Luck

During a conversation with my eldest son, the subject of luck came up. It got me thinking about a phrase a lot of people use: "I never have any luck". It's a phrase that's always bothered me for a number of reasons, mainly because it's usually linked to some sort of material gain, a lottery win maybe, and I've never really been a material person. But during this conversation with my son, I ranted about just how lucky we are to actually even be here. In fact, how lucky any of us are to actually be here.

What are the chances of you being here today reading this? Let's begin way back… I mean waaaaaaaay back to the beginning, the actual beginning — the Big Bang. As far as we know, the Universe just appeared as an infinitesimally small speck and then, for some reason, expanded faster than the speed of light. It grew from that tiny speck, smaller than an atom, to the size of a golf ball in a hundredth of a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second! To put that into perspective, the Milky Way is 100,000 light years across; if a pea expanded from pea size (about 1cm across) at the same rate, it would expand to 1.3 billion light years across in the same amount of time! It didn't stop there either, it continued to expand and is still expanding to this day. And what's more, it contains everything that you can see and everything you can't see, except at that time it was just a massive ball of red hot plasma. Everything. Now luckily enough, the Universe also contained a bunch of rules that decided how all this stuff was going to behave, laws if you will, and one of these laws was gravity. So all this stuff cooled down and, because of gravity, started clumping together to form stars and galaxies and planets. Stars grew old and exploded and scattered all different elements all over the place, and these bits clumped together and formed new stars and new planets. Planets, made out of bits of dead star, were rich in elements such as oxygen, nitrogen and, importantly, carbon (which is what all life is based on). This continued for billions of years, until one day a little star we call the Sun was formed, soon followed by a little planet we call Earth. I'll skip over the bit where the Earth cooled, survived a battering of asteroids on a continual basis, managed to survive a planet the size of Mars smashing into it (creating the moon) and get to the point where water formed. You see, the Earth was luckily the right distance from the Sun for water to be a liquid. As far as we know, all life requires liquid water and without it the Earth would have been a very different place.

So on this tiny planet, which now contains water, the first life begins. How is still up for debate but the important thing is that it did form, and then began to grow and evolve. The Earth didn't have much oxygen at this point, mainly due to all the gases that volcanoes were pumping into the atmosphere as the Earth cooled (creating all the land), but a life form called Cyanobacteria evolved which used photosynthesis to create energy for itself. This took in sunlight and carbon dioxide and released oxygen as a waste gas. These tiny life forms literally caused the climate to change (see, we're not the only ones). Life was pretty good at this evolving stuff, and so when it came up against a challenge (change of climate, lack of food, predators) it changed again and again, to keep giving itself a better chance of surviving and reproducing. Life became more and more complex until the complex lifeforms, who had been happy to live in the oceans up until now, crawled out onto the land. A whole new species now began to evolve and then dinosaurs! Huge creatures roamed the land, doing their thing, eating healthily and being at one with the world. How lucky they must have considered themselves as the meteor that was to wipe them out scorched across the sky. But their demise led to the rise of mammals and, after ice ages, earthquakes, disease, predators, fights for food and mates, they continued to evolve until the first humans came into existence.

Humans brought their own complexities, with war featuring heavily. On top of that, disease and pestilence, starvation, slavery, poverty, more war, technological discoveries, medicines, industrial revolution, air flight, motor vehicles, massive war, political revolutions, space exploration, technological revolutions and then finally you. You! You lucky bastard. Your parents, their parents, all their parents, surviving, thriving, finding each other, making babies, not dying of disease or starvation, not getting killed in war after war after war, evolving from caves, and chimps, ocean life, and bacteria, and single celled organisms, on a planet that happened to be the right distance from the right star after billions of years of other stars and galaxies forming and exploding and making other stars to make all the bits that make you (you're made from bits of dead star!), from an expansion of a speck which just happened to contain the right laws to make it all possible.

"I never have any luck!"

My son smiled. I must be doing something right.