An e-mail was sent to me a while ago that I’d like to share with you, the beloved intelligent reader (for my blog has no other kind!) It ties in very nicely with something I wrote recently.
Obviously the author intended it as more of a “have a nice day” chain e-mail, which is fair enough. But my point is more philosophical: look at the sheer size of the universe in which humanity is, it is not even fair to say, a mere grain of sand on a beach. For all intents and purposes, we are totally alone. Check the PDF out (you’ll need Adobe Acrobat reader) and then think about this: Antares is a supergiant star. But the Milky Way contains hundreds of billions of stars. And there are billions of galaxies; so many in fact, that if you could zoom out far enough you would see “clouds” of galaxies. Such a thought is virtually incomprehensible for our small primate minds that evolved to survive in the middle of Africa.
I guess that’s another good point that can be gleaned from a simple size comparison like the above: some believe that it was all, everything(!), designed for us! In the days when the “known earth” was a continent or two you could forgive such ignorance. But in this day and age, where the edge of the observable universe is 46.5 billion light-years away, the idea that someone or something made all of this specially for a puny group of lifeforms on a tiny planet, orbiting an average star, one of billions in an ordinary galaxy, which itself is such a speck of dust amidst them all, makes talk of an anthropocentric universe laughable.
e v a n e s c e n t 