Significance

Ruben David Azevedo tells us why, in a limitless universe, we’re not insignificant.

- Ruben David Azevedo

Many people assume, in the face of a virtually infinite universe, that we are insignificant beings. This assumption arises from our comparative extreme smallness. After all, our planet is nothing but a ‘blue dot’ in a vast solar system, a grain of dust lost in a second-rate suburb of a vast galaxy, which in turn dwells among another three hundred billion galaxies or more in the known universe alone. We’re negligible and peripheral – they say – and the universe is completely blind and indifferent towards us.

I think this common assumption of our insignificance might be challenged in eight arguments:

First: Relative size alone cannot be a measure for the absolute significance of a thing. Comparisons don’t tell us anything about one’s value in absolute terms, or a whale would be more significant than a human being merely because of its size. The same with certain dinosaurs, space rocks, planets, even galaxies. Complexity may tell us something about significance, but not size alone.

Second: Our alleged insignificance is not some law or definitive statement given by a universal judge with a privileged insight into the very marrow of universe – that is, into its absolute nature. Therefore, our alleged insignificance cannot be an absolute, objective or universal value. And how could we ourselves, being nothing and knowing nothing, issue such an objective universal truth – thus contradicting our own petty nature and infinitely tiny intellect?

Third: Consciousness is the ability of a being, and indeed of nature, to know itself from the inside. We humans are well endowed with this ability. Other animals have it too – though to a lesser degree than us, for we have