What ho! Pepys...
You are the end-point of your own genes' evolution. You are the descendant of survivors, each of whom bred successfully and never once failed – for 3.5 billion years!
Think about that for a moment. In a world in which, for very many individuals, an early death and failure to breed were by far the most likely outcome, not one single one of your ancestors failed to produce at least one offspring. If they had failed, your gene-line would have ended there and then.
You are the product of billions of passes through the sieve of selection and at every pass your gene-line passed the fitness test. You are good at surviving; and you are unique in the history of the cosmos. The likelihood of you being alive at all is almost vanishingly small and yet here you are. Never before has anyone with your individual combination of genes, your individual collection of atoms and your history existed.
And you never will again.
Your ancestors were there when Europe and Africa split off from the Americas. They were there as small mammal-like reptiles when dinosaurs ruled the earth. They saw pterodactyls flying overhead. They survived the mass-extinction which ended the dinosaurs reign.
Your ancestors swam in the pre-Cambrian seas and crawled out onto the land as early air-breathing fish destined to become land-based animals. Your ancestors lived through the Carboniferous era when dense forests of tree ferns grew in steaming jungles where dragonflies with meter-wide wings flew. The trees then fell and formed the deposits destined to be coal as the climate changed. They saw the first flowering plants as plants and insects formed their mutual-benefit society. Your ancestors lived through the first great toxic waste disaster when the blue-green algae produced oxygen and triggered a mass extinction; and they learned to turn it to their advantage by evolving aerobic respiration.
Your ancestors were bacteria; they were arcae; they may have been the strange edicarans which were the earliest known multi-cellular organisms. In almost every one of your cells, in your genes, you carry a record of your evolution, of the entire human evolution story, and of a great deal of the evolution story of every other living thing.
Your journey through space and time has been an adventure of disasters, adaptation, survival and recovery, many, many time you will have been on the brink of extinction - the fate of 99% of all known ancient species - yet your ancestors survived and because they were good at surviving you are here and now.
You will live for a mere flash in the time-scale of the universe but in the vast darkness of the cosmos there can surely be few flashes as bright as your bright spark of consciousness.
Be proud. Be very proud. But at the same time be humbled by the enormity of the events which produced you and the fragility of it all.
Stars died and because they died, you live. You are made by stars out of stardust and in a very real sense, because you are made of the same stuff the universe is made of and are a part of it, there is something even more wonderful about you. Through you, though not just through you, and maybe not just here on this small planet, the universe has gained self awareness and can begin to understand itself. Through you it can stand on the surface of this beautiful little jewel in the cosmos, can look up in awe at itself and think “Wow!”
You’re special. You are unique and you were nearly 14 billion years in the making.
That’s your story. Enjoy it while it lasts.
And please bear in mind also that every other human being; every mammal; every bird, insect, spider, fish, or worm; every plant; indeed, every other living thing, has made the same journey you have made. Each is unique and the descendant of survivors. Each has an unbroken gene-line going right back to the first replicator. They are your relatives. Like you they are part of the whole web of interdependent things we call life on earth.
To end their life will end their gene-line for the first and only time in the history of the universe. Something which has taken nearly 14 billion years to produce and 3.5 billion years to perfect will have been extinguished forever.
Each of them is worthy of respect and each of them deserves the one opportunity to experience life that chance has given them.
Life is rare, precious and wonderful.
Tallyho!
Best Wishes - Lord Noel
