At a 1998 convention on expertise and life, The Hitchhiker’s Information to the Galaxy creator Douglas Adams as soon as proposed the notion of a sentient puddle. Think about it “waking up one morning and pondering, ‘That is an fascinating world I discover myself in — an fascinating gap I discover myself in — matches me moderately neatly, doesn’t it? In truth, it matches me staggeringly effectively, should have been made to have me in it!’ ” Regardless of how a lot intelligence it might in some way have attained, this puddle doesn’t understand that its form was dictated by its setting, not the opposite means round. Nor does it appear to understand on simply what number of elements its very existence is contingent; to its thoughts, it is a puddle’s world, and the remainder of us are simply dwelling in it.
After all, the remainder of us are in simply the identical scenario. In the 70-minute Huge Assume video above, evolutionary developmental biologist Sean B. Carroll places our presence on Earth in perspective, starting with the assorted elements that occurred to converge to make advanced life attainable on this planet in any respect. “An enormous variety of issues needed to go proper for our species to exist, and for every of us individually to exist,” he says, and that’s true on “the cosmological scale, the geological scale, and the organic scale.”
One vital occasion is the asteroid impression that “reset” life on Earth 66 million years in the past, which triggered a gradual cooling of the planet, and one other was the tectonic motion that pushed collectively what we now know as Asia and the Indian subcontinent. A results of these and different unlikely occurrences was the “biosphere” through which we and all different extant species stay as we speak.
What about you and me particularly? Neither of us, as Carroll tells it right here and in his e-book A Collection of Lucky Occasions: Likelihood and the Making of the Planet, Life, and You, ought to really feel that our place was assured. In human copy, when two mother and father get collectively and “that one fortunate sperm makes it and combines with that one egg at that second, that’s a couple of one-in-70-trillion occasion, genetically talking.” This may be tough to internalize, since our personal existence is all we’ve ever recognized, within the method of Adams’ sentient puddle. Even “because the solar rises within the sky and the air heats up and as, step by step, the puddle will get smaller and smaller,” it continues “frantically hanging on to the notion that the whole lot’s going to be alright, as a result of this world was meant to have him in it, was constructed to have him in it.” There’s a lesson for humanity in that story, and one which hasn’t develop into any much less pressing prior to now 27 years.
Associated Content material:
Huge Historical past: David Christian Covers 13.7 Billion Years of Historical past in 18 Minutes
An Astronaut’s Information to Life on Earth by Commander Chris Hadfield: The Viral Ebook Trailer
Primarily based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and tradition. His tasks embrace the Substack publication Books on Cities and the e-book The Stateless Metropolis: a Stroll by means of Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Observe him on the social community previously referred to as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
![Colin Hay Discusses Males at Work, His Solo Profession, and the Music Biz [Part Two]](https://intotunes.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/ColinHayInterview-120x86.jpg)
