A reminder of your unlikelyhood.

It's been brought to my attention through some recent reading, that our existence, yours and mine and your dog's, is extremely unlikely. In fact if time were to start over again, humans wouldn't likely exist. Not homo sapiens, anyway.
~Go back 100 years, no world wars, no radical upheavals, sexual revolutions, modern political dramas, television...
~Go back 1000 years, no Renaissance, no revolutions, no Dark Ages, no butter churns or steam powered autos. I'm leaving a lot out for brevities sake. Try and stay with me.
~Go back 10,000 years, things could have happened differently for the earliest tribes of pre-historic hominids.
~Go back 100,000 years and you introduce potential for an entirely different kindgom of animal to dominate and adapt.
Restart time going back eons, and you could would see different forms of life on every continent.
Keep going back in this way and you could replay things over and over like a record and not see life ever come to be on this planet at all. The window for DNA reproduction would close before a successful replication ever took place, and Earth would die sometime billions of years later when our sun goes nova. Never to be heard from, never to have known itself existed. In the Eastern philosophical traditions, this means the same thing as never having existed at all.

But that's not how it happened. It all happened such that we are. We eat. We think. Most of us communicate, most of us are mobile. The majority work, play, and continue to reproduce. We do these in ways which vary from traditionally simple and rudimentary, to the novel, arguably excessive and complex ways that present knowledge and technology allows. We're the only intelligent life that we are likely to ever know about. Even if there is life elsewhere in this galaxy or it's neighbors (which seems likely) it's nowhere near as likely that it'll be close enough or capable of establishing communication, let alone travel, in between worlds. The space is just simply too vast. That said, we are effectively alone here. We a few sad exceptions, none of us wants to end our time here early, but we do know that it will, someday, all come to and end.

Just like how our time here as individuals is limited, our species cannot last on this planet. I'll save the rant about current situation for another post. Let's just pretend that we were to find a way to co-habitate here peacefully and sustainably. Even if we manage to accomplish this (and that's a big if) we still have outside factors to consider. Even if we survive our magnetic pole shifting, comets falling from the sky, and numerous other cosmic disasters we've seen happen all-too-often in other solar systems, our source for life, energy and heat will one day expire. Before that it will explode in a ball of fire that will probably destroy all of the other planets as well. From what we can tell, there is no way to stop or even stall this process.

The only reason I mention this is not to scare you. A doomsday in 30 billion years is hardly alarming. Quite the opposite, really, when you consider all the more pressing issues we have to consider. It's just that no matter what we do, our species will one day fade away with nothing left behind. We cannot turn back the clock on this. Our only real option is to evolve to a point where we outgrow these sorely limited three dimensions and exist in all dimensions simultaneously. Okay, you're probably saying, "Okay whoa, slow down bub." Then you ask "I only know about three three dimensions, and Time."

The only path to true immortality is to be one with God. Existing in all places, in all ways, throughout the entire temporal matrix.

See, if you understand basic shapes, you can understand the three dimensions we are capable of perceiving. Dots (points) make lines which in turn, make triangles, squares, circles, pyramids, cubes, spheres. You, me and the trees.
Take that pattern of adding directions and follow it's progression, to the next step and you see that conceptually, another dimension could exist beyond the third. It's not possible to properly image a "shape" in the usual sense and this sort of concept is very difficult to understand because it escapes intuition. But try and follow with what you know already about the dimensions that we can see.

From zero to one, two, three, then four. If you continue this pattern, it's not hard to understand how there could be an very large number, or perhaps infinite number of dimensions (why stop at 11?). It's not a practical thought, because we can still only perceive the first three, and unless we gain radically new understanding of how the universe works, that won't change, no matter what technological advances we posses. But this link might help help you in the right direction. Just keep clicking links to get deeper into the idea. Don't forget to open in new tabs, so you don't stray away too far, just yet.

So you start to see that unless we can transcend this physical form; become a formless consciousness existing only as energy in the ether or to put it differently;

If there is a "fabric" of space, we must become it's fibers

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Unless we do this, our time is absolutely limited.

Ray Kurswell suggests we achieve longevity by becoming one with The Machine. I think we need to take that one step further. There are measurable forces that exist in our universe that have an instant, measurable force on every other atom, albeit an infinitesimal one. Our goal should be to harness this phenomenon through understanding it better, and find ways to store information in these forces themselves. What Einstein called "spooky action at a distance" would be our posterity left for all of known existence. Gravity would be our language; electromagnetism, our chariot.

Let's just hope we're the first ones to think of it.