Life

(May 29, 2008) - I take the train into work in the city, and portions of it run along carved out rail beds bound by concrete embankments. It always amazes me to see weeds growing out of cracks those walls. It's incredible how little sustenance life really needs in some cases to get going. A little dirt forms in the tiniest of crevasses, a seed lands, it rains, and life forms. We can understand it logically, and scientifically, but whether it's an anonymous weed in the urban jungle or a towering redwood, or a newborn baby, the advent of life is an incredible mystery and miracle.

Life will force its way into being in the most inhospitable climates. It exists in the blackest depths of the sea and at the frozen poles. Life could even possibly find a toehold in the thin, dusty Martian soil. How? How could life possibly exist there? (Or could have existed there, since it's probably not there now.) For all we've learned, we are surrounded by forces we do not understand.

Even if life doesn't exist on Mars, if it's possible that life could have existed there, if we can find a second verifiable example of another toehold in the vast expanse of the universe where a seed can find even minimum sustenance for life, then we must assume this: if there's more than one, there's a multitude. If the conditions exist - abundantly - on Earth for life to exist, and even minutely on Mars, then they must exist elsewhere in the universe as well. There's either a single exception to the rule, or there's another rule. Life on Earth, we shall find, is not some bizarre exception to the rules of the universe, but merely part of the whole.

Life itself is a miracle - maybe the only miracle. But it is a miracle that exists all around us, in uncountable forms and innumerable times, so infinite and at the same time so common that we lose sight of the fact that it is a miracle. I mean, really, how does a flower grow out of concrete? How does water form on Mars?

Why are we here?

-Paul Vigna

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