Unweaving the Rainbow

Opening lines from Richard Dawkins's Unweaving the Rainbow




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.

We, privileged few,
Who won the lottery of birth against all odds.
How dare we whine
About our inevitable return to that prior state,
From which the vast majority
Had never stirred?


-Richard Dawkins