Billions of Times Luckier Than Winning the Lottery

It's hard to know where to start when there is so much in this big old universe to shed the speed of light on. I'm also feeling a little perplexed about this blog because of the high expectations I set for my readers in the introduction. How about me and my big promise that I would never write anything that wasn't good? I guess without such ambition and confidence humankind would never have flourished into the dominant creatures they did.

Oh look at me, very smooth, totally just steered my way to the START position.

It's such an astonishing thing, this little human life we've all luckily stumbled into, and I simply can't put enough emphasis on how little our lives are on the scale of things, but this is something I will explore further with you in a future post.

You and I being here today is without a doubt, the luckiest thing that will ever happen to us. Do you realise how many times various ancestors of yours must have cheated death to get you to where you are today? From one of your distant great grannies, about 500 million years ago, who smelled like fish and well, probably looked exactly like a fish too, to a furry distant great grandaddy, probably around the size of a mouse, who roamed the earth about 60 million years ago and perhaps missed being stepped on by a dinosaur. Quite obviously it doesn't stop there. The amount of people, animals, reptiles, fish, creatures and small one-celled creatures in your family tree, would bedazzle your pants off. From the very beginning when life on earth started as just a small one-celled creature, your lifeline started to grow and evolve, eventually into human form for millions of years. My favourite part about this visualisation, is when I consider the reality of how ridiculously and stupidly lucky we are to be alive and kicking. As Bill Bryson pointed out in A Short History of Nearly Everything, for us to be here today "...for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce..." I'd just like to reiterate lucky, lucky, lucky enough. 

It's not just putting it in the perspective of "Oh, yes, it's very lucky my Grandaddy mouse didn't get stepped on by a dinosaur" but it could be a case of "Geez, I'm glad my ancestors weren't beheaded for offending the king like in Game of Thrones." Or in my own case, I am 100 different kinds of lucky that my great grandfather didn't die in World War 1 when a hand grenade landed on his machine gun and blew the heads off the two people beside him. It left him with parts missing from his hands and metal imbedded in his face. All his mates fighting in Gallipoli that day thought he was dead, but it turned out that his face was just completely black with bruising and he was temporarily unconscious. BUT HOLY SUGAR! Can you imagine? If he had of died that day, he would never have made babies with my great grandmother, one of which included my grandmother. So my grandmother would never have married a New Zealand sheep farmer, David, to have six children together, one who was of course my dad, Anthony. If that Anthony guy had never have been born, not only would me and my three brothers never have graced the earth with our silliness, but there would have been a lot less tears shed over the All Black's World Cup losses for four consecutive cups.

So there, you see? For millions of years (billions depending on where we're counting from,) our ancestors would have had to have stayed alive just long enough to deliver a genetic seed strong enough to reproduce just one more offspring and this process would have had to continue all the way to 2012 where you are today.

So far the average species on earth has only lasted about four million years before it becomes extinct, which stinks. The modern human has only been around for about one million years, so we only have three million left. That is, if we don't completely take our lucky lives for granted and destroy ourselves earlier. 

So if reading this hasn't made you feel lucky to be alive, well then read it again and pay closer attention.

I hope you enjoyed reading my first installment of The Extraordinary Explained Ordinarily. Until next time you lucky ducks.