你赢得了一场有一千亿分之一概率的彩票——但你从没注意过这件事

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原文与参考译文

On the northwestern shore of Africa, some 150 miles south of the Canary Islands, the coastline slightly bulges in a pimple known as Cape Bojador. For Europeans in the early 15th century, Cape Bojador marked the boundary between the known and the unknown. North of the cape was civilization and the cities of light. South were the mystical lands of Africa and the Mare Tenebrosum, the "Sea of Darkness."

Between 1424 and 1434, he sent 14 ship expeditions to round the perilous cape. None succeeded. All turned back from fear or foul weather. Yet the unknown beckoned. Undeterred, Henry dispatched the explorer Gils Eannes for a 15th attempt. This time, Henry's man succeeded in rounding the cape...

Prince Henry the Navigator was a pioneer in what historians have called the Age of Discovery. His triumph allowed improved mapmaking, new understanding of coastlines and ocean currents, and the opening of new trade routes. Most important, Prince Henry enlarged our perspective. He enlarged our concept of the world—not only of geography but also of our place in new lands and seas, our possibilities.

Over the span of less than a century, discoveries in astronomy and biology have expanded our perspective almost beyond comprehension. We have learned that our solar system sits on the outskirts of an enormous galaxy of a hundred billion stars called the Milky Way. It takes a light ray, which travels at a speed of 186,000 miles a second, 100,000 years to cross from one end of the Milky Way to the other.

We have also enlarged our concept of time in the cosmos. We have learned that the universe began about 14 billion years ago. That's about one hundred million human lifetimes ago. Just as our entire planet is a speck in the cosmos, our individual lives are fleeting moments in the grand unfolding of time.

Advances in biology have shown that the instructions for creating each individual human being are encoded in a set of molecules called DNA. Far more possible arrangements of human DNA exist than there are atoms in the observable universe—each arrangement corresponding to a different human being. One of those many possible arrangements is each of us.

Consider the process of conception, when a single egg unites with a single sperm. Each human female has about 300,000 eggs during the fertile period of her life. Each male ejaculation has about 300 million sperm. Thus each conception contains about a hundred thousand billion different possible combinations of DNA. Only one of those possible combinations led to each of you reading this article at this moment.

Here's a way to visualize that extremely tiny fraction. If you took a very long ruler that stretched from here to the planet Pluto, one inch of that distance would be you. The rest of the distance would be other possible human beings that could have been, but never were.

Being alive at all is the most extraordinary stroke of good luck we will ever experience. Yet it is the easiest to overlook, to take for granted. We wake up in the morning, have our coffee, make breakfast, send the kids off to school... And we forget that beneath all of it lies something profoundly rare: existence itself.

There will never be another you in the future of the universe. From the distant past, billions of years ago, to the distant future, billions of years ahead, the universe will never see another one of you.

So the question is: What are we to make of the fantastically improbable fact of our existence, our moment of life? Or, as Mary Oliver asks in the last lines of her poem "The Summer Day": "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"

Two millennia ago, the Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius understood the fragility of life when he wrote in his Meditations: "Whatever you do, whatever you project, so do and so project as one who may at this very moment depart out of this life."

核心词汇

长难句语法拆解

句一

Far more possible arrangements of human DNA exist than there are atoms in the observable universe—each arrangement corresponding to a different human being.

• 主语：far more possible arrangements of human DNA（人类 DNA 可能的排列方式，数量远多于……）
• 谓语：exist（存在）
• 比较结构：than there are atoms in the observable universe——than 引导比较状语从句，意为「比可观测宇宙中的原子还多」
• 破折号后的独立主格结构：each arrangement corresponding to a different human being
  • each arrangement = 每一种排列（逻辑主语）
  • corresponding to = 对应于（现在分词作谓语）
  • a different human being = 一个不同的人（宾语）
  • 此结构相当于一个省略了 which is 的非限制性定语从句，补充说明前文

句二

In the immense hallways of time and of space, out of the fantastic number of potential lives and the infinite chain of accidents that led to this moment, I am here.

• In the immense hallways of time and of space ——地点状语：在时间与空间的宏大走廊里
• out of the fantastic number of potential lives and the infinite chain of accidents that led to this moment ——来源状语：从难以计数的潜在生命与一连串偶然事件中……
  • that led to this moment = 定语从句，修饰 the infinite chain of accidents（引向这一刻的那串无限偶然）
• 主句：I am here.（我在这里。）