Insignificance of Mankind

The reason I thought of penning down this blog on the Insignificance of Mankind is that I believe most of the problems we face or create are because of an arrogance of sort to imagine somehow that we are special and unique. Almost all branches of science show us that we aren’t.

Image Credit : http://www.thegospelcoalition.org

The first reason is because of the size of the planet we live in and how insignificant it is compared to the universe. So there are an estimated 200 Trillion Galaxies in the universe. 200 TRILLION! Milky Way is one among them. Milky Way has over 100 Billion stars in it. One of them is Sun, which means there could be billions of other solar systems. And in our solar system, there are 8 Planets and we are only the 5th largest planet among them. The largest planet Jupiter is 12 times the size of the earth. The Sun itself is more than 100 times the size of the earth. And our Solar system is not in the center of the milky way and earth is not even in the center of the solar system. So ‘Existential Significance’ is out of the question.

Like Stephen Hawking said, “We are just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies.”

History of Life

Image Credit : https://in.pinterest.com/nautilusmag/

If you consider the timeline of life on earth to be the length of your arm. The origin of life is at your elbow, the age of dinosaurs was at the beginning of your fingers and the beginning of humans as we know it is at the tip of your nails. That’s how recent we are; That’s how insignificant we are. The earth is believed to be formed 4.5 Billion years ago and life was small and microscopic up until 580 million years ago. The Homo sapiens; the first humans are believed to have been around only for the last 4 million years ago approximately. A lot longer than 6 days (Pun intended).

Stage of Evolution

Image Credit : http://www.nationalgeographic.org/media/tree-life/

We always assume that human beings have achieved the most advanced evolution compared to others. That is a very egocentric thing to say and is not at all true. We may have a brain that is more advanced than the life we know. But the fact is, all life on earth is as evolved as we are. All the branches of life on earth have survived everything human beings have survived. We have used many ‘techniques’ to sustain our species; So have every other species. Be it reproduction, development of senses, muscles. Every species have adopted a different strategy. We should also never forget that there are micro-organisms deep in the ocean that can survive immense pressure so deep down, which is impossible for any other species to survive. There are organisms that even survived volcanic eruptions. So from that perspective, we are far inferior to these other organisms.

Chemical Composition

The human body consists of Oxygen, Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, and others. Guess what the universe has in abundance? Exactly, Hydrogen, Helium, Oxygen, Carbon, Nitrogen, and others. There is not a single element in our body that is not found in the universe.

Like chandler would say “Can we BE more common”.