Michael Fried lives in Highland Park, New Jersey, USA.

Schopenhauer, who admittedly may have been something of a grouch, wrote that "Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world." You could take that to mean that reality contains more than we perceive with our senses –and science has shown that’s true. Think about how very unlikely you are. There is so much harmony and organization in our bodies and all around us, yet all is made of stuff thrashed out in the chaotic blast of an inanimate star. Let's narrow our discussion of all of that stuff to you. We can agree that if your moment of conception was off by a millisecond, you would be a very different person. But if your countless human and pre-human evolutionary ancestors had not met and reproduced, let alone reproduced at precisely the correct millisecond, you would not be you at all. In fact, if any of those countless ancestors had not survived to sexual maturity, you would not be. Period. Yet here you are. Life has existed on Earth in one form or another for billions of years and your evolutionary ancestors survived every moment of it.

OK, so how did you get where you are right now? Well, you started off as one single cell. Uno. That solo cell replicated itself, and those cells replicated themselves, until right now you are composed of trillions of hopelessly complicated cells that form exquisitely complex structures. But hang on, those cells – they are each made of a mind-bogglingly huge number of sub-atomic particles forged billions of years ago. So, at root, you are a single, living, animate creature, made of a huge number of living cells that are themselves made of a huger number of inanimate particles. There is so much complexity in the use of your senses, and to run all of your body's systems, micro and macro, involuntarily, simultaneously, seamlessly. Even the most mundane activity, say, reading these words, is a breathtaking occurrence. Photons stream into your eyes and are interpreted by your spectacularly sophisticated brain. Your brain, which is capable of instantly picking the correct words to form sentences out of its collection of tens or hundreds of thousands of words. After all, the you that thinks and feels is really just your brain. And they’re not much to look at. No offense.

Speaking of looking, when we look up and see the stars at night, we are also looking back in time. Each object we see in space shows a different past, because what we see is the light as it appeared when it left that object, and each object is a different distance from us. It is so easy to forget that we are not on some island in space, but that we are also on an object that is constantly speeding through space. It's all a question of perspective. A recent photograph taken from near Mercury showed Earth as just another random dot of light in space. Space, where there is no up or down, only the pull of gravity. Same thing is true right here. There are more stars than we can imagine, and how many of them have orbiting planets and moons? All around us, there may be, life. Ask me, I’d say the universe is thick with life, teeming with life. In less than two decades we've found hundreds of exoplanets, and we've only begun to search. It's a safe guess that when spectrographic analysis identifies an exoplanet with the signature atmosphere of global warming, we will have found intelligent life.

After all, could all those stars set over barren planets, beauty wasted?

I don’t think so. For whatever reason, there is a great deal of complexity in the universe, and we are a part of the universe.

All of this has become apparent because of advances in science. As we’ve grown more sophisticated in our understanding of the universe, we’ve also endangered ourselves and our planet more than ever. We inhabitants of this planet share common problems: global warming, exhaustion of existing energy sources, and a lot more. But many of us also share technology that allows us to be in touch with each other in a way that was never before possible. Cooperation is one of our species' most productive and powerful strengths. So, let me use this space to propose that we open the discussion about global problems to everyone on the globe with access to texting or the Internet. I propose a website with portals for each issue, designed to raise awareness, to inspire, and to implement solutions.

We are all so very unlikely, and yet we are. Let’s make sure we continue to be.