"Besides, we aren't even here," he added.
"How do you mean?"
"How do you mean?"
"Have
you any idea of the mathematical probabilities involved for any given
chunk of matter in the universe to be eligible for participation in the
biosphere, whether as a leaf, a sausage, or even drinkable water? Or
breathable air? The odds are about a quadrillion to one against it! Our
universe is a prodigiously lifeless place. One particle in a quadrillion
may enter into the life cycle, the procession of birth and death,
growth and decay -- consider what a rare event that must be. And now I
ask you to consider not the probability of a piece of food, or of a drop
of water, or of a breath of air -- but the probability of an embryo!
Take the ratio of the mass of the universe -- the burnt-out suns, the
frozen planets, those cosmic garbage dumps we call nebulae, that
enormous cloaca of dust and rubble and noxious gas we think of as the
Milky Way, all that thermonuclear fermentation, that swirling of debris
-- take the ratio of that total mass to the mass of a human body; there
you have your probability for a chunk of matter, equal in weight to a
man, to be a man -- and that probability is negligible!"
"Negligible?" I said.
"In other words, you and I, all of us in this room, statistically we can't exist, we aren't really here. . ."
From chapter 11, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, written by Stanislaw Lem
