What's important is what we do with the time we have, the ripples we send out into the world. That I think is the true value of our lives
What's the higher importance of the impact left on the world. As per the comment you replied to, it will ultimately be multiplied to zero for each one of us. That the impact may sustain in the 'living' world feels somewhat like a propagating wave, or may be even a Ponzi scheme.
Looking from a grander scheme of things, life on earth is more like moss on a stone. If our solar system gets destroyed today, our nearest galaxy would not experience the slightest thing for over a million years, and an astronomically miniscule change even after.
What's the true importance of the impact left over the world?
That's a useless hypothetical in my book, we have no reason to believe it will be destroyed any time soon and at the rate we're going, assuming we don't destroy ourselves, in another 1000 years we'll have long escaped the potential destruction of our planet or even our solar system. And a thousand years is a very short time "in the grander scheme of things"
I believe the vast majority of people can not really influence events like nuclear wars or any such extinction events so it's pointless to fear or even take into account. So focus on what you can do better, be kinder to your fellow colleagues, neighbours etc. and find problems and try to fix them in a sustainable way. Those things might seem small but they're important too
In my understanding, it's not about the universe as a whole; only about the impact left predominantly on the lives on the earth.
The answer to a lot of these questions seems to be "we don't know". In our age, there's a cultural trend of pretending we know things, or that everything is knowable. Of course, a lot of things aren't knowable. In actual reality, we function while not knowing. Uncertainty is the nature of existence. Practically every decision and experience is loaded with uncertainty. Just as there's no absolute-reference-point (relativity), there's no absolute-knowledge-point, and that's normal.
In this thread, we are making guesses about the purpose of...well, anything. But the reality is we will never know. Or more: We don't even know whether we will ever know.
Not knowing, for me, is comforting. I like the mystery of the universe. There are so many unknowns; many unimaginable, even magical, things are possible. That's the experience a child has. It carries a sense of wonder.
>> Uncertainty is the nature of existence.
This should be seen as an observation about our universe, not as some kind of law. Existence could have been without uncertainty also. Some of the debates during the older times were like that, as the laws of classical physics have been deterministic. Some people still argue that volition / consciousness links to the non-determinism of Quantum Mechanics.
Isn't the reason why we live just steering through the unknown and finding what will happen next. Some do more and some do less to affect it, but people usually just wonder what will happen tommorow, what will be in a year, some what will be in 50 years.
We only want to do something impactful when we want to experience the consequences in the future.
I think the not-knowing is what drives us to live. The same thing why we await death so peacefully. It's really the gate we don't know anything about and we just await to sail in.
That's the question the comment I replied to asked. What will (ultimately) happen next is that it will (may) all get multiplied by zero. What's exactly the point of steering through the unknown and finding what will happen next, when we know what's ultimately the next.
About the nihilism that in the end everything will be destroyed... Well, there is a part in the bible where someone says that there are never something new under the sun. Our struggles are equal the struggles that someone before had. Our problems are equal the problems that someone already had in the past. And everything that we do is irrelevant in the end. Which is false, and for us that have access to studies in history, we can easily see that is false. We have new problems in modern times. Our development also turned us less irrelevant. While still astronomically minuscule, we are not anymore worldly minuscule. We have power to change the climate in the entire planet, we can even destroy most life and even ourselves with our technology, we are beginning to explore other worlds. What is the limit? It is unknown. If in the antique world it was easy to be mistaken thinking that the limits that they had were the definitive human limits, why wouldn't be also easy for us being wrong thinking that the limits that we currently have are definitive? Yes, now we have limits on how could we deal with the destruction of our solar system. But we could in the future learn how to survive this. We do not know and never will know what is the limit for what we can achieve. Therefore, believing that all is senseless because our limits will trap us in a dead end is a not very useful unbased claim. This is a case where Pascal's wager makes sense: if indeed we will be unavoidably trapped in a dead end, you lose nothing thinking that there is a way to avoid this, but if we are able to escape the dead end and extinction, it is deleterious to believe that the extinction is unavoidable.
I found the first para specifically reassuring.