Steamed. The boiling point of water, 100 degrees Celsius, is vital to the existence of life on this planet. If water's boiling point conformed to that of all similar compounds, such as ammonia, its boiling point would instead be -100 degrees Celsius, a full 200 degrees lower than it actually is! Even the coldest regions on earth would be too "hot" to allow water to remain in liquid form. Were it not for this unexpected anomaly, virtually all water would have vaporized long ago, rendering the earth incapable of supporting life. (M.A. Corey, God and the New Cosmology, 1993)

Still wondering. In a poll recently published in USA Today, adults were asked what they would ask a god or a supreme being if they could get a direct and immediate answer. Among the top three questions were "Will I have life after death?" (19% of respondents) and "Why do bad things happen?" (16%). However, the highest proportion of those polled, 34%, wished to know the answer to the timeless question, "What's my purpose here?" (USA Today, May 28, 1999)

Blowing their top. Volcanoes are an important factor in the maintenance of suitable climatic temperatures for life. Volcanic activity is a significant source of atmospheric carbon dioxide, which enables the Earth's atmosphere to trap sufficient quantities of solar radiation to substantially increase surface temperatures (the much-talked-about greenhouse effect). Without volcanoes, there probably wouldn't be enough carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere to maintain a life-supporting range of environmental temperatures. (M.A. Corey, God and the New Cosmology, 1993)

Deep. The series of letters you see in the background is a symbolic representation of the base sequence for the chromosome of bacteriophage fX174 (Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, 1979). To show the base sequence of the DNA of a single human cell would require 15,625 copies of Generation to print nothing but the sequence. To adequately represent the molecular blueprint of an entire human being (there are about 75 trillion cells in an adult) would take 1,171,875,000,000,000,000 (1 quintillion, 171 quadrillion, 875 trillion) copies of this magazine, which if stacked flat on top of each other would cover the United States with a layer of Generation almost 10 feet deep!