The .15%

(We may not all be legally-impoverished South Dakota cowboy-turned-jackpot-millionaires, but that doesn't mean we're not lucky.)

It was in an attempt very much like my own here today--and I'm afraid I can't remember offhand precisely where. Dawkins perhaps?--that I first heard the allusion to the some 70 trillion possible people, based on the available number of viable genetic combinations for humans, that could potentially exist (Not allowing for the environmental variances that act on those combinations, which in theory makes this number significantly larger). By having existed at all as human beings--the approximately 108 billion of us who've managed to be born throughout human existence--we find ourselves among the select approximate 0.15% of those potential people to have been realized on Earth.

I think in terms of considering the true beauty in the opportunity life affords us it is essential, at least at times, to keep in mind these things of a grander scale. By recognizing, if not fully comprehending, the incredible unlikelihood of the extreme confluence of circumstances that has allowed humans to rise as a species and--many orders of magnitude less likely--the chance that you would exist in present day as you do, it is not hard to see how some have fallen prey to the insidiously easy idea that there must exist some "higher" design behind our existence. While it is seemingly natural for the human brain to seek out and assign significance and patterns even where there are none, the unfortunate result has been the incredibly convoluted and often violent rise of modern religion which has done more to skew and harm our collective ability to appreciate the realities of human life than any other force.

Thankfully, modern science makes it easier than ever to fend off such unfounded, limiting, and ultimately incorrect viewpoints, shedding great deals of light on the more beautiful and interesting realities of who we are and how we came to be. To even ascertain the very simple 0.15% from above took the combined efforts of biologists/geneticists to determine our genetic makeup through decades of research--not to mention relying on breakthroughs in technology--as well as decades more research on the anthropology side, tracking the rise and growth of humankind using ever-evolving methods on ever-growing sets of compiled physical evidence among other data. And of course they all built on previous human knowledge. Nowadays, an asshole like me can, on a whim, decide to whip together this piece and have at his fingertips this information, reliably sourced, as fast as I can type what I'm looking for (and if it takes longer than that to load I become immediately impatient). That's what I call a "miracle."* In this way, the .15% represents not just a numeric representation of our good fortune as individuals, but also a symbolic testament to our constantly expanding wealth of knowledge as a species.

Though we all defied the odds to be here, our luck clearly doesn't stop there. You're reading this, as I alluded to above, in an utterly fantastic age in 2012. Of course, by the definitions of the vast majority of those other .15-percenters, 1912 would have also seemed a fantastic age. As would 1812. And 1712. In fact, approximately 86 billion of the 108 billion humans--about 80%-- to have lived were born before 1650. See the chart here. We cannot imagine the struggles of many of these people, which becomes increasingly true the further back you trace our ancestry as a species, all the way to the days of life as a nonstop fight for survival. I use this knowledge to hone my perspective and give myself a tool for appreciating the life I have as a truly rare one-time experience to be appreciated as deeply as possible.

In America in particular, but throughout the industrialized modern world, a culture of materialism and a fixation with excess provide additional trappings when it comes to fully fathoming the brilliance of the opportunities we've been given. We're so thoroughly removed from the idea of struggling just to survive on a fundamental level that it seems natural to take things for granted. Progress almost seems to mean the ability to take more for granted. But this disconnect is bad for us, at least without some occasional grounding. I believe a wider-view approach, including a sense of our ultimate scale in the universe--and by that I mean just how unimaginably tiny our part is--can and should be a facet of the mental framework of a rationally-minded person.

By taking at least a little time--and specifically when it enhances the beauty of nature or helps free the mind of the entanglements of our here-and-now world--to reflect on the awesomeness of life and the universe itself, as well as our tiny, unique, inherently lucky part in all of that, I genuinely think we can relieve at least some of the stress we encounter day to day. This campaign season when, if you're like me, you'll be about to want to kill yourself with all the political nonsense and agenda spewing that's going around, take a moment to forget about the 1% vs 99% bullshit and instead reflect on being yourself among the very luckiest of the .15%.


Jeff N.

*The wide availability of this thoroughly backed information is what makes a place like the "Creation Museum" in Kentucky, where schoolchildren are brought to see supposedly accurate depictions of humans interacting with dinosaurs, such an offensive place to me.