Wele. And gratulations. I am delighted that you could make it. Getting here wasnteasy, I know. In fact, I suspect it was a little tougher than you realize.
To begin with, for you to be here now trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemblein an intricate and intriguingly obliging mao create you. Its an arra sospecialized and particular that it has never been tried before and will o this once. Forthe many years (we hope) these tiny particles will unplainingly engage in all thebillions of deft, cooperative efforts necessary to keep you intad let you experiehesupremely agreeable but generally underappreciated state known as existence.
Why atoms take this trouble is a bit of a puzzle. Being you is not a gratifying experiehe atomic level. For all their devoted attention, your atoms dont actually care about you-indeed, dont even know that you are there. They dont even know that they are there. They aremindless particles, after all, and not even themselves alive. (It is a slightly arresting notionthat if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, oom at a time, you would produce amound of fiomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once beenyou.) Yet somehow for the period of your existehey will ao a single overargimpulse: to keep you you.
The bad news is that atoms are fickle and their time of devotion is fleeting-fleeting indeed.
Even a long human life adds up to only about 650,000 hours. And when that modestmilestone flashes past, or at some other point thereabouts, for reasons unknown your atomswill shut you down, silently disassemble, and go off to be other things. And thats it for you.
Still, you may rejoice that it happens at all. Generally speaking in the universe it doesnt, sofar as we tell. This is decidedly odd because the atoms that so liberally and geniallyflock together to form living things oh are exactly the same atoms that dee to do itelsewhere. Whatever else it may be, at the level of chemistry life is curiously mundane:
carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, a little calcium, a dash of sulfur, a light dusting ofother very ordinary elements-nothing you wouldnt find in any ordinary drugstore-and thatsall you he only thing special about the atoms that make you is that they make you.
That is of course the miracle of life.
Whether or not atoms make life in other ers of the universe, they make plenty else;ihey make everything else. Without them there would be no water or air or rocks, nostars and plas, no distant gassy clouds or swirling nebulae or any of the other things thatmake the universe so usefully material. Atoms are so numerous and necessary that we easilyoverlook that they actually exist at all. There is no law that requires the universe to fillitself with small particles of matter or to produce light and gravity and the other physicalproperties on which our existence hihere actually be a universe at all. For theloime there wasnt. There were no atoms and no universe for them to float about in.
There was nothing-nothing at all anywhere.
So thank goodness for atoms. But the fact that you have atoms and that they assemble insuch a willing manner is only part of what got you here. To be here now, alive iwenty-first tury and smart enough to know it, you also had to be the beneficiary of araordinary string of biological good fortune. Survival oh is a surprisingly trickybusiness. Of the billions and billions of species of livi