Strange Machines

It has been a privilege to be born. The longer I have lived, the more grateful I am to my parents for having had me. For as mortality too quickly looms and the veil of invulnerability falls, death becomes a true reality for those who once thought it myth.

How quickly life passes by. Moments come and go like road runners, racing to make the next memory. I can hardly keep up anymore. My journals are full and then emptied. Each day I struggle to encapsulate the highlights and savour them.

For so many, life is over in an instant.

A male calf born to a milk cow, torn from its mother at birth, kept in a cold dark tiny crate for a month alone without food to tenderise its flesh, and then slaughtered to make veal. What sort of life is that? It has never known the warmth and love of its mother, who will lose many more children this way to meet the demands of humans who drink their milk.

Small kittens never asking to be born are born, then thrown into a sack to be discarded, taken away to be gassed, or worse, clobbered to death, just because their mother’s human owners decided not to neuter her and let her wander outside to be impregnated.

Human children born in places where there is no food, no clean water, no medicine. They cling onto their starving mothers as flies buzz around their faces, vultures, undeterred.

Then there are children born, outsourced from day one into a daycare production line or a neglectful nanny, never lovingly held by their own mothers and left to cry without any help or comfort. The imprinting is permanent. They grow up, brittle, unhappy, and angry people, hating life, wishing it would end.

So I must feel blessed that I was born into a loving home, have loving parents who nurtured and care for me. I have had the chance to savour this thing called life and it was kind to me.

When it is time to close my eyes and say goodbye forever, I will remember that in my life I have loved and I have brought joy to others, I have given life to my son and loved him and taught him well. That I have caused as little pain as I could to others to sustain my own existence, and in the process, inspired others to do the same. And that I have created with my mind and my hands many good things I hope will outlive my memory.

At my funeral, this too, shall be read:

“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 Sahara. 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.

Here is another respect in which we are lucky. The universe is older than 100 million centuries. Within a comparable time the sun will swell to a red giant and engulf the earth. Every century of hundreds of millions has been in its time, or will be when its time comes, ‘the present century.’ The present moves from the past to the future, like a tiny spotlight, inching its way along a gigantic ruler of time. Everything behind the spotlight is in darkness, the darkness of the dead past. Everything ahead of the spotlight is in the darkness of the unknown future. The odds of your century’s being the one in the spotlight are the same as the odds that a penny, tossed down at random, will land on a particular ant crawling somewhere along the road from New York to San Francisco. You are lucky to be alive and so am I.

We live on a planet that is all but perfect for our kind of life: not too warm and not too cold, basking in kindly sunshine, softly watered; a gently spinning, green and gold harvest-festival of a planet. Yes, and alas, there are deserts and slums; there is starvation and racking misery to be found. But take a look at the competition. Compared with most planets this is paradise, and parts of Earth are still paradise by any standards. What are the odds that a planet picked at random will have these complaisant properties? Even the most optimistic calculation will put it at less than one in a million.

Imagine a spaceship 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 before an unstoppable comet, like the one that killed the dinosaurs, hits the home planet. The voyagers go into the deep-freeze soberly reckoning the odds against their spaceship’s ever chancing upon a planet friendly to life. If one in a million planets is suitable at best, and it takes centuries to travel from each star to the next, the spaceship is pathetically unlikely to find a tolerable, let alone safe, haven for its sleeping cargo.

But imagine that the ship’s robot pilot turns out to be unthinkably lucky. After millions of years the ship does find a planet capable of sustaining life: a planet of equable temperature, bathed in warm starshine, refreshed by oxygen and water. The passengers, Rip van Winkles, wake stumbling into the light. After a million years of sleep, here is a whole new fertile globe, a lush planet of warm pastures, sparkling streams and waterfalls, a world bountiful with creatures, darting through alien green felicity. Our travellers walk entranced, stupefied, unable to believe their unaccustomed senses or their luck.

As I said, 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 than suddenly discovering it, should not subtract from its wonder.”

~ Richard Dawkins from Unweaving the Rainbow