Life, as it is, is an incredibly complicated thing. I wish I were a scientist who could quantify exactly how incredible life is, but I’m not, and I can’t. My understanding of life (if you can even call it that) is that we are incredibly lucky. Life, and the human species specifically, is the luckiest thing that could have ever happened. Life is an incredibly uncommon event, and as such you don’t really even see it anywhere else in the universe, in fact, we’ve found planets that could support life that don’t even have life on it. So why are we so lucky?

This is basically where I start to say “I have no freaking idea.” The first creatures were weird single cellular organisms which one day just decided to start moving, or something like that. Honestly there is no rational reason for life to have started, other than that some random elements decided to bond in such a ridiculously unsimple simple way that for some reason decided it’d be a good idea to multiply, or something like that. For a while it was a mish mosh of pish posh and nothing was really happening. If you even think about the time span that this must have taken, we’re talking a LONG time here. The average human lives somewhere from 50-100 years long, and we’re talking thousands, maybe even millions of years it took these things to start moving around and splitting up and reproducing like crazy.

Eventually creatures became complex, and this is when we think about dinosaurs. A constantly competing species of eat or be eaten vicious killers. Thus, a pointless cycle started and continued to keep moving on. Dinosaurs were born, dinosaurs killed eachother, dinosaurs were born, dinosaurs ate flowers, and these were basically the two kinds of dinosaurs. Then, something catastrophic happened immediately killing tons of species of fish and dinosaur and mammal, and really just anything that was alive on the planet earth.

This is when the age of the primate started. Just large enough to survive, just small enough to survive. For a while they were in a pointless cycle, not really doing anything but killing and eating, only they were pack animals, and as such worked together to kill one another. Eventually respect for power was something that was becoming appreciated, and with it, memory. How could you remember who the most powerful primate was without memories? Maybe you could tell the physical prowess, but something else was also coming into vogue at the time, and this was tool use.

Power could no longer be quantified by physical strength, but now it was who had the biggest stick, who could use the big stick the best, and who could survive the longest. These creatures continued evolving their brains rather than brawn, and thus humans were born. Sophisticated and intelligent, not always focusing on power, yet still respecting it.

And here we are now in life. I feel like power is something that is going out of style, you don’t need to be a body builder to do kung-fu, you don’t need to do kung-fu to shoot someone. Power can no longer be quantified on looks alone, and now other things are more important than power. As our brains evolve and continue to grow so we can get more intelligent, power is becoming less and less important, and the age of the nerd is beginning. Now I can’t help but think about all of this and be slightly amazed.

I am by NO means a scientist, and likely half of these facts are skewed so horribly that a real scientist would take one look at this and grade it an F-, but this is not being written for a scientist, this is not being written for any particular reason other than for the fact that I can write it. This is the product of millions upon millions of years (possibly even billions), and isn’t it terrible? A poorly written paper acknowledging how lucky we are, as humans, to be alive.

Again, I bring up this prospect of ‘luckiness’ but would most humans consider themselves ‘lucky’? I truly doubt it. People don’t think of themselves as lucky, in fact, most people think of themselves as cursed. I can sympathize. I think life actually kind of sucks for most people, and I’ve come to terms with the fact that life is only what you make of it, something which many people at one point in their lives or another struggle with and can’t necessarily come to terms with ever. We, as a race, question our own existence, but why? Why do we need a purpose? Because we’ve completed our previous one; Survive. Humanity has risen to the top of the food chain, and nothing comes even close to being threatening to us, nothing but other humans, of course.

So what are we doing on this Earth now? This question is a silly one to ask. We’re here on Earth by random chance, there is no rational reason to be here, only what we make of it. Some people think that the earth is a living organism, and that we are its cells. Honestly I think that this is a far more rational belief than one that claims that there is a god. Does it even matter though?