A Great Big Fib

While writing a letter to a pen pal who's not a fan of math, I started talking about the Fibonacci sequence, where the next number is arrived at by adding the previous two:

0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55,.. and so on.

I was trying to tell her why I liked it so much, how it appears in nature and is connected t0 the golden ratio.

And then I started thinking about those first two seeds, the zero and 1 in the sequence. If we add zeroes to the beginning of the sequence, then we have:

...0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,2,3,5,8,... and so on.

Every part of the sequence is logical until we come across the first 1 in the sequence (namely, 0+0 = 0 so the zeroes are following the rule of the previous two terms adding up to create the next term).

But that first 1 comes from literally nothing (namely, how the fuck does 0+0 = 1?).

This makes me think of life. We can imagine those endless streams of zeroes before there was any type of life. We've also made progress in interpreting the building blocks (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, amino acids, proteins, DNA) and how they can combine to form life.

But life itself, that discontinuity between 0 and 1 - it's irrational, illogical, inconceivable! Consider that jump from non-life to life, how, once there is a singe life seed, it builds on itself and nothing to form strange, new patterns that keep growing with no end in sight.

I'll never be a mathematician, but this is beauty.

And it makes me wonder at how we can take parts of our life for granted (friends, family, love, a working mind... and so on) when we can't even decipher how we've come by those parts.

I just thought that was neat, but now it's time to start packing.