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Comment by Kenji | Hacker News Reader

I never really understood how the 'the universe is vast' argument is humbling. What does size have to do with importance? That's like saying a bar of gold has less value if you store it in a bigger room. There are many humbling things in the universe, like making an off-by-one error in C++ with more than a decade of programming experience, but the vastness of the universe is not one of those things.

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I used to think the same thing, but it's not about putting the gold bar in a large empty room. Consider that the our galaxy has a mass of about 6×10^42 kg. The relative abundance of gold is 6×10^-10, so our galaxy has 4×10^33 kg of gold.

The gold bar isn't in a large empty room. It's in a room filled with piles of gold, each more massive than the planet Mercury, for every person on Earth. Amongst those piles, would that single bar still hold value to you?

Edit: Formatting engine didn't like using * for multiplication

The base of that goes back to a very simple realization: On a cosmic scale nothing that we do is of great importance. This planet likely is not as special as we would like to think it is and we are not as special as we like to think we are. We are to the universe as a single bacterium is to us.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0

Is a nice recap of just how vast the universe really is and how utterly insignificant we are within it, in spite of all we're figured out and have achieved collectively. It certainly humbles me.

I can just as easily extract the opposite conclusion, and say that we must be incredibly special if it took an universe that big to create us. And it's as good as a conclusion until we discover if intelligent is common or not.

I'd side with it not being a good argument.

Another humbling aspect is how fragile we are. Even today, there is a number of unpredictable cosmic events outside our control that can destroy humanity and life on Earth very quickly. And every one of us is just a "meat bag" that doesn't know whether it will wake up tomorrow. I find these realizations humbling. Some people get depressed by these thought but they make me appreciate life even more.

"We're significantly insignificant while also being insignificantly significant."

There's no such thing as importance independent of sentient minds. Importance is what we find important; or to put it another way, whatever we find important - is.

I think that it's not about an argument, its a mental simulation and chemical effect. If you hold in your head the feeling of owning your body completely, for a moment, then start to imagine zooming out to a wider perspective, slowly, like a camera you see the whole world then the solar system, etc. As you scale outwards there is usually a noticeable chemical reaction in your brain and body. You literally feel smaller. My guess is you are triggering a predator-is-bigger-than-me reaction in your brain.

>I never really understood how the 'the universe is vast' argument is humbling.

The idea that if there are millions of planets like ours, containing billions and billions of beings like us, on average your "problems" could be a lot worse. I find it humbling imagining the epicness of some of the struggles going on elsewhere in the universe.

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