Random Thoughts on Random Things

Picture this:
A ball of stone hanging in the howling, infinite vastness of space; crowded in by dark matter. On a cosmic scale this ball is less than a mote of dust caught in the breeze. But it has a burning, molten heart and is just the right size; neither too small nor too large, to generate a sufficient gravitational field and thus sustain an atmosphere.

It is also neither too close nor too far from a medium-sized star and it rotates at precisely the necessary speed and in the necessary manner. So this ball of suspended rock and fire experiences both night and day. And life grows upon its surface. It turns blue-green. Glaciers form, oceans spread, mountains push out of the restless and churning earth. Forests crawl greenly across those ridges of stone and soil. Flowers perfume the days. From the stinking primordial muck life-forms crawl and slither and hop; they sprout limbs, form rudimentary lungs. The breathe their first sips of this new air. They become things of claws and scales, flesh, fur and feather. Millions of years from reptile to mammal. And from the mammals spring a line of gibbering apes. These apes learn to walk upright, learn to hunt. Little-by-little they learn to plot and calculate. Their brains grow and expand, their hands become more sensitive and dexterous. They become adept at making and using tools. Their fur disappears generation by generation and they fashion crude clothing for themselves; to remain warm.
They learn to shape the world around them. Become clever. Become powerful. Become human.

These humans; they build houses and halls, cathedrals and cities. They snatch the world for themselves.
Genetic lines form. DNA patterns echoed and replicated, twining like an eternal string of beads. These strings bind and wind through multitudinous generations. They bind cowards and kings, heroes and beggars, fools and geniuses, madmen and saints; all the countless shades in-between. These cords stretch through all of human history, across continents and oceans. They survive famines, plagues, war, tyranny, revolution. They pass through acts of horror and acts of nobility. They witness the Holocaust and the Renaissance. Through the entire seething roar of human history these same strands prevail, linking and re-linking together into millions of new permutations. Until finally two people (each the product of many others - a virtual forest of others) come together.
Exactly the right  people, at exactly the right time. DNA codes combine - half from each and the end result of all these endless years of absolute randomness, the end result of this entire writhing possibility is...

You.

If any of the variables were changed, if any of the times were different, you would never exist. Not as you. Not as you are now. You are a single outcome borne of a colossal flux of randomness. Your very existence is a triumph against unimaginable odds. Every day that you inhabit this small blue-green ball of living, burning stone is the equivalent of winning some incomprehensible cosmic lottery.
Every moment is a miracle.

And this is true of everyone; all the uncountable billions that ever have or ever will exist on this scrap of cosmic dust. Every. Single. Person.

We should never forget just how tiny we are; how incomprehensibly minute the world is. Every point of light that we can see in a clear night sky is (or was) another sun - many considerably larger than our own. Space is infinitely vast. And utterly unknowable.
We should also never forget the staggering improbability of us existing at all.

And, I just realized that all this has been said before (and way more concisely) by Alan Moore in his comic 'Watchmen' - he even used pictures. And Monty Python's Flying Circus did it better with a song. "If you're feeling down, Mrs Brown..."
Oh well.