One of the worse things about conciseness is wondering whether you deserve it. This pervasive angst is particularly poignant in survivors of plane crashes or war veterans but I think we all suffer from it to a greater or lessor degree. Rational thought has done little to help matters, expounding the perception that we are merely the result of millions of years of random natural selection. Hardly as comforting as the constellation of creation stories it elbowed out of the way.
But maybe we need to go a little further down that rabbit hole. If the universe is inexplicably wired toward complexity, then perhaps the development of life, while incredibly rare, is also rather inevitable. And with life comes the possibility of even more unlikely but inevitable conscience self-aware life.
Just how rare? We know less about the rest of the cosmos than our own backyard so let's start with our own humble planet. It has been around for about 4.5 billion years and is bestowed with some unlikely and fortunate features such as large moon and strong magnetic field. Life popped up about a billion years after that by a process that remains largely a mystery. We know in broad strokes how life works. How it started is something else altogether.
The blueprint of life is DNA – an elegant molecule that stores all the information needed to build anything from a virus to T-Rex or a blue whale. Every cell in a organism stores a complete copy of its own particular blueprint. It is basically a biological language made up of an alphabet of only four chemical letters. Sometime in the early history of Earth, an alphabet and a language spontaneously sprung into being and began writing.
If you are not under the influence of psyedellic drugs at this moment, now would be a good time to take them. Is your face melting yet? Good. This might help to appreciate just how mind-blowing this biological milestone was. Somehow a delicate stand of random chemistry began replicating itself while simultaneously manifesting a complex biological envelope to allow this to occur in the incredibly harsh environment of early Earth. The information to build and maintain the envelope, which would generate its own energy and food, was somehow encoded in the molecule in an alphabet and language that previously did not exist. Still can’t wrap your head around it? Take more drugs.
As best as we can tell and for about two billions years consisted largely of prehistoric photosynthetic bathmats called stromatoperoids. They weren’t much to look at but for two million millennia, these and other nondescript colonies of algae set the table for all the complex life that followed, including us.
Like all plants, their waste product was oxygen. The surface of the young Earth was initially entirely un-oxidized and fast as oxygen was released into the atmosphere it reacted with exposed metal minerals in a patient plodding process that eventually resulted in free oxygen accumulating in the atmosphere some two billion years after life first formed.
This was a red-letter day in the diary of our planet. High in the atmosphere O2 molecules began to recombine into the atomic triplets of our ozone layer, shielding the surface for the first time from the roasting radiation of the sun. Life had renovated the planet to allow for an evolutionary explosion of complex life.
Did the bathmats want to pave the way for people? Of course not. Without brains, want or not want are meaningless concepts in the context of primordial life. But the trend toward complexity seems endemic in this universe of ours and fortuitous accidents such as this seem to be the norm if you wait long enough.
These important life-mediated renovations to our planet allowed complexity to take off around 650 million years ago. Most people don’t find numbers with dozens of zeros behind them overly intuitive so instead imagine the stretch of time since our planet formed as the length of your life. Lets also assume that due to your monkish self-denial, hippy diet and Olympian level of fitness you live till one hundred.
On that scale, the first life would have appeared around your 22ndbirthday, hard parts like shells and bone show up when you are 85. The dinosaurs don’t make an entrance until you are 93 and die off when you’re over 95. The earliest humans arrive about four days before you kick off and civilization only shows up an hour before your last breath. Columbus lands in present day Haiti when you’ve got five minutes left and Al Gore invents the internet after you take your last breath but before your brain function stops.
By any measure we live in incredible times. The remarkable view we all enjoy is only possible because we are standing on the shoulders of not only everything that has ever lived but the very mathematics that are hardwired into this universe. The likelihood of that given random chance? About the same as hitting a hole in one on Mars from Earth while blindfolded in a submarine at the bottom of the ocean.
The point is that we live in a cosmos where not only is intelligent life possible, it is inevitable. In fact, it may be the whole point.
There’s no doubt that people need a purpose. Otherwise we think too much, drink too much and sometimes blow our brains out in the basement because none of it makes sense. Let's not pretend this isn’t a problem. We are also about to bring into being a vastly more powerful intelligence that likewise needs a self-apparent purpose, one which hopefully includes our continued existence. Lets instead imagine how much better things could be if we found something to do that was mostly harmless, brought us into the present and encouraged us to be kind to each other.
In the past, organized religions used to take on this weighty task by convincing people there was only one way to see the world, obeying rules would get you in heaven and anything less would buy you eternal incineration. Of course having separate factions of humanity buying into rigid and differing worldviews is a recipe for protracted periods of limb hacking and pillaging in the name of competing deities.
Lets consider another possibility. Imagine that the cosmos was wired for complexity. And because of the incredibly unlikely combination of factors making sentient observers possible, perhaps the universe has patiently been waiting eons for her children to open their eyes and gaze upon her beauty. Just experiencing existence may be the most remarkable accomplishment in creation. Why should you believe that? Because it just might be true.