Now that I've succeeded to have your attention, I may even succeed in persuading you to read Richard Dawkins' "Unweaving the Rainbow", subtitled "Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder". As he goes on to explain:
"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. 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?"
Shades of Montaigne who observed that "to lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago." Go on, click here and read the book.
