First: You exist, you're alive, that's really quite a marvelous thing to be able to say when you stop and think about it. For you to be here now trillions and trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to come together to make you, and the whole history of the universe atoms have never got together quite this way before and they never will again. These atoms came to earth from all over they could be anything but for some reason they've decided for a few tens of years to be you. That's pretty extraordinary if you ask me. Now why atoms do this is a puzzle, being you is not a gratifying experience for the atom. An atom doesn't even know you're there, it doesn't even know it's there. Atoms are mindless particles, after all they don't know a thing yet somehow for the length of your existence these tiny devoted particles will engage in all the delicate cooperative efforts necessary to keep you humming, to make you, you, to give you form and shape, and that you enjoy this the rare and supremely agreeable condition known as life. This is really hard to explain because there's nothing special about the atoms that make you, a human being or any other living thing is an assortment of almost embarrassingly mundane components principally carbon hydrogen oxygen and nitrogen. This is the same stuff you would find in a pile of dirt. The only thing special about the atoms that make you is that they made you. That is of course the miracle of life, but having obliging atoms is only part of the good fortune that got you here. You've also been incredibly lucky genealogically, ancestrally, statistically speaking you shouldn't be here, none of us should. Survival on earth is surprisingly hard work. It is a curious fact of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at producing life but even better at extinguishing it. Of all the billions of species of organism that are sprung up and existed on earth in its long productive history 99.99% are no longer here, they're gone, gone forever. The remarkable fact is that the normal condition for species on earth is to be extinct. The average species on this planet lasts only about 4 million years and if you wish to last longer as we most assuredly do, then you must continually recreate yourself. You must be prepared to change everything that defines you, shape, size, color, physiology, diet, metabolism, everything. And to do so repeatedly, and in the right sequence of precisely the right historical moments. For us to be here now it has been necessary for our ancestors to make all kinds of wholesale adjustments, all of them random, none of them inevitable or even necessarily logical but every one of them necessary to get us here today. So we've been very lucky in that way too but that's not enough. You've also got nearly four billion years of reproductive good fortune behind you as an individual. Consider the fact that for you to be here now every one of your ancestors on both sides since the dawn of time has been attractive enough to find a mate, robust enough to reproduce and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstance to live long enough to do so. Not one of your forebears in nearly four billion years on either side was squashed, devoured, stranded, starved, stuck fast, picked by a more glamorous suitor, spurned or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering the tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result eventually astoundingly and all too briefly in you. I don't wish to belabor the point but life is a damned lucky thing when you stop to think about it. Your existence is a miracle and you really shouldn't let a day pass that you don't rejoice in having it.

Second: Life doesn't happen anywhere else in the universe as far as we know. Now that really is odd the atoms is so freely and congenial clump together to form living things on earth seem entirely disinclined to do it do so elsewhere. Of course the evidence isn't all in yet so far astronomers have found only a few dozen or so planets beyond our own solar system out of the 10 billion trillion or so that are thought to exist so we can hardly claim to have scoured every corner of the universe but it is certainly the case that the only life that is turned up so far and very possibly ever will is found on this one single unprepossessing blue planet in a nameless solar system two-thirds of the way out from the center of the Milky Way and that's not much in a great big universe particularly when you consider that all that life on that small blue planet is found almost exclusively in a frail wisp of water and atmosphere around the surface. If you imagine that Earth shrunk down to the size of a standard desktop globe then the atmosphere is only about the thickness of two coats of varnish and the part of that atmosphere that supports life the biosphere as it is known is only a small part of that most of the earth is too cold or dry or lofty and thin aired from most of life humans even with the advantage of clothing and shelter can manage to live on only about 12% of Earth's landscape. Other animals are restricted further still in consequence most of Earth's life is confined to an exceedingly modest range, just 1.4 percent of Earth's land area contains more than half its biodiversity. I can't think of a better reason than that to be worried about global warming.

Third and penultimate amazing fact: We live on a planet that we don't really know. There may be no other detectable life in the universe but there is such an abundance of it here on our own planet that we don't actually know how much there is we don't even remotely know. I find that quite amazing, even more amazing we don't even know what we know. No one has ever managed to collate the total number of known living things on the planet, most estimates for the number of named species of living things put it put it in figure of about one and a half million but that's really only a guess. As for the number of unnamed yet to be identified species of living things we are even more clueless, it may be tens of millions, it may be hundreds of millions, but according to one extraordinary estimate perhaps as much as 97% of all that lives on the earth and in the seas is still to be discovered.