Winning the cosmic lottery

"On the whole, I don’t fear death. Instead, I fear a life where I could have accomplished more. An epitaph worthy of a tombstone comes from the nineteenth-century educator Horace Mann: 'I beseech you to treasure up in your hearts these my parting words. Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.'

Our primal urge to keep looking up is surely greater than our primal urge to keep killing one another. If so, then human curiosity and wonder, the twin chariots of cosmic discovery, will ensure that starry messages continue to arrive. These insights compel us, for our short time on Earth, to become better shepherds of our own civilization. Yes, life is better than death. Life is also better than having never been born. But each of us is alive against stupendous odds. We won the lottery—only once. We get to invoke our faculties of reason to figure out how the world works. But we also get to smell the flowers. We get to bask in divine sunsets and sunrises, and gaze deeply into the night skies they cradle. We get to live, and ultimately die, in this glorious universe."

"Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization" by Neil deGrasse Tyson: https://a.co/9AHEXyH