Earth is just one of some 100 billion planets in the Milky Way, one of some 100 billion galaxies in the universe. That could mean 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets. It seems likely that something as interesting as life on earth exists elsewhere. We may never know.

Here on Earth, the chemical, physical, mathematical, and engineering intricacies of all the lifeforms we know are so similar as to make it very unlikely that we earthlings represent more than one original creation event. 

That said, we have together achieved such a smörgåsbord of diversity, of form, of intelligence, of strategy and trickery, of resilient algorithms, of pitches and hues and sensitivities there-to, that it boggles the mind. And we won't even mention odors.

We species still in existence at this moment have had equally long to drift and weave our way into our current forms; that is, to invent and reinvent (and re-reinvent) whatever modes of strategy we rely on to carry on existing. While we humans have the incredible good fortune to be able to grok more of the complexity and dimensionality that defines our earthly family than most (or so we would like to think), we are not even remotely close to being able to grok it all. Inescapably, the more different from our own are the dimensions of intelligence characterizing our relatives, the less of their enormity we grok.

There is so much to be in awe of, to stretch our minds and hearts around, to revere, that we, in our brief moments of awakeness - individual and collective - cannot even hope to adequately sample it. There is no chance of exhausting the mystery!

Life is short... What say we get on with it?        🙏🏽