How did we get here?

I have twin daughters. They're pretty amazing (if I do say so myself) when they're not having tantrums. They can now count to 10, and sometimes get as far as 12 or 13, but someday they will become aware of much bigger numbers and hopefully learn to use numbers to calculate things. One thing is for sure, our existence in this crazy world involves a lot of big numbers.

For a start the universe is around 14 billion years old, and earth itself almost 5 billion. But what really blows my mind is that most of the atoms (remember those from the first post) that make up everything that you see around you were created in a dying star. I'm much better at biology than I am at physics so I'll leave the specifics to Brian Cox (legend!), but essentially we're all made of star dust, cool huh?!

Now, have you ever found yourself sat outside on a warm summers eve, staring into the vast expanse of space, a glass of your favourite tipple in hand, and thinking, 'I wonder what the probability of me existing is'? Just me? I mean, lets start with just one day in our lives. There are so many events that happen, from your morning routine to your commute to work, the people you encounter, the news you read, the music you listen to. These days a lot of that is dictated by computer algorithms designed by tech companies, but if you think about it as a collection of things, what are the chances that the exact course of events happens rather than any of the other possible courses of events - do you see what I mean? That's just one day, imagine all the events that had to take place throughout the course of history to result in you existing. To bring in a bit of biology here, what's the probability that the exact sperm fertilises the exact egg and combines in such a way that it produces you? Some scientists, and probably some very powerful computers, have crunched the numbers. As you can imagine, it's a big number, far larger than any of the numbers mentioned so far, so big even that it's tricky to know the best way to write it down. So I'm not gonna write it down, I'm going to show you an image of it.

It's 1 in 10(with 2,685,000 zeros after it). Why am I telling you this? It's easy to think that with around 8 billion people on this planet surrounded by a universe so large it's almost incomprehensible, that we're a bit insignificant. But actually, we're pretty special. We are made of star dust, and the probability of us existing is so ridiculously small as to basically be zero. Life isn't easy, and I know that as my kids grow older they will face challenges, and things won't always turn out exactly how they want, but maybe occasionally they will sit out on a warm summer evening and remember how remarkable it is that they're even here.