Thanks to the five known physical forces and two sets of amazing equations, Einstein's and Schrà ¶dinger's, we find ourselves having biologically evolved in an incredible universe. We could not have asked for gravity, for the electromagnetic force and for the two nuclear forces to have been any better.
Add to this the amazing fact that several times in our evolutionary history, including the path that led to us, single-celled organisms managed to form multicellular life that reproduced by sex rather than division. Until the principle behind this is explained by science it remains on my list of near miracles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicellular_organism
Pure Opinion.
I know that none of us will come out at the same place when we read about these coincidences. In fact, my position has changed over the years, although I am still a scientific skeptic about religious concepts like salvation and an afterlife.
Nevertheless, when I look at creation it seems like some things were inevitable, in other words built into Einstein's and Schrà ¶dinger's equations. One is simple life. I believe that planets throughout the universe that happen to have a complete Periodic Table like ours will eventually see at least simple life such as bacteria, assuming environmental conditions are correct. We, of course, thanks to a relatively stable environment for 500 billion years since the Cambrian era, also witness many examples of complex life, which are probably very rare.
Why we humans are here, given the turmoil in our astronomical environment, I cannot say. But I do know that this planet is in many ways a gift of evolution, both physical and biological, and I am all the more committed to leaving it better than I found it.
How could I do otherwise? Something set the initial conditions at the Big Bang and injected incredible laws and equations plus an unfathomable amount of energy into our incipient universe. Somehow these equations held forth for 13.7 billion years and gave us this solar system and our little Blue Dot, to borrow from Carl Sagan. Our ancestors, doing their share, managed to survive several major extinctions.
