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We aren't here

January 16, 2020

"Besides, we aren't even here," he added.

"How do you mean?"

"Have you any idea of the mathematical probabilities involved for any given chunk of matter in the universe to be eligible for participation in the biosphere, whether as a leaf, a sausage, or even drinkable water? Or breathable air? The odds are about a quadrillion to one against it! Our universe is a prodigiously lifeless place. One particle in a quadrillion may enter into the life cycle, the procession of birth and death, growth and decay -- consider what a rare event that must be. And now I ask you to consider not the probability of a piece of food, or of a drop of water, or of a breath of air -- but the probability of an embryo! Take the ratio of the mass of the universe -- the burnt-out suns, the frozen planets, those cosmic garbage dumps we call nebulae, that enormous cloaca of dust and rubble and noxious gas we think of as the Milky Way, all that thermonuclear fermentation, that swirling of debris -- take the ratio of that total mass to the mass of a human body; there you have your probability for a chunk of matter, equal in weight to a man, to be a man -- and that probability is negligible!"

"Negligible?" I said.

"In other words, you and I, all of us in this room, statistically we can't exist, we aren't really here. . ."

Memoirs Found in a Bathtub
written by Stanislaw Lem
From chapter 11,