Looking at the Cosmos, we see ourselves surrounded by structures on all scales, ranging from the Solar System over the Milky Way galaxy to the filamentary distribution of distant galaxies and other cosmic objects. Where did these structures originate from, and how did they develop?

In three steps, the talk aims to explain why it would appear far more likely for the Universe to have turned out completely empty. In the first step, we will encounter the necessity of dark matter. In the second, we will see that it is surprising that any ordinary matter would exist. And in the third, we will look back at the beginning of the Universe and see that the origin of the largest cosmic structures is likely to be found in the physics of the microscopic world.