Why You Probably Shouldn't Be Alive
[Music] If you're watching this right now, you've won. You've won the game of life; you just don't know it yet. As of May 2019, there are approximately seven point seven billion humans on our planet. Seven point seven billion people, just like you and me, living their own lives with their own jobs, relationships, hobbies; and not one is the same as any other.
The number of events, of situations, of interactions that happen on a daily basis across everyone on Earth is a number so high that it's hard to fathom. But something that is even harder to understand is how you're even here in the first place. A lot has happened over the course of history. Like a lot of things, there was nothing, and then there was something. There were a lot of things, and all of this, the entire history of the universe, has led you to this very second.
The timeline we live in, the one where you're breathing and using your senses to get all the information from this video, what are the odds of that happening? Everything has led to this moment, but by the numbers, you shouldn't even be here in the first place. In order to be living a life like you do today, you had to be put here; but even at one time, the Earth wasn't here.
The universe had to form in the exact way it did for life to form on Earth. The fundamental forces of nature just so happened to come together in the way that they did. Luckily, gravity is a thing, and it's proved to be useful—so useful that it's pretty much the glue that holds together any star, planet, galaxy; pretty much anything. The strong and weak nuclear forces are able to keep us as humans held together at the lowest levels imaginable.
Luckily, one lost planet roaming the solar system collided with Earth over 4 billion years ago, and that is why we have the Moon; that is why we have seasons. It's why the climate is just perfect. It's why we have liquid water on Earth. Earth currently remains as the only place in the entire universe known to harbor life forms of any kind. Out of millions, billions—whatever the number is—out of all of those planets, only one has life for certain.
But even one out of a billion are better odds than you being alive. For some reason that I wish I could tell you one day, a microorganism, one that couldn't be seen to our naked eye, began feeding on the thermal vents at the bottom of the ocean. This little, almost insignificant organism played the most important role of them all. For all they knew, the world above them didn't exist, but one day it would.
Over millions of years, evolution took place. These microbes began to be able to replicate themselves, and each and every single step of evolution began. The pure numbers of the situation don't do it justice. The odds of everything being so perfect that each step brought us progressively closer to becoming modern humans. Humans that could realize their humanity. Yet from one microbe spawned an entire species that took over the entire planet.
Over a few thousand years, on a universal timescale, that's quite literally nothing. But now let's think about humans. What separates us from everyone else? The minds of animals have continuously gotten more advanced over time, but a human mind is something completely different: sentience, consciousness. We are aware of some internal state of being.
You don't wake up in the morning because you've thought about it; your brain just did it. We don't think about breathing; we don't think about blinking. Your brain automatically takes in all of your senses and creates a picture, a view of the world in your head. For all we know, the Earth could be something completely different from what we see day-to-day, but the way we perceive it all comes down to how a three-pound organ in your head can put together a puzzle with the pieces being all of your senses.
But it isn't perfect; it's easy to trick. For example, listen to this, and try to imagine it right now. You're probably thinking of a restaurant. It has multiple tables, all having a little world of their own. You might be imagining waiters moving food around. This little universe of its own was created in your head, all from just your sense of hearing.
Humans have the ability to picture things, to see them from a different perspective, to take our imaginations and make them a reality. This works great! Actually, every invention ever made was to do that—spark that initial burst of creativity. The brain built us as individuals, and we built the world. Luckily, we're on a planet with hundreds of different elements, some of which worked great for shelter or technology. Some work greatest as food sources to keep us alive.
Some released certain chemicals in your brain that make you feel a certain way, and these chemicals released form you as a person. For example, the fight-or-flight response that we get when we're in danger is the result of adrenaline, a hormone in your body. Happiness is the result of having large amounts of serotonin, and the most important one involving your existence today: the love formula.
Sorry to break it to you, but you see, you couldn't have gotten here by yourself, even if you wanted to. You may think you're the result of randomness, but actually, everything happened the way it was supposed to. Your parents met, which by itself is an extremely low probability event. Depending on your age, out of millions or possibly billions of people, these two met at the perfect timing.
For example, you watching this video offsets your daily activities by about 10 to 15 minutes. Everything you do after you finish watching this video will alter your life in some way. As weird as it sounds, you're actually changing the course of your life right now. Some events that should have happened won't, and others that shouldn't have happened will. Every day, you stray further down your own personal timeline, one that not any other single person on the planet has lived except you.
Your parents are no exception to this. They both lived their own lives, were raised by different parents, hopefully worked different jobs, had different friends, but somehow ended up meeting. And not only did they meet, but they liked each other enough to stay together to come to the decision to have a child. You, unless you were a mistake like me—not even kidding—it keeps going.
A woman has about 300,000 eggs inside her body; a male can have billions or trillions of different sperms throughout his life. But only specifically one each could make you, and it did. The odds of that are 1 in 400 quadrillion. If the situation hadn't been perfect, if that one stoplight hadn't been green, if that line at the grocery store wasn't so long, there's a pretty high chance that your parents would have never met.
These lucky situations don't stop at your parents; they keep going. It extends to their parents and to their parents, all of which somehow ended up living long enough to have kids. This goes back tens of thousands of years, even your ancestors thousands of years ago when the life expectancy was literally 30 years.
This continues all the way back to that very first little microbe at the bottom of the ocean floor, over 4 billion years ago. Your life is the result of a family tree that hasn't been broken for billions of years. What are the odds that all of that happened perfectly? You're more likely to be struck by lightning a thousand times in a single day than you are to be alive.
You're more likely to be a victim of an airplane crash every single day of the year, back to back to back, than you ought to be alive. You're more likely to win the lottery nine times in a row than you ought to be alive. Some may say you were put here for a purpose; others may say you just got lucky. The universe has 10 to the 80 atoms. The odds of you being born are much lower than that.
The number of 50/50 coin flips your family has gone through when it comes to living long enough to have children or dying before carrying on the family line, it goes back tens of thousands of millions of years. This gets more interesting when you consider alien civilizations. The odds of us meeting are already low, but when you think about everything that had to happen for two different civilizations coming into existence close enough to each other to actually contact each other, it's just crazy to think about.
No matter what age you are, no matter where you live, no matter your gender, you are alive. This is a luxury that by the numbers you shouldn't have even been given. What's the point in living a life that you aren't trying to squeeze everything out of? Looking at the regret in the faces of people who are too old to do the things that they really wanted to do in life is perhaps one of the scariest things in the world.
Waking up in the morning and realizing that your existence is actually a miracle—something that seems so perfect, so orderly, came from an infinite set of possibilities. The amount of thoughts you have in a day, the number of neurons that are fired and exist in your brain are inconceivable in magnitude. This doesn't happen by accident. Everything that could have happened didn't; it only happened in the way that set the universe into its current state.
The smallest of things, the tiniest of decisions makes the biggest differences, the biggest impacts. Understanding a little of the chance there is that you're here today is terrifying, but yet I find that more than anything else, it gives me purpose. It gives me a reason to say that I and everyone else have a reason to exist. I believe you exist for a purpose, but that's for you to figure out.
I can't tell you why we exist, but I can tell you one thing that's for certain: we shouldn't have even been here in the first place. [Music]
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