The Long Game

Then it began.

For every billion particles of antimatter there were a billion and one of matter. They wiped each other out, but not completely. Everything that exists is the one left over.

Nobody knows why there was one extra. Keep an eye on it.

Gravity gathered the leftovers into hundreds of billions of galaxies. This is one of them, and it holds hundreds of billions of suns.

Inside those suns, hydrogen was fused, step by step, into carbon, oxygen and iron.

Carbon forms only through a narrow quirk in how its atoms hold energy. Without that quirk there would be almost no carbon, and no one here to notice.

But the biggest stars could not hold on to what they made. They blew themselves apart and threw all of it into the dark.

All of it followed a few laws and a handful of pure numbers, the same everywhere we have looked.

Shift some of them by a few percent and stars would make far less of what you are built from. Nobody knows why they are these ones.

They held. And around one ordinary sun, one rock settled at the distance where water stays liquid.

With billions of planets, some were bound to. The harder puzzle was the settings that allowed any at all.

On that rock, atoms from dead stars began linking into chains that could copy themselves.

At least 3.5 billion years ago. Nobody yet knows how it started.

Your copy of that chain is three billion letters long. About two meters of it is folded into almost every cell you have.

You began as a single cell, just big enough to see. It split, and split again, and did not stop until there were about thirty trillion.

Three weeks in, a flat sheet of those cells rolled into a tube and zipped itself shut. That tube became your spinal cord and your brain.

Around the same days, some of your cells began to beat together. They haven’t stopped since.

Then nerve cells reached out from it, each one feeling its way toward a muscle or a patch of skin. Nobody directed them. Each cell answered its neighbors.

Some grew a meter long, a single cell running from the base of your spine to your toes. This wiring is why you can decide to move a finger, and it moves.

Behind your eyes, 86 billion more wired themselves together. Some of them are reading this sentence.

7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

You are about this many atoms, more than there are stars in the observable universe, arranged so that they can look back.

And yet, it feels like something to be you.

No equation we have says it should.

And so, for as long as there have been people, they have gathered under this same sky and asked why.

Around fires like this one, we told each other stories. We have never stopped.

Every culture looked up at the same stars and saw its own stories in them.

2

Go back far enough, and everyone alive today has the very same ancestors.

Your family tree doubles every generation. About forty generations back, it has more places in it than people have ever lived.

For at least 67,800 years, we have been leaving the same message.

We raised stones to frame the rising sun.

At Stonehenge, sunrise on the longest day still lines up with the stones, 4,500 years after they were raised.

We learned to write, and our words began to outlive us.

The first writing appeared more than 5,000 years ago, in Mesopotamia and Egypt.

Now we write in code. It still says the same thing.

Look far enough out and the galaxies are strung into a web, the largest structure we know of.

It looks strangely like the web of cells behind your eyes.

Coincidence, or a clue? No one knows.

Every answer we have found has opened a bigger question. So we are not near the end of discovery. We are at the very beginning.

Every life becomes a story.

Part of yours is already written.

We may never find the last answer. But this moment is already here.

Since you began watching, your heart has beaten about 70 times, and Earth has carried you 1,800 kilometers around the sun. You did not have to do a thing.

So what will you do with this moment?

Chess has a few pages of rules, yet more possible games than there are atoms in the observable universe. The rules only say what cannot happen. Everything else is up to the players.

Your future isn't written yet. No one's is.

The choice is yours. So make it a good one.

What will you create with the time you have?

A long life is about four thousand weeks. What you create echoes on into eternity.