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Comment by binalpatel | Hacker News Reader

I wax poetic about this pretty often - but it's always been amazing to me that me, and you, and everyone in the world has an unbroken chain of ancestry all the way back to the first spark of life.

We're all stupendously lucky in that regard.

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Of course, if that weren't the case, there wouldn't be anyone around to feel lucky. :)

I do quite enjoy that survivorship bias!

Thats usually the argument I used to explain why one doesn't need religion to feel a sense of awe: the fact you, or me exist at all is the result of millions of generations of our direct ancestors fighting for our survival with a mix of incredible luck and a lot of dedication.

That is formidable enough to ponder that that one doesn't need to disrespect all of these creature/persons thru the millions of years up to you/me by introducing a magic creator and wipe away all that effort.

Carl Sagan said it best, "The cosmos is also within us, we are made of star stuff"

There's probably millions of parallel universes where humans weren't so lucky and we're extinct. We happen to be living in the universe where they are.

Or, we live in the simulation where the parameters were tweaked so that we were "lucky" and managed to survive this long. Other simulation runs didn't turn out so well for humans.

There are stories written around this - the so-called 'Long Earth' with endless parallel worlds taking different evolutionary paths. Even one where dogs grew intelligent.

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