We are going to die and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.

Darwinian natural selection has put together on this planet – and I would conjecture, on rather a lot of other planets as well – something utterly extraordinary:

The World of complexity which is unknown to physicists – the World of complexity which is the World of biology.

And on this planet it has produced the Human brain which is capable of understanding the process that gave rise to it and capable of making a model of the universe in which we stand.

We live on a planet that is all but perfect for our kind of life, not too warm and not too cold, basking in kindly sunshine, softly watered; a gently spinning, green and gold harvest-festival of a planet.

There is starvation and racking misery to be found. But take a look at the competition.

Compared with most planets this is paradise and parts of Earth are still paradise by any standards.

What are the odds that a planet picked at random will have these complaisant properties? Even the most optimistic calculation will put it at less than one in a million.

We are going to die and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.

The potential people who could have been here in my place, but who will in fact never see the light of day, outnumber the sand grains of Sahara.

Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton.

We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds, it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

More, we are granted the opportunity to understand why our eyes are open, and why they see what they do, in the short time before they close forever.