“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 Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. 1 of 2
Nightwish plays this bit at the end of certain concerts (after The finale song "Greatest Show On Earth") and have even had him perform it in person - I'm not knocking anybody's religion because I used to be very "spiritual" myself but too much bullshit has turned me away from it (especially when the right uses it as a weapon while not practicing what they preach and not even knowing what they said) so I really connected with this because I am more of an evolution kind of human...
We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds 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 at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”
― Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder
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