The development of technologically advanced civilizations will require easy access to energy. Without it, we could not make accessible the large amounts of information necessary to develop and manufacture telescopes, computers and particle accelerators. We built our civilization on coal and, later, oil, and I doubt we could have developed it on tide, volcanic or wind power alone. How common will easy access to energy such as coal be? It is possible that advanced alien civilizations built on fossil fuels are rare, although once again we lack evidence to state this with any confidence. Coal formed on Earth because bacteria and fungi were unable to access the dead plant material from which it formed as a resource, and it consequently formed the hydrocarbons we have built our civilization on. Evolution is a potent force, but it requires genetic mutations that appear at random. Coal formed because the genetic mutations did not happen that would have allowed organisms to use the dead trees of the warm Carboniferous as a resource. If the development of advanced civilizations is dependent on chance genetic mutations, they may be rare. We know how evolution works and why it produces new life forms, and we know we are an accident of evolution. So too may be our civilization, and this means that perhaps very few species achieve an understanding of the universe that is as well developed as ours.
My personality, like yours, is also an accident of history, even if I cannot tell you with confidence which historical events made me the way I am. I have experienced a unique set of events and experiences, and these have helped make me. My personality, my desires and my obsessiveness to understand why I exist are due to a mix of my genes and the environment I have experienced throughout life. Had I been born into Tudor England, Napoleonic France or even ancient Athens, I would likely have developed other desires and motivations. I believe my brush with malaria was key to me being who I am, but I cannot prove that. Despite being an accident of history, scientists have some idea why I have the personality I do: chance, nature and nurture will all have played a role.
I exist because the fundamental forces have the right values, because these forces produce galaxies, stars and planets, and because chemistry is such that life can evolve when conditions are right, and evolution can act to make it complicated and intelligent. I am persuaded that our universe is stochastic, and this stochasticity manifests at the level of fundamental particles, and complex living organisms have free will because life has found a way to exploit this quantum randomness at the level of living beings. Despite this there is still much I want to know before I lie on my eventual deathbed. I want to know why there is something rather than nothing, and what the conditions were that led to life beginning. I doubt scientists will solve the first question in my lifetime, but I hope we will be able to make simple life in the laboratory by the time I die. It may be a long shot, but we are making progress. I know many of the reasons why we exist, but not all. Science has brought us a very long way, but the history of why we exist is not yet complete.
I can’t write a book about existence without touching on unscientific explanations for us being here. Many people believe in deities, life forces or cosmic energies for delivering their existence. Given the prevalence of these beliefs, can they all be wrong? I think so, but that doesn’t mean I don’t respect people who hold other beliefs. Perhaps that is just part of my personality and can be attributed to some childhood event I have long forgotten.
Many non-scientific beliefs can easily be shown to be nonsense. An acquaintance of mine is convinced that crystals have some supernatural properties that protect from malevolent spirits out to cause harm. They can protect themselves from such dangers by always having a crystal in their underwear. Such patent nonsense doesn’t bother me enough to attempt to disprove it, but the experiment that would do so is easy to design. I simply need a large group of volunteers that I would randomly assign to two groups. I would ask one group to wear underpants with crystals sewn into them for a year, and the other one to wear pants that are identical in every way but lack the crystal. I would score each participant in the experiment for mental and physical well-being at the beginning and the end of the study and calculate changes in these scores over the course of the experiment. If crystals provide some health advantage, then those in the crystal-lined-underwear category would on average improve their health to a greater extent than those with less ornate pants. I am confident there would be no difference, with the possible exception of increased chafing in the crystal-wearing group. Related experiments have been conducted, and crystals provide no health advantage.
Other equally wacky ideas are yet to be disproven, but there is also no evidence to support them. There is no evidence of any force beyond the four fundamental forces permeating the universe. There is no life force or positive energy field. There is also no scientific evidence for any of the deities that humans have created to explain their existence, but that is part of their attraction for many. Deity beliefs are impossible to disprove because they are constructed around blind faith. Believers are rewarded, typically after death, for holding evidence-free beliefs and behaving in a particular way while alive. Such narratives are constructed in a way that they cannot be disproved by science, and this is why science and religion often clash. Many scientists are critical of religion because science is evidence-based while faith is not, while the devout often see science as a threat as more people turn to it for an explanation for their existence. Despite this, religion is appealing to many because it gives life purpose in a way that science does not, and because we all feel special.
At about the age of twelve or thirteen I started to feel like I was special. I thought that I was destined to do something great in later life, perhaps become prime minister or Britain’s greatest-ever Olympian. These feelings didn’t motivate me to become immersed in politics or sports training, it was just a feeling of inevitability I had. It felt that my soul had been assigned a body, that this gave me an opportunity not afforded to all souls, and I had some sort of duty to make my life worthwhile. At this time, I believed in the Christian God, having been educated at a Church of England school and being sent to Sunday school as a child. My mother has been a regular churchgoer all her life, and religion is important for her. To her great credit, she has never criticized me for my lack of faith, and we have always respected one another’s views. Along with many others she will likely disagree with the following paragraphs, but she will be proud of me for writing this book.
By my mid-teens, as I became ever more fixated with science, I began to lose my religion, and by the time I had finished my undergraduate degree I was an atheist. Part of the challenge of that journey was, if my life was to have a purpose, what was it going to be? My brush with malaria helped me decide.
My experience of feeling special is not unique, and I suspect is an inevitable consequence of consciousness. When pondering the question of why they exist, many people interpret this feeling of being special as assuming they have a higher purpose. They accept that they exist, they feel (and they are) special, and so there must be a reason as to why they are here. These readers may feel short-changed in that I have described what had to happen in the last 13.77 billion years for them to exist, for I have not given their existence a purpose. Apart from the evolutionary argument that the purpose of their existence is to attempt to reproduce, I argue there is no other reason. Our existence is a consequence of the strengths of the fundamental physical forces, evolution and a lot of randomness.