What If...?
by David Molina
My particular generation is named the Boomer Generation. My eldest son is a Millennial, and my youngest is called Gen Z. My grandchildren are Generation Alpha - you know, the one’s who were born taking selfies of themselves.
My generation’s claim to fame is that after WWII, horny, sex-deprived soldiers got right off the boat and into the beds of horny, sex-deprived young women. Lots of booming, lots of babies.
My family’s boomer babies were six in all, which seems to be average during our booming era. One of the things I notice about us is that we are all different, yet similar. Mark, the youngest, is the tallest, six feet. My brother John and I have the darkest complexion, and are the two siblings who look the closest to each other, both 5’9’’. My oldest brother, Tony, is the shortest, the most fair-skinned, and balding, 5’6”. My sisters were one fairer, one darker, both in skin color and hair. Anne-Renee, the youngest of the two, was two inches taller than her older sister, Terrie.
My parents were the culprits. My dad was tall, dark, and handsome. Black hair, brown eyes. My mom was a college girl, looking like a Hollywood movie star. Light brown, fine hair, fairest of the fair skin, and blue eyes; a petite 5’3”. Between dad’s brown eyes and mom’s blue, all six of us had hazel. A generation later, our first three children had hazel and voila - our fourth had his grandma’s Picard blue eyes, the very first in two generations.
A generation before, families were often much larger. My dad’s mom had 7 children.
Two generations before, my dad’s grandmother bore 17 children. Several died in infancy.
The genes my mom and dad produced (2), and then my two pairs of grandparents (4), and then four pairs of my great-grandparents (8) spans former generations after generations in an exponential travel backwards.
150,000 generations, it turns out, assuming humankind began 2 million years ago. What if any one of the gazillion mothers or fathers died before they were able to do the deed, share the happy moment?
What if you were never born?
- You wouldn’t be reading this story
- You would miss a lot of other stuff too.
What if you were never born?
It seems impossible, doesn’t it? Yet the odds were stacked against you even before you were born.
The chance of your parents ever meeting was 1 in 8,300,000,000 - the total number of people inhabiting the earth currently. Not so great odds, but that is just for starters.
When you were conceived, 300 million sperm (a single teaspoon - ) were whipping their flagellae in an upstream race. Only one made it to the finish line. Over the course of a lifetime, your dad produced 2,000,000,000,000 little guys, and you just managed to get that one.
Dad’s lucky sperm torpedoes towards the target with a payload of 23 DNA strands, consisting of 200 billion atoms arranged into 3.2 billion base pairs. At this point, you can blame Dad for your overbite, obesity, height, and intelligence - or lack thereof.
Your mama was born with 2 million oocytes (single cell eggs). Every one of those 2 million eggs was formed before your mama was even born! She grew them while floating around in a salty amniotic waterbed inside her mother’s womb (the belly bulge that belongs to Grandma). Mother Nature decides our unborn mama’s stash of all those eggs would never amount too much - which to say YOU. That is not to say you were one in a million. Don’t let them short-change you. You were one in two million, right?
Wrong. Half of you are one in two million.
That egg half of you needs a sperm half of you, a Mr. SpeedoTorpedo, who is a one in three hundred million kind-of-guy. The odds of you becoming your present you is 2,000,000 times 300,000,000, which adds up to 600,000,000,000,000. (I can’t possibly advise you to place a bet on you with these kinds of odds.)
Alas, these idiotically foolish odds now mean your two single-cell lovers - let’s call them Romeo and Juliet - must somehow match up despite 599,999,999,999 other possible couples waiting in the wings. Thus, when your mama and dada say to you, “Honey, you are so special!” that are not kidding.
The you package you opened is truly a miracle, an absurdly unique package of two cells bonding, mating, and within 9 months goes from two cells boinking each other to a complete human being ready to burst out into the world.
The ordinary is possible. The extraordinary is unlikely. A good miracle should be impossible. You and your two gametes are a piconanometer short of impossible.
What if you were never born?
That tiny bit of impossibility that actually was possible allowed you to grow up and propagate more humans. Darwin harped about survival of the fittest, and people believe that even though it is not true. Fate trumps fitness. The buff bodybuilder walks out of the gym and gets run over by a truck. QED.
Ponder this - for the previous 150,000 generations here on planet Earth, every single man and woman copulated successfully at least once in their lifetimes. That’s better than the average of batting averages in the major leagues. And then somehow, their offspring did the same, and then their offspring’s offsprings, and then over and over for 150,000 times successfully. If your great-grandfather died the day before his happy moments could have been conceived, the following generations just got wiped out.
And then we all disappear.
There are a few things to point out.
- We are all pretty damn lucky to be reading this
- We should be thankful to all our predecessors for doing their job for us
- As impossible as all this, it gets even more impossible.
This is a shocking cascade of single cells looking for a date. But even more shocking are the human people who were born and survived long enough to be able to procreate at least once. Yes, your mama and dad did it, and their parents did it - and a whole bunch of your ancestors for the last 3 million years. In fact, all of them did.
Consider that before our last two centuries, there were constant famines, wars, disease, and poverty. No education, no science, no potable water, no hospitals, high birth mortality, But through it all, your ancestors managed to get it on and onto generations beyond generations, 150,000 times without fail.
What if your great-grandpa Gronk, a 10 to the 12th power caveman, got eaten by a sabertooth just before the ten minutes he was going to relieve his girlfriend of the oocyte she’d be carrying around for 14 years? Just ten minutes too late, that moment of bad luck, and we all disappear!
What if your grandpa, Gaius - a not-so-bright Roman foot-soldier - was wandering to gather the spoils of victory in town? Minutes before he got to choose grandma at the market, he failed to notice his buddy, Tarquinius, had dumped a chest of jewelry out the window he was standing under. If he had only stepped one step to either side, he could have been a grandpa - one of the lucky 150,000 guys. But he didn’t look up, and he didn’t step to either side. Grandpa Gaius is ignominiously relegated to Could-of-Been Grandpa. Too bad he ended up being a fateful target rather than getting to bang grandma. Gaius missed out, Grandma missed out. And worse, we all disappear. Thanks, Gaius.
What if somewhere in your lineage, some guy thought that girl would never look at him twice? What if a couple of lovers decided that Romeo and Juliet stabbing themselves wasn’t all that romantic, in fact, pretty dumb? What if your ancestor decided he could never marry his ancestral wife-to-be, but only because he would be forced to live with a horrendously horrible mother-in-law, but bit the bullet for better or for worse? What if that ancestral wife-to-be’s parents felt her husband-to-be’s dowry was too little for their expectations? What if an ancestral man decided to join Napoleon’s artillery battalion, and unfortunately had his balls blown off before the last night’s wenching instead of after? A single bad break, one way or the other, and we also disappear.
What if your great-great-grandfather was on the first line of fire at Gettysburg instead of the second? What if your great-grandma (38 generations ago) survived the Black Death in Scotland because she married your grandpa (38 generations ago), who was hobbled by his mare who stepped on his foot while in a secluded farm in the Highlands? By the time he was able to walk, the plague passed them by. Had he not, we all disappear.
What if over the course of those 150,000 “happy moments,” every single one of your ancestors was able to not die in the harshest environments in order to reproduce in an unbroken chain? A single break in the chain and you’re not here.
What if all these musings, all these possibilities that we conjecture, what if the real stories of those who brought us to life are so very much more wonderful than our guessing?
Albert Einstein put it this way.
“There are only two ways to see your life; one is as if nothing is a miracle. The other is if everything is a miracle.”
What if... Einstein is right?
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