I learnt it the hard way that not everyone appreciates the beauty of our cosmic insignificance. Most people are fully immersed in this tiny world we built and I sometimes envy them.
The central fallacy is that size has to do with significance. It is a huge non sequitur and grist for the deepity mill to conclude that just because Earth is tiny in comparison to the Universe in terms of size that it must therefore be insignificant.
Is life, specifically intelligent life, signiant on a cosmic scale?
If so there’s a strong chance that Earth is the most significant place in the galaxy at least. It’s possible we’ll screw ourselves up before we make it to other star systems, but of we do manage self sustaining interstellar ships then within a cosmically tiny amount of time humans, or the evolved dwacwndents, will occupy every star in this galaxy.
Maybe that’s common, maybe that’s insignificant on a universal scale, maybe reaching the level of development humans have is quite common, but it’s quite possible that Earth is, or will be, very significant on a galactic scale if nothing else.
Maybe. Maybe not. We really just don’t know. If sentient life is vanishingly rare on a cosmic scale then there would some significance to Earth (currently). But it is otherwise pretty insignificant.
Even if we’re significant on a galactic scale, that’s a long way from cosmic significance. Even our galaxy is pretty insignificant on that scale.
People here flippantly conclude whether something is significant or insignificant without defining what significance is and how to determine it. Question begging and bad assumptions abound.
"Pale blue dot" talk is ultimately an intellectually vacuous appeal to confusion and emotion. It strives to seem profound, but it only manages to approximate a silly deepity.
I think it does. It’s not proof that this place is insignificant, but the fact that it’s just a tiny dot in an unimaginably vast universe is strongly suggestive.
Compare with a hypothetical universe consisting of a million-kilometer-diameter crystal sphere with the Earth at its center. Again not proof, but absent any further information, one would reasonably conclude that Earth is much more significant in that universe.
Dunno. The crystal sphere wouldn’t tell me anything. If I’m the kind of life form that requires such sphere in order to evolve in the first place, then of course I’d observe such a sphere around my planet— otherwise I wouldn’t be there to observe anything!
If I lived on such a planet, I might say, well, I’d need a big sun-like outer gas giant in order to prove we’re significant. As it is, we’re just a little crystal sphere in a huge universe.
What he was saying is if the total universe was merely a few million kilometers, the earth would form a much larger and non-trivial portion of it compared to the vast size of the observable universe in real life.
There is no cosmic perspective. There's only my perspective, your perspective, and so on. Perhaps there are alien perspectives, and from their perspective, their world is very significant.
When you talk about significance, you have to bring in considerations of value and worth. And at that point, you have to bring in the individual. Significance is only significant to someone.
That's not the point at issue. And it is also entirely possible to have independent grounds on which to judge significance other than "this is my neighborhood" (which, btw, may very well be a very legitimate basis for judging significance).
A good place to begin is to define significance and to identify and explain what causes something to be significant.
My problem with these immersed people of this world is that it’s like being residents of a terrarium, entirely at the mercy of the Lord to keep the A/C on. We need few people to wonder what is out there - who is maintaining the terrarium temperature?
It might be that a lot of people just aren't well enough primed to appreciate the pale blue dot as it isn't recognizable enough.
This is why, despite current controversy and how fun it is to mock Katy Perry, space tourism is so important, particularly when it gets to the point of Low Earth Orbit.
Being able to see the whole entire planet in detail right out the window apparently has quite the psychological effect.
Maybe we really are so insignificant that ultimately it doesn't matter. So, we might as well make the most of the time we have here!
Speaking for myself... Some of us care about this little spec of dust, so we try to challenge those who want to destroy the planet. We like making cool stuff, building little empires, and also making our communities fun and thriving!
We didn't build this world though. If anything it built us. And everywhere we look there's depth to it, whether we contemplate the stars, the worlds inside ourselves, or mundane earth events like a glance over clinked glasses when you fell in love...
Here's some Borges:
"Tennyson said that if we could understand a single flower we would know who we are and what the world is. Perhaps he meant that there is no deed, however so humble, which does not implicate universal history and the infinite concatenation of causes and effects. Perhaps he meant that the visible world is implicit, in its entirety, in each manifestation, just as, in the same way, will, according to Schopenhauer, is implicit, in its entirety, in each individual.
Dissociation and viewing your existence as nothing is not beautiful and it's definitely not honorable. Our existence is the realest we're going to get. Your life is 100% of your universe dawg, act like it.
Space is barely even real to us earth critters lol
Ok, why are you acting like you're contradicting OP when the two viewpoints necessarily go together?
If the rest of the universe cares about us, we need to live our lives for the rest of the universe. If we're cosmically insignificant, then what's here and now is what matters, and what we have to live for.
To you. I find a great amount of beauty in appreciating how small and unlikely our existence is - in how important it is to us, and how unimportant it is to the rest of the entire universe.