We Are Going to Die, and That Makes Us the Lucky Ones

We will all die eventually, and that makes us fortunate.

Most people will never face death, because they never have the opportunity to be born.

Those who might have lived in this world in my place, but will never see daylight, outnumber the grains of sand in the Sahara.

Among those unborn souls must be poets more gifted than Keats, and scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the mathematically possible combinations of genes vastly exceed the number of humans who have actually lived.

Surviving through the teeth of these astonishingly tiny odds, ordinary people like you and me can meet each other in this world.

— Richard Dawkins

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.

Most People are never going to die because they are never going to be born.

The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia.

Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton.

We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people.

In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

Professor Dawkins mentioned this passage in a speech.

For each of us, being born and existing is an extraordinarily fortunate coincidence. The universe contains so many possibilities, and we happen to become one reality among them. That itself is a miracle.

Life’s birth results from countless accidental factors combining. From sperm and egg meeting, to random genetic combinations, to environmental influences, every step is uncertain. We emerged from these countless possibilities to become the “lucky one.”

Mathematics tells us that possible human genetic combinations number as many as 10^3000, while only about 10^11 people have actually been born. This gap in probability is vaster than the distances between stars in the Milky Way.

Those souls that never appeared are like invisible nebulae, forever suspended in the vacuum of possibility. Yet perhaps this inevitable “loss” makes every realized life a specimen of miracle. We carry not only our parents’ genes, but something like kaleidoscope fragments randomly cast out by the whole history of human evolution.

This understanding does not bring nothingness; instead, it highlights the magnificence of existence itself. Like Camus’s Sisyphus, recognizing life’s essential absurdity gives us the deepest freedom. If we are all numbers accidentally rolled by the universe’s dice, then the scent of morning coffee, the falling path of each ginkgo leaf, and the warmth of fingertips touching are tender rebellions against nihilism.

Those unborn “possible people” resemble dark matter in the night sky. We lucky ones favored by probability mark coordinates for the entire dark universe with our breath. When you pass a stranger in a convenience store, that brief encounter holds the whole narrative of ten billion years of material evolution.

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This passage reminded me of another passage by Carl Sagan:

“

The elements in us came from hydrogen atoms combining after explosions cooled. I am the universe; I am the stars. Under the law of conservation of mass, fundamentally we do not disappear, but come from the universe and return to the stars…

The nitrogen in our DNA, calcium in our teeth, iron in our blood, and carbon in what we eat were all formed from what countless stars scattered after the great explosion. So every one of us is a star.

— Carl Sagan

”

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Every iron atom in our blood once endured temperatures of millions of degrees inside a star. The calcium in our bones may have witnessed a supernova’s dazzling moment. This depth of time makes firing brain neurons in 7×10⁻²⁷ cubic meters—that is, human consciousness—the most exquisite form of organized matter in the known universe.

Humanity may be the most romantic product of cosmic evolution. Scientifically, every atom in our bodies has undergone an epic journey through the universe:

1. The origin of hydrogen: 60% of the hydrogen atoms in your body were born in the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. They waited billions of years in primordial nebulae.
2. The stellar furnace: Carbon, oxygen, and other elements were born through nuclear fusion in the first generation of stars. Stars like the Sun still produce new elements today.
3. The supernova funeral: Heavy elements such as iron and gold had to await supernova explosions at stars’ deaths. These violent explosions scattered elements into interstellar space.
4. Earth’s reassembly: 4.6 billion years ago, this interstellar dust condensed into Earth, eventually forming you, reading these words now, through geological activity and life’s evolution.

When we gaze at the stars, we are essentially gazing at our past selves. The photons arriving here across time and space may carry memories once held by the atoms composing our bodies.

• Professor Richard Dawkins is a renowned British evolutionary biologist, ethologist, and science writer; an academician of Britain’s scientific academy, Oxford professor, vice-president of the British Humanist Association, Fellow of the Royal Society, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and honorary associate of the National Secular Society. He is among today’s most famous and outspoken atheists and advocates of evolution. His bestselling science books include The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion.

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