Gracias, Mexico. You made us possible!

If there is one word that characterizes well what ticks in America, it would be hustle.  Like the hustle at the pool table.  The hustling phone calls that I get about my car warranty or social security.  I mean, this is a country that has hustlers in plenty in its history, and one even got himself elected to the highest office in the land!

That American ethic of hustling also made possible a "Creation Museum" in Kentucky.  What an innovative hustle to make money!  Take, for instance, the way the museum deals with dinosaurs.  Their sales pitch is that dinosaurs and humans co-existed.  In this hustle, they ask, "were you there?"

Think about it: were you there when God created the earth? No, but we have a book inspired by the Creator that tells us how He did it. If we start with God’s Word, dinosaurs living with humans—at least early on—makes sense.

Tickets per person range from $24.95 to $39.95, and "parking not included."  If you want to see how humans lived with dinos, you need to fork over extra for parking your vehicle!

In understanding the universe in which we don't literally read "a book inspired by the Creator" we go about in search of evidence and rational explanations.  In other words, science.

Thanks to science, we understand that humans and dinosaurs didn't live together.  Had I known this in my childhood, I could have avoided a few nightmares!

But, until today, I hadn't considered the possibility that the dinos had to go extinct in order to make homo sapiens possible.

Our presence here on earth was a result of "the mother of all accidents" when a 6-mile wide asteroid crashed into earth.  The essay argues this crash made all the difference: "It stands to reason, then, that without the asteroid impact the dinosaurs that had reigned for more than 100 million years would likely still be here, and therefore the primates would not be, and so neither would we."

The odds of an asteroid hitting earth are very low.  The odds of that size of an asteroid hitting earth are very, very low.  And then the location where it crashed.

The rocks around the Yucatan target site are rich in hydrocarbons and sulfur, which resulted in the production of enormous quantities of soot and sunlight-deflecting aerosols. Geologists figure that as little as 1 to 13 percent of the Earth’s surface contains rocks that could have yielded a comparable stew of destructive materials.

This small target means that with the Earth rotating at about 1,000 miles per hour, had the asteroid arrived just 30 minutes sooner, it would have landed in the Atlantic Ocean; 30 minutes later, in the Pacific Ocean. Just 30 minutes either way and the dinosaurs would probably be here.

And I wouldn't be here blogging!  Dumb luck has been the story of our lives!

So, have a special dinosaur-themed celebration on Cinco de Mayo!

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!