CONTINGENCY: VERY LUCKY TO BE HERE!
What are the pitfalls of thinking about time and space as infinite rather than vast, but finite? What are some of the other perils of thinking about time?
To what extent has scientific knowledge, culminating in the standard model of physics, replaced the need for myth and religion?
If human brains are the most intricately organized physical entities in the known universe, what must be inferred about the complexity of their collective interactions in real time: the utterances, artifacts and multilayered, evolving structures of human culture?
As sentient beings, we are alone the universe, or we are not. What will be the consequences to the human psyche if and when we find out? If distances measured in light years preclude the practicability of any contact, what difference would this make?
Birth heralds the beginning of a human lifetime, but it can also be seen as a mere marker point in a series of unlikely events long underway, even before conception. Indeed, the improbability of a given human conception is monumental. Each male ejaculation launches hundreds of million genetically unique sperm. Only one will combine with a genetically unique egg in a contingent fertilization event.
The moment of fertilization itself—which certainly defines the genetic landscape for a given individual—can be viewed as no more than the culmination of a great chain of contingent biological events originating in our ancestral forebears. Our genetic traits do not represent a singular foundational point. In the regress of genealogy any chosen stopping point along the continuum is arbitrary.
We can rewind the evolutionary regress from our primate ancestors to much simpler multi-cellular organisms, to the origin of primitive cells; and to the spontaneous evolution of the biochemical building blocks of life from the chemical elements; themselves previously cooked up in the alchemy of exploding stars.
If we reverse still further, we would encounter the birth of ancient stars; mostly composed of, and spontaneously fueled by, the hydrogen vestiges of an original big bang. Our theoretical foundational point, or singularity, is met only at this most distant temporal view, as we reach the limits of current physics.
MORE CONTINGENCY: “GOLDILOCKS PLANET”
The Earth is not too large and not too small. Being not too large, it is a rocky planet rather than a burbling gassy giant. Being not too small, it has ample gravity to impel an envelope of atmosphere and liquid water to cling to it perpetually. The Earth’s locus in relation to the sun is not so close that we are boiled or incinerated. It is not too distant to preclude harnessing solar energy for the self-regulatory and self-reproducing processes of the organisms that thrive on it. Energized by the sun, the life on Earth is a rare and spectacular oasis of order and complexity. The Earth represents a hiccup in the general trend towards dissipation in a universe where the arrow of time dictates ever increasing disorder.
MORE THAN FORTY ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE
Our sun is one of hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way, itself one of tens of billions of galaxies. The Milky Way is 100,000 light years (or 10 to the power of 21 metres) across. There are a further 15 orders of decreasing magnitude between a human femur and a proton.
OUR LATE ENTRANCE
Our solar system is a cosmic speck in a universe some 13.7 billion years old. If we mentally compress the Earth’s 4.55 billion year history into single year, our Australopithicus ancestors would not appear until 4 a.m. on the 31st of December. Homo sapiens would make its entrance just ten minutes before midnight.
ONLY 5 BILLION YEARS TO GO
All stars have a beginning, a middle and end. The life of a star unrolls according to its size. Our sun is a middle-aged, medium-sized star. In about 5 billion years much of its hydrogen fuel will be spent. The gravitional forces due to its mass will decrease. The sun will become an expanding red giant and will engulf the planets closest to it. There is some controversy as to whether the sun will simply burn the earth to a crisp or fail to reach it at all because ever decreasing solar gravity will no longer be able to hold the outer planets in their previously fixed orbits. Either way, the consequences for life remaining on earth will be catastrophic.
The chances are that we are not alone in the universe. Recent observations of other “goldilocks” planets (not too hot—not too cold—but just right) with close, but not too close, orbits around their stars, provide evidence that the earth is far from being unique as a potential substrate for the origins and evolution of life.
HERE BY LACK OF FORESIGHT
We have no need to delude ourselves with supernatural (or god-given) “intelligent design.” The scientific explanation is stranger, more poetic and more awe-inspiring than the fiction. Mind is one of the more recent pinnacles of biological evolution. It emerged automatically from almost nothing at all. Its complexity and elegance was not premeditated since the algorithm that produced it—natural selection—lacked all foresight. Mind’s multifarious manifestations: awareness, agency, instrumentality, free-will, selfhood, imagination and the like, simply evolved, given an ordered universe and eons of time.
I am not speaking of randomness (for E had to arise, as a consequence of A through D), but of the central principle of all history, contingency. A historical explanation does not rest on direct deductions from laws of nature, but on an unpredictable sequence of antecedent states, where any major change in any step of the sequence would have altered the final result. This final result is therefore dependent, or contingent, upon everything that came before, the unerasable and determining signature of history.
Gould, S.J. (1989) Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, W.W. Norton & Co. New York.
STEPHEN JAY GOULD
American Evolutionary Biologist and Essayist
[1941-2002]
Bryson, Bill (2005) A Short History of Nearly Everything: Special Illustrated Edition. Broadway Books: Random House, New York.
