Niraj Naik walks through the astronomical odds of your existence: 13.798 billion years of cosmic history, countless ancestors, the improbability that you were ever born at all. He asks whether life is fate or a game you get to play, and whether your choices are really yours or just cultural programming running on your brain's hardware.
Questions this video answers
One in 400 quadrillion.
About 100,000 eggs.
Around 1 trillion sperm.
About 4 billion years.
Around 13.798 billion years ago.
In the beginning there is a question and that question one do you think that life is just a game with a set of rules which, if learned and played out to the max, can bring you anything you desire?
Or 2 Do you believe that you are a victim of your genes and your fate is already predetermined? Which one of these two statements do you feel is more self empowering? To answer this, we need to find the answer to some more questions. What are all the things that have to have happened for you to be watching this video right now? Why did you land on this webpage? Did someone recommend it? How did they come into your life? Why are you interested in stuff like this anyway? Who turned you onto it and how long ago? What factors in your childhood inclined you to be more interested in these subjects later? Why are you even watching this video in this room and not some other? Why did you buy this house or rent this house or apartment? Why are you in the city and not some other? Why are you here at all? How did your parents meet? How did they move into that space and time where their paths intersected to create you? Did they even have a plan to have you at all? Why is this planet capable of creating life? And especially the kind of life that makes weird videos like this one? If you are watching this on a computer or laptop, how did they come into existence? How did this invention get to this continent? Who made it? What's their story? What's your story? We when you think deeply about all of this, you will realise what a miracle your story really is. Or is it really a miracle at all? Well, let's first start with your story. The reason you are here is because way back your mum and dad decided to make love. And in doing so, a lucky sperm fertilizer neck. The chances of that being around one in 400. Quadrillion. Yes, quadrillion. When you take into account that your mum makes about 100,000 eggs in her lifetime and your dad around 1 trillion sperm. But this chance encounter of a lucky egg meeting an even more lucky sperm had to be repeated many, many, many times throughout the history of all your ancestors, going back to the first Homo sapiens, the first Homo erectus, and the Homo habilis, with perhaps your chance of an alien encounter meddling with your DNA thrown in for good measure. You are the net result of a lot of lovemaking stretching back over 4 billion years.
Now, what about our planet, the home of you and your ancestors? Well, that was the result of a Big bang, supposedly. And that was supposed to have happened around 13.798 billion years ago. Then stuff collided, cooled and heated, exploded, imploded, fused and formed into big balls of mass we called our stars and planets. The chances of our planets, with all the conditions for life existing here are all pretty slim. And so is the fact that you are watching this video at all. So perhaps you really are a miracle. So as a miracle begins in the mum's room, your brain was formed. You popped out into this world and your new brain starts getting bombarded with new information from your new environment. Your parents, your friends, your school, the tv, and all sorts of other things hypnotizing you to do the things normal culture wants. If you imagine your brain is your hardware and your mind is your software, your software gets programmed in these early years and your new operating system guides you through life and then on and on and on, constantly evolving and being programmed along the way. You then do the normal acceptable thing of going to college, falling in love, making love, creating some new little versions of you, getting a job in a big city that feels like working in a factory, giving up most of your fantasies and dreams, getting a mortgage, spending more time at work than at home, taking pay the bills so you and your new yous can repeat the same cycle over and over and over again, with it all ending in a wheelchair or hospital ward, surrounded by people you hardly know, all wondering how you ended up here and where did all the time go? Now ask yourself this question. Are you the software or are you the hardware? Or are you both? And is that the life you really want? When you start to meditate on all this and all the questions I just asked, you will begin to realize that you become your environment, your inner world becomes your outer world, thoughts become things, and your very best thinking has got you where you are today.
