Cosmic Insignificance--Nora

 

The human race is, undoubtedly, cosmically insignificant.

Our great, vast universe is 13.8 billion years old. This is a timescale that I, personally, can’t even begin to comprehend. 13.8 billion years. Only roughly 66 million years ago did the prehistoric carnivorous beasts known as dinosaurs roam freely. Before that were the marine arthropods called trilobites, about 540 million years ago. Even the earliest known ‘living’ thing we have evidence of are microbes found in rocks, 3.7 billion years ago. So what was earth in that 10.1 billion year difference?

Albert Einstein said time was just an illusion. While I could dive into physics theories and the theory of relativity, I don’t think that would be much fun at all. Simply put, time is relative. Time varies for everybody depending on the speed at which you are going through space. For example, take the stars. Every night we look up to see the wondrous balls of burning gas in the sky that emit a light. The Big Dipper is approximately 125 light years away. That means, the light emitting from that star took 125 years to reach our eyes.That means we are seeing light sent out from before we were even born. Crazy, right?

NGC 4845. That’s the name of the galaxy located approximately 65 million light years away. So if we applied what I said earlier, about how the light we see from this galaxy took 65 million years to reach our eyes today, do you know what that means? That means we are seeing the earth for how it was 65 million years ago, when the first T. Rex went extinct. Light speed is a finite thing, so it works in the opposite direction: if by some miracle intelligent life form existed out in the Milky Way and they happened to look at Earth, they would be seeing it in the time of the dinosaurs (assuming, of course, they had a very very very big and fancy telescope that is able to see 65 million light years away... although if they’re aliens maybe their eyes are just built different than ours. Who knows.)

We humans and our tiny lives are so insignificant when it comes to the vast majority of space. We are but a tiny tiny speck in a massive, forever expanding universe. We are a microscopic blip in the time and space continuum. So many long abysmal stretches of geological time when nothing existed, and when everything existed. The words that come to mind to describe us humans are insignificant. We are living through the 6th mass extinction (the Holocene extinction) that is being caused by us. By climate change, by the extinction of animals due to human activities, deforestation... In a couple million years from now, will there be a new race? Will the cycle of life continue? Will our planet become engulfed by the sun? Are we the last species?

If we are so insignificant in this massive universe, then why do we try so hard to understand the impossible? Why do we try so hard to please and impress others? In order ​to be significant (when considering it on a cosmic scale) one must be objectively valuable to either someone or something, and since we humans do not value objective value in that sense, it follows that there is no such thing as cosmic significance. This is my definition of insignificant. I guess what I’m trying to say is:

Live your life. You only have one.