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Comment by de6u99er | Hacker News Reader

Images like this remind how irrelevant we are in the cosmos. The rest of the universe won't even notice when we are gone.

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Man, wouldn't it suck if it turned out the only place in that vastness that supported sentient life was Earth and we fucked it up?

Definitely. But it won't matter.

It wouldn’t, because then there wouldn’t be anyone who it would suck for.

It could suck plenty for our descendants, while any remained.

Well, life also sucked plenty for our ancestors (including the dinosaurs being hit by an asteroid and whatnot), so from a big-picture perspective that isn’t a very convincing objection. I guess you could construct scenarios where we fuck it up in a way that causes more suckage for sentient beings in the future then there was ever in the past, but that’d be moving goalposts.

Chicxulub was a minor hiccup as disasters go. Wholesale ecocide, down to the mantle, is on the table.

It is wholly possible that life was well on its way before the strike that produced the moon re-melted the whole planet down to constituent elements.

It would be sucking in a metaphorical vacuum.

Ugh. Apologies :)

So much more important that we make the best of the time we have, for each other, while we can make a difference for ourselves.

Yes, but we need to change how we treat each other.

I for once don't care about Nato or trading oil in USD, but nevertheless the US government thinks it has the right to make everybodys life miserable if people don't care enough about those things. Same goes for the trade war between China and the US. Nobody except some corporations and greedy politicians really care.

This shit needs to end. It is literally killing us all. And we must stop buying and producing crap we don't really need.

This is an emergent quality of ourselves (or a life) and not a coincidence or few personal fads. It will continue to be until we re-engineer ourselves and/or create a substituting species.

It might be emergent, natural even, but we are better than this. A lot of balls have been continuously dropped by a lot of people. Small changes at the right time could've ended up with humanity prospering in the 21st century. Now between hypercapitalism, religious extremism and runaway climate change the James Webb telescope is one of the few things that still let's me keep faith in humanity.

This makes me imagine a little part of the Mandelbrot set saying it is irrelevant because it's such a small part of the whole. But in truth, the Mandelbrot set is not the Mandelbrot set without every part of it (the math would be off). We are the universe. As Alan Watts said: "an apple tree apples, and the universe peoples".

You don't know that. Sure there's lots of worlds there and even more space between them, but size and scale isn't everything. Meaning may be unevenly distributed. Universe could be fractal. Those could be minor variations of the same world, rather than many different ones. They could have laws of physics distinct from ours for all we know.

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