything resembling the complexity of the human brain. There is no other world that we have discovered, within our solar system or without, that can support the dizzying array of chemical reactions that we call life, let alone consciousness.
Sure, with enough planets around enough stars within enough galaxies, life is probably bound to happen one way or another, but it appears that life only happened here, once, billions of years ago, when it didn’t appear – or was snuffed out – even in our own solar backyard.
There are a million tales that the universe has been spinning for over 13 billion years to make life possible. Life could not have arisen too early in our cosmological history, for there was not yet enough generations of stars born and dead to spread their ash, their byproduct of oxygen and carbon, into the wider galactic mix. And, alas, there will come a time in the distant future, trillions of years from now but yet countable with finite numbers, when the universe will be too old, too cold, and too exhausted to fashion new stars at all.
