To begin: yeah, you all thought I was going to rant about life, right? Well check out that ever-so-obvious title. No sarcasm here, that's exactly what I'm going to talk about. You know why? Because the very concept of life is, without and sort of hyperbole or dramatization, amazing.
Let's get something straight right away: you shouldn't be alive right now.
And no, that's not some depressing message. Not some urge or prod telling you that your life isn't worth it and you should just give up. It's a statistical fact. The odds for life to have developed on any one planet are astronomical, so insanely unbelievable that there's really no reason for you to exist at all. As it was explained to me, the likelihood of DNA randomly coming into existence is comparable to the likelihood of taking all the parts to a jet, throwing them into a tornado, and getting a working jet on the other side. Whether you chose to explain this phenomenon as proof of intelligent design or otherwise, it's still a mind boggling occurrence. Life, even in its most basic forms, shouldn't have come into existence; let alone more complex organisms like ourselves. As proof of this, just look up into the skies. How many planets do you think there are? The eight (or nine, if you really wanna count Pluto) in our solar system? A few dozen? Maybe a hundred?
Try 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Yea, that's a lot more than you thought, right? And get this: none of them, as far as we know (which isn't a whole lot), have life on them, much less sentient life.
It doesn't just stop their, either. Take a look at yourself, or any other complex organism around you. Think about how that organism works: the organism breaks down to organ systems, those systems to separate organs, those organs to tissues, those tissues to cells, and so on and so forth. Let's focus on the organ systems for now, specifically that of your muscles.
We all take our muscular system for granted; we can move and junk, but it's actually so much more. Muscles are responsible (with the aid of our brains) for our communication, the continuing beats of our heart, digestion, visualization, and pretty much anything else that can move on your body at all. But that's all simple; think harder about it. Through no real effort, you can move your hand. Through no real effort, you're reading this (don't even start me on the eyes). Through no real effort, you can walk.
Oh my God, walking. It's one of the biggest evolutionary steps life has taken as a whole. Ever since the first fish stepped on to land, life was never the same again. Through millennium after millennium, the leg/foot was perfected. Billions of millions of hundreds of thousands of years went into that one appendage. It went from something used to swim and clumsily walk to an appendage capable of careful balance and calibration.
Try this out: stand up, walk across your room, and come sit back down. Fucking amazing right?
"Not really, Kyle."
You just don't understand. You did something on a semi-conscious level that allowed you to move from one point in space to another. You didn't even have to try that hard, did you? Well, maybe you did. Lazy bum. But if you did do what I asked, it came natural. And that's an amazing gift. The fact that you can travel through space, through no enormous magnitude of your own (unless you were one of the species that perfected walking). Through a complex serious of chemical reactions, where proteins within your cells slide back and forth, you can contract and extend the muscles in your leg that enable you to walk. Chemical reactions. Your body is a living lab that you didn't even have to put together. How amazing is that?
Then we get to balancing. Oh, how even more wonderful balancing is. The muscles in your legs, minimal input, make acute alterations that keep you upright. Go ahead and try that walking thing again. You literally pole vaulted over one leg, balanced yourself on that one leg, landed on the other, and then shifted your weight so you could repeat the process. And we take that for granted. That shit's amazing.
And to continue with the idea of acute muscle control. We as humans, out of the known living species, are one of the few with opposable thumbs. With those, we can handle and manipulate objects in our environment. Without even extending much effort. I'm sure everyone reading this has a computer or a phone or portable gaming device or something. Through the magic of our hands, we can pick that thing up and just type/press keys and buttons like it's nothing. Through a little bit of practice, just about any human can learn to play the piano -- which, to me, is probably one of the most finger-intensive actions a person can perform (obvious sexual acts aside). Think about it: anytime a person plays the piano, their fingers are having little voluntary seizures that create a pleasing melody. That living chemistry lab is cooking meth or something when this happens; that stuff just happens at a stupidly complex pace.
Alright, maybe this really is turning into a rant, so this'll be my final example my mind explodes with the wonders of life and the universe.
Your eyes. I mentioned them previously before. Go ahead, check. I did. Don't doubt me again.
Your eyes, through some sort of black magic, brings in light, bounces it around a bit, converts it to electro-chemical signals, then sends it to the brain where the brain translates those signals into a picture. If that doesn't scream "magic!" I don't know what does. What originated as nothing more than a light sensitive cell, your eye developed and evolved into this organ that is able to grab light from the world like some sort of thief, and jam it into your head until your brain makes sense of it. Add that with the muscles involves (those hat allow us to move our eyes around inside our brain casings and the ones making up the iris) and you get some stupefying sums (I'm running out of phrases at this point).
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Slightly unrelated. This is a torn iris; it just contracts and lets in more
light without you even having to care!!! |
Even if you think life sucks, it doesn't. The circumstances of your life might suck (that's all subjective, though), but the very concept of life can't suck. Life proves that science is, in fact, magic; but just explained magic. While you might hate what happens in your life, you can't hate life in general. It's just too tremendous of a thing to suck. Please, if you can even begin to rationalize to me just why life in general sucks, do so. I just don't understand how.
After all: