Humans are Significant in the Cosmic Scheme of Things, Actually
Rage against the principle of mediocrity
Humans are not important. In the cosmic scheme of things, that is. We are merely little animals, on a tiny planet, in just another galaxy. How could we be significant? Only religious people of the past thought we held a special place in the universe.
I bet you’ve heard an argument like this before. It is what the physicist David Deutsch calls the Principle of Mediocrity, and it seems to have become the default position among educated people. But it is false, and you don’t need a religious worldview to see why.
Human beings are exceptional in the basic sense that we are highly untypical in comparison to everything else in existence. To appreciate how unusual we are, just consider what makes up the vast majority of the universe. As Deutsch explains in The Beginning of Infinity about our unimaginably large universe of matter:
“80 percent of that matter is thought to be invisible ‘dark matter,’ which can neither emit nor absorb light. We currently detect it only through indirect gravitational effects on galaxies. Only the remaining 20 percent is matter of the type we parochially call ‘ordinary matter.’”
What’s more, most of the mass of ordinary matter is concentrated in stars, and the vast majority of the universe by volume is cold darkness. Think about that: almost everything that exists is nothing but frigid emptiness.
Compare this stark reality with us humans. Here on Earth, experiencing love. Creating art, scientific explanations, and technological miracles. As the podcaster Brett Hall has said, “We are, so far as we know, the sole place in the universe that is creating knowledge, an open-ended stream of knowledge that could transform the rest of reality.”1 How could that possibly be insignificant?
The scale of the universe does not mean that what humanity is doing is not special. On the contrary, it makes what our civilization continues to create and discover even more remarkable and heroic.
Recommended reading and listening:
The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch
Arjun Khemani on X
ToKCast with Brett Hall