This human birth is a priceless gift from God and very, very precious!

Don’t take human birth lightly, or for granted. Don’t waste it.

Unless a person is deliberately dumb, he will realize that there is something special about the human body. Let us leave aside spiritual arguments for a while. There are only 8 billion humans on earth. Even this number is proving to be a serious strain on the earth and its resources. Efforts to give a decent lifestyle to all have given us global warming, pollution and habitat destruction. These are serious problems that mankind has to grapple with. Any increase in the population will impose greater strains on Mother Earth. Scientists warn that soon we may cross the tipping point, hastening our extinction.

What is the total number of life forms on earth? Not the number of species, but the total number of amoeba, fungi, bacteria, plants and animals? There is no definitive answer to this question, but one way that scientists have attempted to calculate this is by weight, by gigatons of carbon.

It seems there is 550 Gigaton of carbon of life on earth. And the mass of all 8 billion humans combined? A mere 0.06 Gigaton. Do the math Also, this is an inaccurate answer to this question - what is the total number of life forms? For further comparison, a single human body has 39 trillion cells of bacteria, all life forms, jeevas. And that in a single human body. Of all the zillions of living beings, only 8 billion or thereabouts can be human. To those who sneer at scriptures and God and swear by science, this is pure scientific tabulation, not quotes from the Vedas.

So, by any calculation, scientific or spiritual, humans are a microscopic minority.

Scriptures inform us that after a long and miserable journey through 8.4 million different wombs, we get to be human again. Some pig-headed people may argue, ‘So what if I waste this human birth? I don’t care. I will be a human once again, even if it is after an astonishingly long time.’ Any reasonable person will find this argument stupid. But our purpose is to clear all doubts, no matter how pointless or stupid.

Who decides how and where we are born? God does. What if God does not give us the precious human birth? Is there anything that we can do about it? Civil servants get promoted by seniority and merit. Students get promoted to a higher level by clearing exams. If so