On this accidental life

Every once in a while, in the introductory course in which demographics is one of the topics we address, I assign students the task of talking with their parents and grandparents about why they chose to have the family size they had.  "If they had three kids, ask them why they decided against two or four, for instance" I would tell them.  Of course, the written essay about the family demographics will be situated in the context of academic discussions.

When we regroup and discuss the assignment, I can always expect a student or two to talk about how they were "an accident," as in an unplanned pregnancy.

What we almost always overlook is this: every one of us--yes, you and me included--is an accident.  We are “children of chance.”

The time traveler, however, does not need to kill his grandfather to wipe himself out of existence, for as we said children conceived at different times would be in fact different children. All he has to do is distract his grandfather long enough to alter the timing of the conception of his grandfather’s child, and poof! He vanishes. Given that men produce about 1,500 sperm per second and that the particular sperm that succeeded in fertilizing the egg from which our time traveler’s parent came was in competition with about 400 million released on average during sex, I should think a loud thud on Gram and Gramps’s bedroom door at just the right moment should do the trick.

In the generations prior that had sex in order for us to be here at this time, one teeny weeny deviation from that intercourse, or if one of the other sperm among the 400 million had reached the egg first, the rest would have been history.  I might not even have been created and, thus,I might not exist.  How bizarre is that!  Without those series of accidents, there is no possibility for that favorite articulation of cogito ergo sum.

It also sets up a sequence of events in which an entirely different set of people end up being born. Unlike most actions whose remote consequences diminish to zero, like the furthermost ripples of a pond after a pebble has been thrown into it, altering when children are conceived or to whom they are conceived has repercussions that steadily increase over time. The consequences of a different set of marriages, births, accidents, road gridlocks, crimes, FIFA World Cup winners, businesses, books, inventions and scientific discoveries increase exponentially the further we progress along time’s arrow.

Given such a tenuous existence that was created out of a freakish ultra-low probability accident, it is depressing how much we go about making lives unpleasant--we fight, we kill, we enslave, and we even attempt to wipe out of existence "different" people.

With no such everyday realization that we are "children of chance," it is no wonder that we are far, far away from peace on earth!