You're Much Much Much Much Luckier Than You Think!

The Cosmic Lottery

Yes, you’ve won!  Against truly unbelievable odds!

Ever take a look at a line to buy lottery tickets at a convenience store?  You generally won’t find professionals on it—they know well that the odds of winning—often a million or more to one—are minimal.  (Many of them are long-term investors in the stock market and --eventually-- just about always profit handsomely.)  The good people on the line appear from their dress and demeanor to be members of the lower middle class—in other words, they really need the money.  And they’re not going to get it.

The chances of an acorn to grow into a towering oak is about one in 3.8 million.  The chance that a figurative acorn,  that is, a lottery ticket, will grow into a money tree is about the same as the likelihood of a freak storm burying New Delhi under three feet of snow. There are so many ways to fall short, sometimes way short, of one's heart's desires!  Maybe those who spend money on lotteries think they’re somehow special.  Maybe they believe in luck. Nobody’s special, of course, and Lady Luck is no match for disembodied statistics.

Yet they’ve won the cosmic lottery, along with every human being on the planet, against truly astronomical odds. Every one of us is extremely lucky to be alive!

Let’s look scientifically at how you became you.  The average male produces about 500 billion sperm cells in a lifetime.  During sex, the male injects over a million sperm into the vagina.  A woman, in contrast, is born with about 600,000 ova.  What do you think the chances are that one and only one of those ova, and one and only one of those sperm cells, came together to make you uniquely you?  How many countless pairs of eyes could have been reading this article instead of the two through which you encounter the world?

Your luck doesn’t stop with your mother and father.  What about your parents' parents, what about your lineage that goes back millions of years—and much longer than that if you include non-human multi-celled ancestors dating back at least 500 million years?  The number of people who could have been born, yet failed to receive a winning ticket to life in the cosmic lottery probably exceeds the number of leaves on every tree on Earth!  Especially when one considers the fact that you are alive now, and are not someone who lived in the past or might live in the future.

Your luck doesn’t stop with your genealogy.  If we change “dreams” to ‘stars” in Shakespeare’s famous quote from The Tempest, namely, “We are such stuff as stars are made on...,” the statement becomes not only figuratively true, but literally true as well.  

I will venture a brief explanation of stellar nucleosynthesis.  The predominant elements in the universe are hydrogen and helium.  When a huge cloud of primordial elements condenses via gravity into a massive star, the outer pressure of radiation from nucleosyntheses is balanced by the inward pull of gravity.  When a massive star runs out of hydrogen, the death process, very slow in human terms, begins.  Higher elements on the periodic table, such as carbon, nitrogen and oxygen are formed.  This provides an adequate energy source for the star, until iron is reached.  Iron has an extremely high binding capacity—gravity is not able to compress it and thus use it in nuclear reactions.  The star is no longer in balance: the inner force of gravity is no longer equalized by the outer force of radiation.  BOOM!--a supernova occurs. The fierce amount of energy released causes the nucleosynthesis of even higher atoms, such as gold.  The force of the explosion ejects these elements into interstellar space.  (Becoming a supernova is not the fate of all stars; only those whose mass is a little over eight times greater than that of our sun die in this manner. The exception is formed by two white dwarf stars in orbit around each other.  When one star gobbles enough matter from the other, a supernova results as well.)

Our sun and solar system are about four billion years old.  The supernova explosion or explosions that enriched the clouds with heavier elements which became our solar system, probably happened billions of years before; huge interstellar distances mean that it likely took a very long time for those heavier elements to reach the cloud that was condensing and becoming the planet which we inhabit.

My point is this: the chance that an interstellar cloud condensed into a solar system in which life is possible is unknown, but probably quite minimal.  The elements that became the sun or Jupiter were not able, due to harsh conditions, to evolve  life forms.  Think of all the countless lifeforms there would be if, say, Mars and Venus were equally hospitable to biological evolution! In addition, what if one of your ancestors branched off onto a lineage that did not lead to humans?  You guessed it, you wouldn’t exist as a human being now. You lucky non-dog!

That life arose on Earth—who knows how—and that some of her original elements, along with a hefty dose of oxygen from photosynthesis, eventually became you, dear reader, was by no means inevitable.  If I were an observer from another world, and, at the time our solar system was forming, was asked what the  chances were that highly complex life forms. such as us,  would eventually arise, well,  I wouldn’t want to bet my alien life on it.

Your luck doesn’t stop with this universe either.  The four forces of the universe are incredibly fine-tuned.  Is this another example of Wilberforce’s argument that finding a watch on the ground implies a creator?  No.  Many physicists posit that there are just about an infinite amount of other universes where the values of the four forces would be different, the vast majority of which would preclude life as we know it.

Lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky you!  You'v’ won the cosmic lottery with the chance of winning were so astronomically low that you might as well say that you’ve beaten these odds: infinity to one!

If that’a a fact, and it is, why is there so much dissatisfaction and unhappiness among the members of the highest life forms known?

2. Problems

I’m not going to discuss the problems in detail, you are undoubtedly quite familiar with most of them.

It is interesting to note that persons who win human lotteries, such as those on a convenience-store line, are very often not made happy by their so-called good fortune.  One study found that five years after winning a lottery people are no happier than one who became a paraplegic five years earlier!

My experience confirms this.  One day my former barber announced that this would be the last time he would cut my hair—he had just won a lottery!  A simple man, an emigrant from Italy who only spoke broken English, now had big plans of moving up the social ladder.  While he was cutting my hair, the phone rang constantly—So many people had ideas of what to do with his money!  You could see that he didn’t know how to handle his new situation—he seemed nervous now when he previously had seemed quite content.  I would hate to think of what became of him five years later!

The problem is that these cosmically exceedingly rare human beings all live on a tiny speck called Earth—over seven billion of us!

The problems arose when we evolved into selves that imagine that we are separate from the environment. In order to survive, we had to defend and take care of ourselves.  We are aware of death. We began to compare ourselves to others.  Many of us wanted to become numero uno.  Imagination and will, our glories, are also our ills.  Greed, hate, delusion etc. arose! Problems, problems, problems!

I am going to spend even less time on the solutions, since this is an article about cosmic luck,  You know what they are: do something you love to do; keep busy; meditate; accept yourself and others for what you and they are; love your neighbor as yourself, socialize, exercise mind and body, etc.

Not easy I admit.  But you’ve come an infinitely long way already—Becoming happy, very happy, is, after all, a whole lot easier, and will take a whole lot less time than evolving from nothing at all.  Take my word for it, it can be done.  Good luck!