As Luck Would Have It

Fortune had been showered upon you to be living today. Nothing facetious about that whatsoever because today, as we speak, or rather, as you are reading this musing, consider yourself one of approximately 7 billion who each comes from a very long line of continuously unbroken chain of connected lives that span a very, very long time. It is continuously unbroken because had there been a break, just once, in that chain, at some point, or any point along that span of tens and thousands of years, you will not be here. 

Here's why.  From a set of two people - your parents - your mother gave birth to you not too long ago.  Before that, two sets of parents (four different people) brought up the two persons who became your father and mother. You go back another generation and now we're talking four sets of parents - eight people in all - from your past who had something to do with you being here. If you go back just a little bit more, you will count 16, then 32, then 64 who were in that chain in just another additional three generations. Imagine a very long funnel and you’re at the bottom tip of it today. Tracing upwards you will have a wall of people lining the sides of the funnel stretching almost endlessly to an unimaginably flared top. Markers of your DNA will extend in an unbroken band stretching to however farther back your imagination will take you.  There is something truly staggering about this, but let's digress for a bit in the next paragraph.

The Chess Board Story

There are quite a number of different versions of this tale but we’ll pick one from India since that is where chess likely originated. It’s about a king, a chess master, who challenged one visitor to a game.  The challenger when prompted what he wanted as a reward after he bested the king, merely asked that a single grain of rice be put on the first square of the chess board. Two grains on the next, then doubling that on the third square, which are four grains…then doubling it again to eight, and so on and on until the 64^th square. The king thought nothing of it and agreed, not realizing that he was faced with the classic effect of exponentials.  Just by the 40^th square there would have been 1 billion grains, but still manageable and well within what the king had in his vast granaries. The king’s accountants soon realized that by the 64^th square the number of grains of rice amounted to 18 followed by 30 zeros (18³⁰ grains).  That amount of rice would have weighed 210 billion tons, enough to cover all of India with a layer one meter thick. Assuming just ten grains of rice on a stalk per square inch, a rice field twice the area of the entire surface of the earth, oceans and lakes included would have been required for planting.

Two things we learn from that story: (a)from the second paragraph above, you will see that there had to have been some serious overlap in our ancestry because there could not have been that many people to have lived if each individual among 7 billion people today traces his or her lineage just to one discretely single funnel; (b) often people, even experts in their field, would use the word exponential, i.e. exponential growth, profits will grow exponentially, etc., not realizing what they’re talking about, so tread lightly when using that word, except to use it metaphorically but often one cannot resist and even add “literally” to it.

To further explain what I just said from the last sentence, imagine going back just 60 generations before you were born.  The doubling effect of parents of parents of parents would require an exponential number of people if we merely account a single line of ancestry.  Therefore, it is only conceivable that a great number of people in every race and mixed races could trace their ancestry to a relatively much smaller number of original individuals. Another way is to imagine that you, as an individual, were at the tip of an ancestral pyramid, which you are, and you project backwards in time the number of people from whence you came through the doubling phenomenon of parenting.  By the 64^th generation the base of the pyramid would exceed the diameter of the entire solar system if all the people involved with you were from a single linage if they stood shoulder to shoulder on a straight line.

Therefore, we must conclude that we all came from a very narrow ancestral base.  All Europeans, for example, have common DNA markers in each and every one of them, distinctly European, because there had to have been just a handful of original parents.  It is almost as if there was a proverbial Adam and Eve but mind you, not in the literal sense.  We can say the same for those from Asia, the Middle East and Africa, of course.  People in every race are likely related to one another and there is more likelihood than not that all races are related as well.  Allow for migration patterns, allow enough time (as in several thousand years), and allow for the fact that changing geology dictated climate patterns that dictated the concentration of food and shelter, biological adaptations, cultural and sociological evolution, etc. the odds of people mixing, separating, reuniting, exploiting one another through wars and even local conflicts, and do not forget that we are confined to one earth –though large and widespread it is still a finite area – the odds of people “bumping into one another” completes the recipe for the proverbial “melting pot”.  We cannot know all the details but the math tells us that there could not have been that many people in our ancestry to have allowed for truly discrete “originals”. I could be wrong but not by much if we keep in mind that the numbers are not there for you to have come from a single line without ancestral “entanglements” in the past.

But what has “as luck would have it” got to do with all of what had been said so far?

Everything!  In order to cover every reader we will either make this about the odds of you making it thus far as just mere fortuitous results of probabilities or as an acknowledgement that the Creator, as many of us believe, has a hand in how and why we made it this far; however, God did not exactly make it that easy for every ancestor.  Just think this through.  At any time along the chain, a break could have occurred because of diseases, famine, accidents, death through war, enslavement, natural catastrophe, etc. Of course, either none of those happened or you owe it to your ancestor’s skill, genetics or luck because you are here now.

The biology of creating you, and each and every ancestor before you, was always fraught with all kinds of obstacles. From the moment of conception the struggle for survival, even at the microscopic level of fertilization, is no picnic for the fertilized egg. Let’s back up for a bit because before that, anywhere from 40 to 120 million sperm cells initiated the journey with only a few hundred making it anywhere near the egg which by comparison is not only a hundred fold bigger than the sperm it is actually a cellular fortress.  As luck would have it, one sperm cell out of the remaining few hundred will make it through and the fortress shuts down and fertilization begins. The fertilized egg must then make an epic journey from the fallopian tube to the uterus (womb) when at that point it is still considered a foreign body and can be rejected at any moment. As luck would have it, the fertilized egg reaches its destination and will cling to the lining of the uterus like a parasite, which it is, and must remain there for nine months totally dependent on nutrition from every ancestral mother. Occasionally the fertilized egg will not get it right and an ectopic pregnancy may occur thus making the whole journey for naught. Many generations ago under primitive pre-natal care, or perhaps even none at all, the odds were not too favorable to the infant or mother.  But, as luck would have it, your ancestors made it and here you are.

Furthermore, as luck would have it, the blueprint of you was intact and followed to the letter throughout your entire development as an embryo to final term.  Here is the thing.  The smallest and latest computer chip available in the market is phenomenal relative to its predecessors. It is small and thin all right but we can still clearly see it, hold it and examine it. It holds a lot of information but not quite as much – not even close - as the information carried in the fertilized egg.  If the egg that is just a mere 100 microns in diameter (a millionth of a meter) were scaled to the size of a shirt button, the latest microchip, proportionately scaled, would be about as large as the Houston Astrodome. But, as luck would have it, your mother’s natal CPU (central processing unit) read all the information correctly so that you have the right hair and eye color, your limbs were complete, all your organs developed in the programmed sequence and upon your birth, not only did you successfully inhale your first mouthful of air outside the womb, you bellowed with a loud cry that also made your mother cry for joy.

As luck would have it, you and 7 billion others are each at the tip of unbroken chains of life.  But keep in mind that of all the species that ever lived from since the time life begun only less than 1% are in existence today.  99% became extinct for many reasons. The fact that our species are still around is something to behold, and we add to that the reality that our ancestry had been so entangled in so many ways for so long over eons of time that we could all be related – one way or the other. Unfortunately, there is a “but” that follows. Because as bad luck would have it, human frailty and the nature of the human character seems to prevail throughout, from history to history. If anything, we had proven that human life is persistent; we persisted on developing, understanding and always aiming to elevate the human spirit; yet, the most important question still remains unanswered: Why is our history filled with human conflict, theaters of war in the same battlefields over and over again and again - our future is pre-dominated by wars and rumors of war?

Hopefully, as luck would have it, we will somehow find a way before our luck runs out.