For the road

nerdology:

Watchmen did it. That’s all I could think about while my dashboard filled up with reblogs of “What are the chances you coming into being?” I’m not saying it’s a bad post at all (though it is quite long and I don’t totally agree with all of the math), but Dr. Manhattan says the same thing so well:

Thermodynamic myricles… events with odds against so astronomical they’re effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing.

And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged.

To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air into gold. That is the crowning unlikelihood.

…

But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget. I forget. We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from another’s vantage point, as if new, it may still take the breath away.

For all of his crazy, Alan Moore is so often a poet.