This is cool as heck, and now I’m going to go back to my computer job and try not to think about how ridiculously tiny and fragile my little life is.
Importance is a local concept, and it can be quite relevant locally.
I never understood this `we're but a speck`. Do you know of many other specks with life ?
Now imagine instead- If the Universe is conscious, instead of that being one big conscious observer looking down; perhaps instead we (each of us humans, animals etc as life act as living observers) living our first person subjective perspectives like a multitude of cameras for the universe to experience itself on Earth
And we can imagine that happening at all scales simultaneously across all living worlds and other forms of mind throughout the cosmos, ie consciousness as first person observers might be as innumerable as the number of stars in the sky, and these living perspectives or subjective cameras are dotting the whole immensity all unify to provide the universe with an eye on itself in infinite perspective ..
Doesn't that make up for humans being puny tiny lifespans - we (our insignificant bodies) are just disposable cameras for consciousness
It makes absolutely no sense and at the same time makes about as much sense as anything.
- Bill HicksI've been trying to adopt this mindset myself in recent years.
It's helped me "cope" and accept certain things about my life. It's not how my mind developed initially, so it doesn't come naturally to me and I sometimes fall into old habits. So, sometimes I need to remind myself to practice it.
Anyway, thanks for the reminder! :)
So, I conclude, since our biology is tuned for that -- it's better to keep worrying and enduring, and we will be happier. There must be a contradiction somewhere though.
Yes, nobody said anything that you had to be a couch potato stoner person. We don't live in the world of Star Trek Federation, so we all have to do whatever job we do so we can afford the basic things we need. However, we get paid for 40 hours, so I'm not giving them 45, 50, or 60 hours. I'm not working 5 days a week, and then donating a 6th. My time is my time. I give you what you pay me for, and then I take my time back. My favorite quote from a coworker when I was very young, "I give them what they give me, 40 hours."
During my time, I can do whatever I want to do while not stressing about the J.O.B. Whatever I left on Friday will still be there on Monday. I'm not a doctor, so nobody is going to die because I didn't check my email or slack. The rat race ended for me a long time ago
Or my income for that matter -- just make 100% sure paid all the salaries, taxes, insurances -- if I come up negative, well, sucks to be me then, dude.
- Carl Sagan in Pale Blue Dot
Our species was born on this rock and it will perish on this rock. And it will have no impact on anything even within our star system, let alone this galaxy.
The sentiment that the universe is our home is a nice one, but it’s not true at all. Existential crisis is the only reasonable thing here, at least from the lens of human existence.
That being said... I'd love to if I were terminally ill yet capable enough to understand what was happening -- to be yeeted into a super super massive blackhole that was not feeding such that I would not be torn to shreds or vaporized by the accretion disk and ultimately understand what lies at the center of my now time horizon...
> This is cool as heck, and now I’m going to go back to my computer job and try not to think about how ridiculously tiny and fragile my little life is.
There could be an alternative take here: we really lucked out that life as we know it exists at all. So we kinda won the lottery already.
Now there are fuck tonne of filters we passed so far, may very well fail on next one (probably self-destruction), and we are lucky with so far stable good place for life. Given there are billions of trillions of planets, no way we are on the very top of that ridiculous number.
We may be one of the earlier civs but no way we are first neither. But how we would recognize a civilization that has say just a 1 billion years headstart? Dyson spheres are for fools ignoring dark forest stuff, not something really smart cautious beings would do. Matter holds enormous amount of energy, and there are other ways to extract it in a less obvious ways, ie black holes or probably some other ways.
Look at it this way - we are maybe building a small baby steps for one of big civilizations of universe. Still extremely primitive in all possible ways while arrogant enough to mostly not see it, but there is potential for true greatness. Otherwise we will perish, I dont see anything in between.
Accept your fragility, be grateful for what the universe gives you, be humble about your limits and faults, and spread happiness, joy and love to the other fragile, limited beings around you. There’s your cure for existential dread.
Afraid of the impending collision of Andromeda with the Milky Way? Not to worry. Life as we know will be gone by then. Huge processes like galactic mergers are "in slow motion" relative to our every day processes due to light speed bounds. The time they take to occur is enormous because the distances involved are enormous. In a cool way, the presence and influence of an astronomical object is just as insignificant to our processes as the presence and influence of one electron, and for the same reason: enormous difference of scale. The big stuff is no more scary than the small stuff.
"It’s been publicly confirmed that our galaxy is within the open maw of a massive galaxy-eating beast. The beast can’t move faster than light, so it’ll take hundreds of millions of years for it to finally bite down. This is something that humans will just have to live with"
(I don't think you can actually tell a good story with this, it's a background detail you would put in some other story).
Naw!!! We are rare, so rare that we might be unique in our solar system, galaxy! We don't look little and instead the reason for the whole show! "Where is everybody?" -- easy, we're it. Soooo, what's the reason??
The whole event is likely to be an exponential, and the last, ah, after Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, Schrödinger, biochemistry, ..., computers, we look like we're at -- a standard for exponential growth, e.g., the question P v NP -- the unique big turn up out of the atmosphere ... blowing past Andromeda at 0.5 c and accelerating.