Our place in the Universe

In the beginning, the Earth was the centre of the world, and Man was the supreme being. It's been downhill ever since. First, the earth was demoted to the third planet from the Sun. After that, the Sun was found to be just one of many thousands of stars. Then, it was found out that there were not thousands, but in fact at least one hundred billion stars. After that astronomers discovered that all those stars were in just one galaxy, the Milky way, but that there were many other galaxies. The estimate now is that there are at least one hundred billion galaxies. And that's just the observable universe. There are more stars than grains of sand in all the beaches and deserts of the Earth.

In our own planet, we were also demoted from being the very purpose of Creation to just another mammal, evolved quite recently from other similar species. We are a random product of the mindless vagaries of evolution. Evolution has no purpose, and although it has created complex species, those are extravagant outcomes of its machinery. The most successful species are by far bacteria. How more insignificant can you get?

And yet we are very special. It may be that the Earth is the only place in the Universe where there is life. We simply know nothing about how probable it is that a planet with similar conditions to that of the Earth should be alive. We just don't know. There is simply nothing that can be argued for or against this notion.

Even if there is life elsewhere, it is by no means certain that evolution will produce other creatures with the same capacities we have. If you think about it, life has been going on in this planet for at least 3 billion years. That's not an insignificant figure, since the universe started just 13 billion years ago. And only in the last few thousand years we started to unravel the mysteries of the world. If the life of the universe were to be shrunk to a single year, life on Earth started at the beginning of October, while human history would have started a few seconds before midnight. It's not as if we had discovered remains of extinct species that once had our level of intelligence. Chances are, they never existed.

We may share a large percentage with the genome with other apes, but we are more than that.

From current evidence, it seems as if we are indeed much more special than we have been led to believe, even if our existence is due to chance.

Our brains sere a very special lump of matter. Some people may think that our abilities with respect to art, music or speech is what sets us apart. For me, it is that we may be the only conscious systems to ponder about these questions in the whole universe. It is through our incredible brains that this Universe finally becomes conscious of itself.

If we are indeed alone in this vast universe (an awe-inspiring thought), it certainly feels as if the rest of the Universe exists only for the purpose of creating us. An illusion, no doubt, but a comforting one. This would certainly be a welcome change from the trend that has been demoting us from the throne of Creation to utter insignificance and would put us back at the centre of all that exists.