The Ordinary Miracle of Existing - The Atlantic

On the northwestern shore of Africa, some 150 miles south of the Canary Islands, the coastline slightly bulges in a pimple known as Cape Bojador. For Europeans in the early 15th century, Cape Bojador marked the boundary between the known and the unknown. North of the cape was civilization and the cities of light. South were the mystical lands of Africa and the Mare Tenebrosum, the “Sea of Darkness.” Ancient notions, dating back to Ptolemy, claimed that Africa was surrounded by boiling seas filled with giant creatures, whirlpools, and perpetual darkness. No sailor had ventured south of Cape Bojador and returned.<br>The challenge was taken up by Prince Henry of Portugal. Between 1424 and 1434, he sent 14 ship expeditions to round the perilous cape. None succeeded. All turned back from fear or foul weather. Yet the unknown beckoned.<br>Undeterred, Henry dispatched the explorer Gils Eannes for a 15th attempt. This time, Henry’s man succeeded in rounding the cape, giving it a wide berth and steering far to the west. As he turned south, Eannes looked back over his shoulder and was astonished to realize that he had left the dreaded cape behind. On his next trip, the explorer landed in a bay many miles to the south. There, he saw footprints of humans, camels …<br>Prince Henry the Navigator was a pioneer in what historians have called the Age of Discovery. His triumph allowed improved mapmaking, new understanding of coastlines and ocean currents, and the opening of new trade routes. Most important, Prince Henry enlarged our perspective. He enlarged our concept of the world—not only of geography but also of our place in new lands and seas, our possibilities. Indeed, one can view all of human history (our art, our science, our exploration, our invention) as a gradual increase in perspective, of ourselves and of the world.<br>Perspective begins at a young age. Toddlers first begin using words such as me and mine around the age of 2, showing an awareness of themselves as separate from the outside world. Shortly thereafter, conscious exploration and discovery begins: Parents and caretakers at first, then the nursery, then the house, then the neighborhood. Little by little, we humans gain an understanding of what the world contains. We socialize, we read, we travel, we experience. But, in hindsight, our perspective remains highly limited. A significant minority of Americans—more than 20 percent—have never traveled abroad. More than half of us live in the same state where we were born.<br>Read: The algorithm that makes preschoolers obsessed with YouTube<br>Over the span of less than a century, discoveries in astronomy and biology have expanded our perspective almost beyond comprehension, if not as individuals, then at least as a human civilization. We have learned that our solar system sits on the outskirts of an enormous galaxy of a hundred billion stars called the Milky Way. And the size of our galaxy is practically inconceivable. It takes a light ray, which travels at a speed of 186,000 miles a second, 100,000 years to cross from one end of the Milky Way to the other. Other galaxies—many other galaxies—exist too. The mind reels from trying to imagine such expanse. Think of an ant in New York City contemplating a trip to San Francisco. Our houses, our roads and bridges, our cities are a speck in the cosmos, a dust mote, one grain of sand on a vast beach.<br>We have also enlarged our concept of time in the cosmos. We have learned that the universe began about 14 billion years ago. That’s about one hundred million human lifetimes ago. Just as our entire planet is a speck in the cosmos, our individual lives are fleeting moments in the grand unfolding of time. And, as the Buddhists always emphasize, everything is impermanent. Everything passes away. The ancient cities of Sumeria and Egypt are long gone, as are the temples of ancient Greece and Rome. Tenochtitlán, the capital of the Aztec empire; Port Royal of Jamaica; the English coastal village of Dunwich. All gone. All that we see around us today will one day be gone. Against this backdrop of history, on Earth and in the cosmos, our individual lives are brief flickers in the chasms of time.<br>It is hard to imagine such a cavernous theater we find ourselves in. But it is even more difficult to fathom how unique each of us is, how improbable, how lucky to be alive at all. Advances in biology have shown that the instructions for creating each individual human being are encoded in a set of molecules called DNA. Far more possible arrangements of human DNA exist than there are atoms in the observable universe—each arrangement corresponding to a different human being. One of those many possible arrangements is each of us.<br>Or consider the process of conception, when a single egg unites with a single sperm. Each human female has about 300,000 eggs during the fertile period of her life. Each male ejaculation has about 300 million sperm. Thus each conception...