Readers with suicidal tendencies kept in check by powerful medication may want to stop here. Your meds may not protect you.
Undeterred none-the-less? All right, let us gently proceed.
Mark Twain, in his boundless wisdom, pointed out, “I was dead for millions of years before I was born and it never inconvenienced me the slightest.”
But before we proceed to discuss what happened before we were born, let’s draw an unavoidably gruesome picture of what will happen to us after we are dead, for that is what seems to worry a sizeable percentage of the population who wish to live forever but don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday.
Let me give it to you straight. After we are dead for a hundred million billion trillion years, we’ll hardly have begun being dead. If you multiply that hundred million billion trillion by a hundred million billion trillion – and keep multiplying it every second for another hundred million billion trillion years – you won’t even reach one percent of the time you will remain dead. For forever is a really long time, indivisible and irreversible. Eternity is one endless wait in God’s Laundromat. It is also a dull and pointless subject from which we can derive neither wisdom nor solace.
So let us return to the time before you were born.
Some time around 3 billion years ago, Mother Nature (with or without God’s help) concocted a soup of nutrients, perhaps aided by lightning, which began to percolate. Molecules bumped into each other, connected and divided and reconnected, again and again until after eons of time random connections remained viable and the spark of life sputtered into being. Molecule connections pulsed and throbbed and generation after generation new connections grew, evolving until units of life began to split in two and simple replication was achieved.
Let us focus on just one of those primal cells. It divided as its ancestors had, and its offspring divided, down to the thousands of millions of generations. Each cell in this chain successfully divided at least once before it was eaten by others or died a natural death. And each succeeding cell did the same. It reproduced before it died. After a million million generations fins and feet were achieved, and crawly things invaded the land to reproduce, generation after generation. Some lines developed wings or horns or poisonous fangs. Some climbed trees in search of fruit. One line developed an opposable thumb. This line could make and hold tools. Fire was tamed and thousands of generations were spent beside bonfires, chipping flint spear points and knives. One line managed to find enough food and to avoid the deadly assaults of rivals and wild animals, surviving infancy and successfully reproducing at least once, each generation managing to produce offspring in spite of hunger, disease, and death during child birth.
Again and again and again in this one line, every link in the chain was somehow miraculously able to provide the next link in the chain, adding a new generation. Some links were noble caring parents and good citizens, some links were rogues and robbers and murders. Many many were rapists, for there was no romance nor marriage a million years ago. Some were prostitutes, male and female. Some were wise, some were kind, some were lazy, some were a pestilence to their communities. But each and every link in this chain were lucky and somehow managed to reproduce the next generation, continuing the unbroken chain, despite floods, famine, plague, slavery, persecution, civil wars or simple competition. Again and again strength and endurance combined with sheer luck, and each link in the chain survived long enough to reproduce itself. Again and again and again and again. Until after 3 billion long years you were born.
You (and your offspring if you have them) are the end product of a three billion year long chain. Not once in three billion years was the chain broken before successful reproduction or you wouldn’t be here. Despite the fact.. and probably because of the fact.. that hundreds if not thousands of your ancestors were murders and rapists and prostitutes in order to survive, you are privileged to be alive today. Rejoice! Each of us who is alive today is alive because we are the products of countless rapes, murders and land-grabs!
But are you grateful.. or as grateful as you ought to be?
So try to show a little class, and a little gratitude for the struggles of the countless generations before you. You may not have been born for a specific purpose. But you were certainly born because a billion ancestors strove to give you the chance not to be a total fuck up.
