The first thing you will notice is that you are self-aware.
As a human being, you are as far as we know a member of the only self-aware, intelligent species in existence. There might be others, but so far we haven’t seen any evidence.
Your life will go on for about 70 or 80 years. That’s about twenty-seven thousand days. How much exactly depends how you spend your time. Some things will shorten it, others lengthen it.
At the end of that time, we don’t yet know what will happen to your self-awareness. Our best guess is that it will just stop. That’s a pretty tricky idea that you’re probably going to spend some time wrestling with. But don’t worry, we’re all doing it.
We’re also not sure how or why existence started, or what the point of it is. We think it began about fourteen billion years ago. The human race has only been around for a little bit of that, about two hundred thousand years, 0.001% of existence so far.
The bit of all existence that you’ll spend your time in is a really tiny bit of the whole thing. Our nearest star, the Sun, is about a million times more massive than our planet. There are hundreds of billions of such stars in each galaxy, and there are hundreds of billions of galaxies.
So far about five hundred people have been outside our planet and into space. If you look up into the night sky you can see a big silver disc called the moon. We’ve been there.
We still don’t understand a lot of how all that existence works. We have a couple of pretty good theories which you’ll have time to get to know, including General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. So far though both seem to have some gaps.
You are one of about seven billion humans who live here. That’s about twice as many as there were fifty years ago. You are one of two types of human, male or female. They have different roles in reproduction and have physical differences. A problem you’ll have to deal with is the unfair oppression of women by men, which there has been a lot of in our history so far.
At some point around the age of 12 or 13 you may find you want to develop an intimate relationship with a man or a woman. Most women go for men, and most men go for women, but there are plenty of men who go for men and women who go for women too.
Relationships with other human beings will be a big part of your time here. Sex is very enjoyable for humans, and in the case of heterosexual sex we’ve developed ways of having all the fun of it without actually producing babies. You can also find talking to other human beings about problems, for example all the unanswered questions we’ve been over so far, makes you feel better about them.
That should be enough to get you going. All in all, it’s not the worst hand you could be dealt.
