2. MY CALLING, Part One

People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child – our own two eyes. All is a miracle.

- Thich Nhat Hanh

I joined the military not to serve my country or to save the world, but for a paid education. My family wasn’t poor, but trust funds weren’t exactly lying around. Plus, the world seemed pretty safe when I enlisted. The Cold War had been over for five years, peacekeeping was the military word of the day and so all around, I figured I was getting a pretty good deal. It would be another five years before planes would crash into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and change everything.

My less-than-noble motivation was enough for the military, who took what I offered and formed me into what they needed. Militaries are good at conditioning new soldiers, and they should be, considering they’ve been doing it longer than any of us have been alive. Physical training and education are only a part of the process — the simple part, actually. The harder part of conditioning is building an individual and collective identity based around the concept of service to others.

For my part, I was an eager student. Within months of basic training, I’d wholeheartedly accepted the ideas of service before self and unlimited liability, or the lawful ordering of soldiers into harm’s way and conditions which could lead to their death. I mean, what could be more noble than sacrificing yourself for others? As a trainee officer, I ate up this awesome responsibility because the military gave positive meaning to my life, namely: to serve my country, my comrades-in-arms, and those placed under my command.

Over time, I came to associate the values and beliefs of the military profession with what I believed were also part of service to others in general. And, to some degree, those values are the same. Spirit, discipline, and teamwork all help promote resilience and cohesion and effectiveness, all beneficial values whether one chooses to be a lowly grunt or a civilian doctor.

But when I consider how my life has been spent, my military education left out two things, perhaps for good reason.

First, as all-consuming as the military became for me as a way of life, there are numerous ways to be of service to others.   

Second, as much as the military taught me to adapt and overcome, as much as we took on non-military tasks in Afghanistan like building a civil society and economy, there are numerous ways to save the world because the world, as it turns out, is far more miraculously complex than almost anyone can truly comprehend.

That came home to me in the summer of 2021, when my then nine-year-old daughter and I hiked the Barrier Lake Trail up Yates Mountain in Alberta’s Kananaskis Country. From a lookout point near the top, we gazed out over the jagged peaks of Mount Baldy and Mount Kidd to the south, and the tree-lined valley that led to Kananaskis Village. It was my daughter’s first time up a mountain – a real one, not the ridges that masquerade as such in the Gatineau Hills near Ottawa.

“It’s breathtaking,” my daughter kept saying, over and over. On our way down, we’d meet sweat-drenched people slogging their way up and she’d tell them to keep going because the view was ‘breathtaking.’ She said it so much I almost asked her to stop. Instead, after catching another view of the pristine, cobalt-blue Barrier Lake, I asked myself at what point I’d stopped seeing the world through the eyes of a child. Because she was right, the view was breathtaking. In fact, nearly everything about our planet is a miracle, starting with its existence in what’s called the Goldilocks Zone¹, a region around a star where an orbiting planet is neither too hot, nor too cold, but rather, just right. In the case of the Earth, what’s just right isn’t the temperature of oatmeal, but the conditions to support surface liquid water, an essential condition for the evolution of life.

In the Milky Way, our home galaxy, NASA estimates that there are at least 100 billion stars². Assuming each one of those stars has at least 1 planet, an estimate supported by research out of the Space Telescope Science Institute³, there could perhaps be 5 billion habitable planets in the Milky Way⁴. Looking bigger, to the entire universe, there are maybe 1 trillion galaxies and 1 septillion stars⁵. If each one of those stars has at least one planet and if the rate of habitable stars is the same as in the Milky Way, then there could conceivably be hundreds of billions of planets able to support life. With those odds, the chances of Earth being a beautiful and unique snowflake amid the vastness of the universe should be pretty low.

Except that may very well be the case.

In 2016, a team of astrophysicists suggested that Earth might be a 1-in-700 quintillion planet⁶. That fits with 2021 data that suggests there is only one other planet in the Milky Way that might get enough sun to support an Earth-like biosphere, Kepler-442b⁷. If true, that would make what exists on Earth that much more magnificent. From soaring mountains to dark-blue oceans, to the barren beauty of sand-swept deserts, our world yields natural marvels that inspire awe.

On top of all that is the miracle of life. By some estimates, there could be over a trillion species on Earth⁸. One of those species, working together, has built magnificent cities, wondrous art, monuments carved out of the faces of mountains, and technology that pushes us to reach for the stars. Unfortunately, these feats aside, collective life – at least collective human life – may be a miracle too far. Because as much as people have accomplished together, our world faces a crisis.

1. Leah Burrows, “A goldilocks zone for planet size: Research redefines lower limit for planet size habitability,” in Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, September 10, 2019.  https://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2019/09/goldilocks-zone-planet-size, accessed November 8, 2021.

2. NASA, “Beyond Our Solar System: Stars, Galaxies, Black Holes and More,” NASA Science: Solar System Exploration, February 17, 2021. https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/solar-system/beyond/overview/, accessed November 8, 2021.

3. Cassan, Arnaud, Kubas, Daniel, Beaulieu, Jean-Philippe et al., “One or more bound planets per Milky Way star from microlensing observations,” in Nature, Vol 481 (2012), pp 167-9, https://www.nature.com/articles/nature10684, accessed December 7, 2022.

4. Bryson et al., “The Occurrence of Rocky Habitable Zone Planets Around Solar-Like Stars from Kepler Data,” in The Astronomical Journal, Vol 161 (36), January 2021, https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/abc418/pdf, accessed November 8, 2021.

5. ESA, “How many stars are there in the universe?” Science & Exploration, https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Herschel/How_many_stars_are_there_in_the_Universe, accessed December 7, 2022.

6. Erik Zackrisson, Per Calissendorff, Juan Gonzalez, Andrew Benson, Anders Johansen, and Markus Janson, “Terrestrial Planets Across Space and Time,” in The Astrophysical Journal, Vol 833:214 (12 pp), 20 December 2016, https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/833/2/214/pdf, accessed December 7, 2022.

7. Giovanni Covone, Riccardo M Ienco, Luca Cacciapuoti, and Laura Inno, “Efficiency of the oxygenic photosynthesis on Earth-like planets in the habitable zone,” in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 505 (3), August 2021, Pages 3329–3335, https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stab1357, accessed November 8, 2021.

8. Kenneth J. Locey, and Jay T. Lennon, “Scaling laws predict global microbial diversity,” in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences May 2016, 113 (21) 5970-5975,  https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/113/21/5970.full.pdf, accessed November 8, 2021.