Thermal vents to miracles
Pockets full of miracles
Little bags of gold
It’s a miracle that we’re here. While the persistence of life, for now on Earth in the near term, remains likely at a given moment, our individual lives are all highly improbable. On average 2–300 million sperm cells are fighting to fertilize a human egg. Just one of them made you. If a different one out of those 2–300 million had one, you would be a completely different person. The odds that your parents would have had a child if they were healthy and trying to are decently high, but the odds that would exist as you were extraordinarily small. Your life is a miracle, so to speak.
Life on earth seems to have been exceedingly improbable. The best theory explaining the emergence of life on Earth involves thermal vents. The equilibrating process that is a thermal vent provided the energetic flux to kick off the anti-entropic cycle that is life.
Deus ex thermae
As yet we have no evidence of life beyond our planet. Our intuition says there must be life elsewhere. Perhaps the more radical consideration is that there may not be life elsewhere. We might be it, at least in this universe, and maybe in all of them. One might push back immediately.
They argue it’s regressive and human-centric to believe that our planet contains all life. There are so many planets. Even if the emergence of life is exceedingly improbable on planets that could support it, surely life would emerge on at least another one of them? Right? Who knows.
I am more certain of the existence of something beyond our observable physical space than I am of life outside our planet. Fermi’s paradox considers why we have yet to discover life beyond our planet, but fails to consider that it may simply be because life is so unlikely that there is no other life. This criticism is known as the Rare Earth Hypothesis. It’s not a popular viewpoint. I don’t necessarily agree with it, but I do think we should consider once again believing that our existence is, indeed, special. We are surrounded by miracles.
