An afterthought to all this, thus far.

A long time ago, in a place far far away.

As I travel through the Alps; my thoughts drift to thinking that “The purpose is to live.” A tautology worth remembering.

So my existence, from the perspective of the cosmos, has neither meaning nor purpose nor necessity. That is nothing to be ashamed of, for the same would be true of God, if God existed. I am and remain an accidental, contingent thing and I may not have existed at all.

How easily can that be? Well if we do some calculations, as a member of the human species, I have a particular genetic identity.

There are about 30,000 active genes in the human genome. Where each of these genes has two variants, or “alleles.” So the number of genetically distinct identities the genome can encode is at least 2 raised to the thirty-thousandth power – which roughly equals the number 1 followed by 10,000 zeros. That's the number of potential people allowed by the structure of our DNA. Now how many of those people have actually existed? It is estimated that about 40 billion humans have been born since the emergence of our species. If we just round that number to say, 100 billion, just to be on the conservative side; this means that the fraction of genetically possible humans who have been born is less than 0.00000.......GAP..........000001 (insert about 9,979 extra zeroes in the GAP.) The overwhelming majority of these genetically possible humans are unborn specters. Such is the fantastic lottery that I – and you – had to win in order to shimmer on to the scene of life as we know it. This is contingency with a vengeance. The fact that we prevailed against these stupefying long odds makes us “the lucky ones” - So says Richard Dawkins. It is even more earth shaking taking in the account that your zygote may have split into twins or more.............or less. 

 

Good night from Cortina d'Ampezzo, where thoughts are regenerative and amplified.

 

David