The overlooked miracle of life
All of us, even those who profess atheism, at one point or another have hoped for a miracle, an act of Divine Providence that could make our most heartfelt wishes magically come true.
I wish i could be a topper in the board exams; I wish I could land a job in an MNC; I wish I could find my ideal life partner; I wish I would win a jackpot lottery.
Our miracle list is almost as endless and as varied as we. But as we hope, and even pray, for a miracle, we overlook the greatest miracle of all, which is ourselves, the fact that we exist at all.
If you're fortunate enough to live in a place where there is little or no atmospheric and light pollution, and you look up at the night sky you'll see some 2,000 stars, each of which is like our Sun.
This is only a minuscule part of our galaxy, the Milky Way, which has an estimated 60 billion stars and is one of anywhere between 200 billion and three trillion galaxies in the universe, each with billions of Suns, which in turn have their own orbiting planets.
In order to sustain life even at the most basic level, a planet must be in what is called the Goldilocks Zone, neither too hot nor too cold. Moreover, habitable planets must have water, from which primordial life springs.
Scientists – using the Drake Equation named after astronomer Francis Drake, who in 1960 initiated the first organised search for extraterrestrial radio signals – have estimated there could be as many as 60 billion habitable planets in our galaxy alone, and in the universe as a whole as many as 50 sextillion. That's five followed by 22 zeros, or one million billion.
However, the calculus of the Drake Equation falls foul of the Fermi Paradox, named after the Italian-American physicist hailed as 'the architect of the nuclear age', Enrico Fermi.
Seeing a magazine cartoon depicting extraterrestrials rummaging through New York City's garbage bins, Fermi reportedly said, 'Where is everybody?' Why is it that SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, launched in 1960, hasn't made contact with a single intelligent life form from elsewhere in the universe? Could it be that such beings deliberately avoid us, seeing the mess we've made of our own planet through environmental degradation and wars? Or is it that we are truly alone in the unimaginable vastness of the cosmos? Marvelling at the complexity of life on Earth, from bacterial, single cell microorganisms to scientists, astrophysicist Fred Hoyle compared it to the statistical probability that a storm sweeping through a junkyard would create a fully functional Boeing 747.
Who, or what, is the cause of this miraculous phenomenon that we take for granted and call life? Religion would have us believe it is God. Science would nudge us toward the Big Bang Theory and Darwinian evolution.
The greatest wonder of wonders, the greatest miracle of miracles is that there is something at all – the universe, earthworms, us – rather than nothing, existence rather than non-existence.
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