Am I significant? I suppose most people have asked themselves this question at some point. When we are caught up in our everyday lives everything revolves around us. But every once in a while we experience something that gives us a different perspective. Perhaps some of you have viewed the ground from a plane and noticed how small we are compared to the world we inhabit, or looked up to the stars and remembered how tiny our enormous planet is in comparison to the vast emptiness that surrounds it.
There are many fancy graphics that illustrate just how tiny we are but to me the most stunning demonstration of our place in the cosmos is called “Pale Blue Dot”, a photograph of earth taken by the Voyager 1 space probe.
If you can’t find earth at first, it is the little bright spot halfway down the right-hand sunray. Magnificent, isn’t it? The astronomer Carl Sagan once gave a speech at Cornell University about this picture that I believe should always accompany it.
We succeeded in taking that picture, and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there – on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
[…] To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.
Contemplating on this, I suppose it is hard to feel truly significant. We might as well feel high and mighty about being the rulers of a grain of sand.
However, significance is not an absolute property but a relation. Nothing is or isn’t significant, it is always significant in relation to something else. Are we significant in relation to how the Milky Way is rotating around itself over the course of 250 million years? Of course not. But why would this be the ultimate frame of reference?
If we wanted, we could go in the opposite direction. We don’t know yet what the smallest building blocks of our universe are, maybe fermions and bosons, strings and branes, quantum gravity loops or something far more exotic. But we do know that the basic structures which comprise all that exists are so minuscule that even atomic nuclei are as big to them as galactic clusters are to us. Every atom of every molecule of every substance that we consist of is as complex as an entire universe in itself.
Each of the trillions of cells that make up your body is a speck of life on its own, showing all traits that we proud ourselves on to distinguish us from the dead matter surrounding us. And all these lives form you, a life of your own, distinct yet identical to all of those beings that are created and annihilated constantly during every second of your existence.
Not only that, your body is host to an unfathomable amount of microorganisms. For all of them, you are their home, their breeding ground, their safe haven, as essential to them as the earth is to us. But they not only live off of you, they take part in and regulate processes that keep your body functioning, from your gut flora to the protective coating on your skin. Together, all of this forms a biosphere, a true superorganism, or in other words – you.
These two views do not conflict each other. We are both entirely insignificant and incredibly important, depending on what it is we are talking about. There is no need to spend time thinking about which one is more accurate, because there is no contradiction.
Instead, consider how reflecting on our place in this universe changes the way you think. You see, when I quoted Carl Sagan earlier I omitted one sentence about the Pale Blue Dot:
To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
How about you? How did all of this make you feel? Did it inspire you to change the way you treat the ones around you?
The Metaphorical of Delphi 