I'd like to share with you some thoughts I've been wrestling with for a long time. My dilemma is this: how can a species as spatially and temporally insignificant as Homo sapiens sapiens find meaning and a sense of worth in a Universe which seems to be utterly indifferent to it? I will spell out the issues at some length, and then I will try to find hope in all of this.
I. The Human Home: Spatially Insignificant
Humans found themselves in a physical world that was immense compared to the size of their own bodies, and (we may assume) immense compared to the size of even the largest tribal groupings our ancestors formed. (Arthur C. Clarke put the size of the human species in startling perspective when he pointed out that the whole of humanity would fit inside of a cubic mile.) Further, travel across the surface of the planet was often extremely difficult, even dangerous, no doubt reinforcing the human sense of the earth’s enormity. When humans began venturing out on epic sea journeys, from the Phoenicians in the early 12th century BCE to the Chinese and Western Europeans beginning in the fifteenth century CE, the sense of the earth’s hugeness was reinforced.
But our small size in relation to the Earth can deceive us. In the larger context of the physical universe, the Earth is almost unimaginably miniscule.
We can begin by considering the Earth in relation to objects in our own solar system. The earth, large as it is to us, is tiny compared to Jupiter, which has a volume 1321.33 times that of our planet. The size of our neighborhood star, the Sun, is even more overwhelming. The Sun could hold our entire planet almost 1,300,000 times. And the Sun is merely a star of average size.
The diameter of the Solar System itself is more than 7.5 billion miles as compared to fewer than 8,000 miles for our little world—a ratio of more than 937,000:1. But that’s just the start of the measure of our cosmic insignificance. The Milky Way Galaxy, in which our sun is so ordinary, measures anywhere from 100,000 to 120,000 light years in diameter. (A light year is the distance light, the fastest known thing, travels in one earth year—a distance of 5,878,499,810,000 miles.) Therefore, the Milky Way is (to be on the low end of the estimate) 100,000 x 5.878 trillion miles across. It contains anywhere from 100 billion to 400 billion stars, depending on the thoroughness of the estimates being made. On such a scale, our planet’s size is already negligible. But the picture gets worse.
It was not understood until the 1920s, through the brilliant work of Edwin Hubble, that the Milky Way Galaxy was far from being the only one in existence. Since Hubble’s time, we have vastly improved our observational tools, including the orbiting of space telescopes (the first one being named in Hubble’s honor, fittingly enough). And the story they tell humbles us even more. There are whole clusters and walls of galaxies, all held together by gravity. NASA recently estimated that there were 125 billion galaxies, and emphasized that infrared cameras, radio telescopes, and x-ray cameras might greatly increase the estimate. Some of these galaxies are mind-bogglingly huge. In 1990, Science News announced the following:
By carefully recording the faint light surrounding a bright galaxy at the center of a dense cluster, a team of astronomers has uncovered evidence for perhaps the largest and most luminous galaxy known. This gigantic agglomeration of stars, which sits at the center of a rich galaxy cluster called Abell 2029, extends 6 million light-years in diameter (more than 60 times the width of the Milky Way) and emits more than a quarter of all the light produced by the entire cluster.
Such an object has a diameter 4.7 billion times the diameter of our Solar System. This would be as if our solar system were eight one-hundredths of an inch across and the giant galaxy in question were roughly the diameter of North America from the Arctic Circle to Colombia. By my calculations, this enormous galaxy in Abell 2029, if seen as a circle, would be more than 22 quintillion times the area of a circle represented by our solar system.
And when the earth is finally compared to the entire physical universe, the human species all but vanishes completely. The Earth’s diameter of about 7,900 miles must be compared to the estimated 156 billion light years diameter of the Universe. Since a light year is 9,460,528,400,000 kilometers or 5,878,499,810,000 miles, this figure multiplied by 156,000,000,000 yields a staggering result: the estimated Universe is 1.15696893 × 1020 (hundred quintillion) or, written out, 115,696,893,000,000,000,000 times the diameter of the earth.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that if the estimated Universe were the size of the Earth, the Earth on such a scale would probably be no larger than a single atom.
2. The Humans: Temporally Insignificant
Recent findings from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) space project indicate a universe 13,700,000,000 years old. The earliest member of the genus Homo, Homo habilis, is thought to have emerged no earlier than 2,500,000 years ago. Even with the discovery of a find called Toumaï' (not a member of Homo) in Chad, we can say that the hominid line emerged no earlier than 7,000,000 years ago. Therefore, the genus Homo has occupied approximately less than two one-hundredths of one per cent of the total existence of the universe (more precisely about .01825% of the universe’s age). To use a slight variation on how Carl Sagan once put it, if the entire age of the universe could be reduced to one year, the genus Homo did not emerge until around 10:30 pm on 31 December. The oldest member of sapiens, perhaps 200,000 years old, emerged at about 11:52 pm on that fateful last day. The earliest agriculture in the Fertile Crescent, about 11,000 years before the present, would have begun about 25 seconds ago, the earliest written records, about 5,000 years old, emerged about 11 seconds ago, and all of human history since the year 1500 has, in this universe shrunken temporally to one year, taken place over the last 1.15 seconds. The life span of a centenarian on this scale is reduced, therefore, to about one-fifth of a second. The life span of a person of typical life expectancy in the advanced countries would be about one-seventh of a second.
Some people might prefer to think of these issues by picturing an enormous timeline. So let’s consider this. Let’s say you have a timeline that stretches out 1,000,000 kilometers in length. Each year since the Big Bang would be about 7.299 centimeters on such a scale. On such a scale, we would have to travel 664,293 kilometers—-almost two-thirds of the total length of the line—-to reach the beginning of the Earth. We would have to travel almost 999,818 kilometers on that timeline to reach the first member of the genus Homo. We would have to travel 999,985 kilometers to reach the first sapiens, 999,999.2 kilometers to reach the earliest civilization, and 999,999.6 kilometers to reach the earliest writing. The last 500 years of human history would take up about the last 36.497 meters of the timeline, more than 999,999.96 kilometers from the start, the lifetime of a centenarian would be 7.299 meters from the end of our one million kilometer line, and the lifespan of a typical human in the advanced nations (about 75 years) would take us less than 5.5 meters from the end of a line 1,000,000,000 meters in length.
We are an amazingly recent occurrence in this iteration of the universe. Even in comparison to the Earth, a mere 4.6 billion years in age, we are insignificant. Imagine if the earth were a sentient, conscious being. Further imagine that it had the powers of observation and evaluation. Can you imagine how fleeting the life of a seventy year old person would be to such a being, a being almost 66,000,000 times older? It would be as if our 70 year-old simply evanesced out of nowhere and disappeared almost instantaneously. The rhythms of the earth are unimaginably slow in comparison to the frantic pace of our lives. The earth’s memory would include geologic eras measured in tens or hundreds of millions of years. It would contain the earliest glimmerings of life, the upheavals and splitting apart of whole continents, the births, lives, and deaths of countless entire species. The recession of the last ice age, some 14,000 years ago, would be a recent memory, comparatively speaking, to such a being. It would be the equivalent of a memory our 70 year-old would have of something that happened 45 minutes ago!
We are newborns; we are very, very young children of space-time and energy-matter. We were not created at the start; we were not created near the start; we weren’t even created near the middle. We are the latecomers. It took eons of time to produce us, and our reign on this tiny world has been vanishingly brief. We have only just begun our journey, and there is no guarantee that it will last much longer than it already has.
3. The Human Scale of Meaning
Given the extraordinarily diminutive size of the Earth in the cosmos and the brief duration (so far) of the human species, it cannot be argued coherently that what happens to us or what we do or believe or think has any bearing on the organization and function of the universe. There are those who might argue that the human species could be significant in such a vast context if:
A. We were the only species anywhere to have evolved consciousness (which is possible). But even if this were the case, would our tiny little island of intelligence have any impact whatsoever on an entity as vast as our home galaxy, let alone the universe as a whole? Our consciousnesses, operating on quantum principles as yet not understood, might be sending signals across vast distances of the universe almost instantaneously (entanglement, or “spooky action at a distance”), thereby affecting the course of cosmic events. But such an effect, even if proven to be real, would be lost in the enormity of the multiverse. If we are alone, these signals would die out in the vast emptiness of the cosmos. If we are not, and the universe is filled with innumerable conscious beings sending out their own signals, our messages would be lost in the shuffle. We might be only a brief candle, the flickering out of which would be noticed by absolutely no one. Of course, we might someday reach out into small parts of the universe and colonize them. But our “empire” would be tiny at best. There is also the possibility that humans will someday send self-replicating devices into space, but the utility of doing so would be diminished by the fact that such devices would face the insuperable barrier of distance as they tried to communicate with us.
B. The universe was created for our specific benefit (the basis of the anthropic principle). The absurdity of this belief echoes the absurdities of an earlier age’s geocentrism. To believe that a universe as big in relation to us as the earth is to a single atom exists chiefly to facilitate our existence borders on delusion. Would anyone argue that the earth was created for the benefit of a single atom within it? Humans are a byproduct of fortuitous conditions in an extremely localized environment, and little else can reasonably be said.
C. We are the favored offspring of God or a divine intelligence or universal spirit. Again, the influence of the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic view of the universe is manifesting itself here. The major religions all came to postulate their views of God at a time when the human conception of the universe was severely limited in scope, to say the least. It may have been credible to believe that a universal mind was interacting with us when the whole of creation was thought to have a roof only a few miles high and the whole sky seemed to rotate around us. To believe now that a universal God sees us as the pinnacle of its creation is either an amazingly hopeful view of our place in reality, or an amazingly hubristic one.
Therefore, in my view, humans can find meaning only in the extremely limited context of the earth and any place in the universe where human intelligence might spread. The universe is, in all likelihood, completely indifferent to us. We must confine our search for meaning to our own insignificant world. In fact, in order to maintain human moral conduct, we have to ignore the fact that what we do means nothing in a universal context and focus ourselves strictly and entirely on our own little community. The adoption of a “universal view” could prove disastrous, for then, any brutality could be excused by saying, “Well, in the whole scheme of things, what does it matter?” In a very real sense, it is vital that our conception of the moral universe be confined to the earth and its consciousness-possessing inhabitants (and, more broadly, all of its sentient beings). This is what I mean by the phrase, The Human Scale of Meaning. We must confine ourselves to this planet and its people, and mentally it constitutes our total existential universe.
What preserves us, ethically and morally, is our understanding of our similarity to other humans. This should convince us that the rules of human conduct matter, and give us an understanding that other humans are as real as we are. (It is for this reason that during wars a crucially important role is given to dehumanizing our enemies. After all, how can we do horrible things to people who share so much in common with ourselves?)
4. Conclusions
Alone and isolated, for all intents and purposes, in the cosmos, and alone in the uniqueness of their own conscious minds, (for no human experience is identical to any other human's, and no form of communication is perfectly unambiguous) humans find themselves in an existential dilemma that appears from my vantage point to be inescapable. Many of the best thinkers the species has produced have tried to elucidate some greater meaning, some over–arching significance in our experience, but in my view these attempts are inherently doomed. Our theologies and philosophies were largely formed at a time when humans believed themselves to be overwhelmingly significant in the scheme of things. In my view, to the degree that they argue for the centrality of the human species in the universe or of our centrality in the consciousness of some divine figure, these systems of thought are no longer tenable. It is quite reasonable, I think, therefore, to argue that the human experience means nothing in the context of the multiverse—nothing at all. We thought our earthly drama was of universal significance because we used to think we were the Universe and the children of a father-like creator spirit (in societies that imagined godlike figures to exist) or else imbued with the spirit of the world itself. I have arrived at the point in my life where it is impossible for me to believe that if there were indeed a Universal Intelligence of some sort that existed, that it would even notice our presence. It would be exactly as if a being the size of the solar system were expected to notice a group of microbes clinging to a dust speck. The proposition collapses under the weight of its own absurdity. We are just too small to matter. That may seem inelegant, even vulgar, to you, shockingly simplistic, or coarse. But I see no other way I can state it.
Naturally, you may tend to reject this out of hand, pointing to the extraordinary nature of the human brain and the products of the culture its features, and those of the rest of the human body, made possible. We are unique, you may argue. There is nothing in any evolutionary system anywhere that is like us (ignoring for the moment the multiple worlds hypothesis). And we are intelligent, surely a rare commodity even in the immense reality in which we find ourselves. You may indeed be right. In fact, nothing like us probably has evolved anywhere else. Our cultures are in all probability not like those of any other intelligent beings which may exist elsewhere. As a group, we have made tremendous discoveries and learned how to live in large numbers on a planet that has proven to be more difficult than we might have expected it to be. And still, in my view, we are next to nothing. Imagine, if you will, that there is a colony of intelligent beings living on an object the size of a grain of pollen located somewhere in Alaska. What, really, are the odds that they would ever make their presence known to you? What are the odds that you would discover them, or even suspect their existence?
You might also argue that, discovered or not, known or not, our intelligence is still a wondrous phenomenon, a beacon however tiny its light might be, a possession both exalted and exalting. Here again I must object. It seems to me that our intelligence is far more limited than we believe it to be. It is the product of a body constructed out of the simplest and most convenient elements available. It has fooled us into thinking that it is equipped to probe the deepest mysteries of existence, when in fact its principal reason for being was to facilitate reproductive success—nothing more.
So all of our drama, all of our achievements, all of our suffering, all of our workday toil, all of our ordinary experience, all of our tragedy, all of our squalor, all of our evil, all of our nobility, all of our joys, all of our selfless love, and all of our dreams will, in all probability, never be known outside the confines of this humblingly tiny world we inhabit. We have made no visible impression on the Universe whatsoever. Nothing we have done or gone through has (in all likelihood) meant anything to anyone outside of this fortuitously placed rocky little speck of dust. Many believe that we occupy a special place in a divinely ordained plan, but nothing can show us whether these hopes have any basis in fact. And as I have said, (in a previous diary) there is no prospect of a utopia of any kind for this species, and no prospect whatsoever that we will ever be some sort of “shining city on a hill” for the cosmos.
However, none of this means that the human species cannot take an absurdly heroic stand in the face of the blind enormity of reality. Just because something is meaningful only to us, it is not any less real for that. We mentally don’t live in the whole of reality. We live here and now. The human enterprise has meaning for us. It is real to us, and that is sufficient. We in turn are just as much a part of reality as anything, anywhere, in any dimension or any frame of reference. We carry the nature of the Universe within us. We follow its rules; we are its creation. The energy-matter out of which we are composed became aware of itself, and we became the only life form in our world that knew, at least in part, that we were part of something perhaps infinitely larger and longer in duration. If we can only set down our arrogance, our obsession with being the “center of creation”, our astonishing hubris, and our grossly inflated sense of our own significance and surrender ourselves to the knowledge of our true place, then perhaps we can turn with renewed energy to the true business of humanity: making this world a truly decent place for the first time.
Perhaps we need to “un-anchor” ourselves from the loftier pretensions of our kind. We must stop seeing the Universe as “ours” in the sense of being made for us, and start to see it as “ours” in the sense of being our home. We will never “conquer it” or “own it” but we will always be a part of its history, even if that history is forever unread. And we can make of ourselves and of our world something better than it has been, and that is a worthy and noble undertaking on which to embark.
So yes, let us give up our arrogance and our pretenses. Let us stop seeing ourselves as the reason for the Universe’s existence. But let us never forget that we are just as much a part of the Universe as anything. I may be tiny, and my effect on the rest of reality may be utterly negligible, but by God I am real! I may count for next to nothing, but I will never be nothing. However many zeroes there may be to the right of the decimal point in calculating the percentage of the time I lived in the Universe’s existence, or the amount of space I occupied while I was here, there will always be that 1 at the end of that chain of zeroes. I am that 1, and I am content to be so.