"Every day, we have a choice whether we take our lives, our existence, our freedoms, and our moments for granted, or whether we express appreciation and gratitude for the good things that exist. The biggest unifier that all human beings have in common, that we all exist on the same world and in the same Universe, never gets the due it deserves. Here and now, it's possible for us to exist, and to exist as long as our natural lifespans will allow us."
"This wasn't guaranteed from first principles, but simply happens to be. At a huge number of different points in our Universe's history, the laws of nature came together in such a way to enable our existence, and to allow us to look back today, 13.8 billion years later, with thankfulness in our hearts. Here are ten phenomena that made it all possible, and ten reasons to give thanks."
"Be thankful for an asymmetric Universe. There are all sorts of important symmetries, but if everything were completely symmetric, there would have been perfectly equal amounts of matter and antimatter. As the Universe cooled and expanded, they would have annihilated away almost completely, leaving just a sparse set of particles and antiparticles less than one-billionth as dense as the Universe today. But instead, we have a Universe filled with matter and not antimatter, and that makes all the difference."
Gratitude is framed as a daily choice rooted in the remarkable fact of existence. The emergence of the Universe followed a transformation from a pre-Big Bang state, likely cosmic inflation, to a hot, particle-filled cosmos that set the stage for all structure. The laws of nature aligned across countless events and epochs to permit complexity and life. A crucial ingredient was the matter–antimatter asymmetry that prevented near-total annihilation and left a matter-dominated cosmos. Ten distinct phenomena are identified as essential enablers that together made observers possible 13.8 billion years after the initial expansion.
Read at Big Think
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