In Praise of Insignificance

July 14, 2009

I just got back from The Amaz!ing Meeting in Vegas, baby! For those unfamiliar with this particular conference, it's sponsored by the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF), founded by magician, escape artist, and scourge of fake psychics and pseudoscience around the globe James Randi. My pal Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy now heads JREF, and he invited me to be a speaker at TAM this year -- an honor I was happy to accept. This was my first time at TAM, and it is, indeed, an amazing meeting: I had many fascinating, thought-provoking discussions to mull over at my leisure.

Phil did manage to put me on The Most Intimidating Panel on the Planet: it is a surreal -- and humbling -- experience to share a dais with the likes of Bill Prady (executive producer and co-creator of The Big Bang Theory), Mythbusters' Adam Savage, and the incomparable Penn and Teller. But anyone who writes about space science and cosmology is comfortable with insignificance: the greatest among us, after all, is just a tiny speck, or momentary spark, in a roiling vast cosmos that just keeps getting bigger on time scales that dwarf a human lifetime.

Check out this image: see that tiny speck of light, inside the blue circle? That's Earth, as seen from the vantage point of Saturn. We are so much smaller even than that.

Sean reminded me of this famous photo when I told him about one conversation in particular I had after the panel. One young man mentioned that, as an atheist, he always feels at a disadvantage when talking to someone who believes in an afterlife: "Our outlook is just so... bleak in comparison."

I understand where he's coming from: many people think that a world view that doesn't involve an afterlife is a depressing option: why bother trying to be a decent, moral person, the reasoning goes, if there's nothing to look forward to after death?

We were interrupted before I could fully respond to this young man -- conferences are not an ideal format for these sorts of in-depth philosophical discussions  -- but I do not think the lack of an afterlife constitutes a "bleak" outlook at all. What frightens people about their own mortality is the thought of not consciously being, and from that, perhaps, springs the human need to invent belief systems that reassure them that their death will not be the end. That, and an unwillingness to admit to ourselves just how insignificant we really are.

We are born narcissists, almost by definition, since we can only experience the world around us from our own perspective. In that sense, the world revolves around us, and no wonder the prospect of having our consciousness snuffed out unsettles us. But empirically, it's a different story. Before Copernicus, pretty much everyone in Western Europe believed that the Earth was the center of the solar system, with the sun and all the other planets orbiting it, and man, made in the image of God, ruling over the whole shebang.

There was a very good reason people balked when confronted with scientific evidence to the contrary. Accepting Copernicus meant removing man from his place at the top of the cosmological food chain. “The world had scarcely become known as round and complete in itself when it was asked to waive the tremendous privilege of being the center of the universe,” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe later wrote of the implications of a heliocentric universe to 17th century believers. “Never, perhaps, was a greater demand made on mankind.”

Until the modern era of space exploration, however, when the Hubble Space Telescope took this famous image of the Ultra Deep Field:

You learn to redefine vastness when you're married to a cosmologist who thinks about these things for a living. Every speck in that image is an entire galaxy. Each one of those galaxies contains billions of stars, no doubt with countless undiscovered solar systems orbiting them. Somewhere in that vast expanse, floats our tiny blue planet. We are smaller now than ever.

If one embraces an atheist worldview, it necessarily requires embracing, even celebrating, one's insignificance. It's a tall order, I know, when one is accustomed to being the center of attention. The universe existed in all its vastness before I was born, and it will exist and continue to evolve after I am gone. But knowing that doesn't make me feel bleak or hopeless: I find it strangely comforting.

Nor does it make me feel like nothing I do could possibly matter -- quite the opposite: everything we do matters a great deal. That's the great paradox. It makes our short time here on Earth incredibly precious, in which every moment should be savored. I tell my husband I love him every single day, because those days are finite. Fifty years will be gone in an instant from a cosmological perspective. Our choices, our actions, how we choose to behave toward our fellow travelers -- random kindness to strangers -- all of this becomes tremendously important when one embraces insignificance... because this life is all we have.

Photos: (top) The Pale Blue Dot (Voyager mission). (bottom) Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Source: NASA/ESA. Public Domain.

Comments

[William]

Well said as usual.

[Dave Bacon]

Amen.

(That feeling of wonder at the size of the universe almost made me become an astrophysicist. Took all the courses at Berkeley but then got distracted by the other end of the size scale :) )

[Michael T.]

Can you really be so sure, so certain as you say? The atheist world view requires such a certainty and in that sense it is no different than one who subscribes to the gods. If anything should humble us is not so much the size of things but rather how much we really don’t know about the cosmos we inhabit. I can equally see myself as the most significant thing in the universe and derive the same conclusions. It is interesting that the very things your insignificance leads you are those things that stand outside the physical world – love, compassion, humility.

I would suggest a view that is not so “dimensionally” challenged. "Time and space are modes in which we think and not conditions in which we live." – Einstein. And therein lies the wonder and the joy, in the question, because nobody really knows. Take refuge in the uncertainty.

[Jennifer Ouellette]

It depends on how you define the "atheist worldview" -- mine does not assume 100% certainty; I have always embraced uncertainty. But I can be 100% certain as to what I believe, yes, with the understanding that my beliefs continually evolve as new input comes in -- much like science.

Mostly, I think you are reading more into the post than is actually there; we are not in disagreement - and that Einstein quote happens to be one of my favorites. :) The point of the post was not to build an air-tight case for any one belief system, but simply to respond to one young man's concern that the atheist outlook is "bleak." I don't think it is, and I think many like-minded folks will agree with me. That's all.

[Michael T.]

-- much like faith.

[Ignobility]

The universe existed in all its vastness before I was born, and it will exist and continue to evolve after I am gone. But knowing that doesn't make me feel bleak or hopeless: I find it strangely comforting.

I find that comforting, too.

[Peter]

When I look at this picture my thought goes to the miracle of thought itself. How can this empty vastness give birth to mind? The immanent possibility of intelligence must exist throughout this great open field to be present at any point within it, so the hidden possibility of mind has to be woven into the fabric of spacetime from the beginning. Therefore mind is primary, and in a fundamental sense is the "center" of the cosmos, not in some meaningless geometric way, but in the same way a child is the center of a parent's universe.

[tcmJOE]

Is there a video of The Most Intimidating Panel anywhere on the internet?

[Jennifer Ouellette]

I checked with Phil Plait, and he says DVDs will be made available in a month or so... There were some other great panels at the meeting, too.... and a great talk by Adam Savage.

[Randy]

That top photo was the inspiration for a really great section in one of Sagan's books, read here by the man himself. How unlikely that I'd be sent the link to it this morning and then happen upon Jennifer's story that night!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p86BPM1GV8M

[singtasticdavid]

Beautifully expressed. It's exactly what I was trying to say in my song "Stargazing"

STARGAZING

When skies are clear and I can see the stars
I seek a place where I can be alone
Then I am just a fleeting thought in a random universe
This is the greatest feeling that I know

When I lie down beneath the springtime sky
Counting the shooting stars that stream across the night
The ups and downs of this small world are dissolved in children’s dreams
This is the greatest feeling that I know

See how the planets circle in the void
As we perform our petty dances here below
We could burn our Earth to smoke and ash and the Moon would shed no tears
This is the greatest feeling that I know

You can hear it here:

http://www.esnips.com/doc/8446f574-b980-4025-88bd-302941e0f965/Stargazing-by-the-bonfire-2-21-Sep-08

and the sheet music and other resources are available at www.Singtatsic.com

[Metre]

My son once asked me what it would be like when you're dead. I told him that he should know, he's already been dead once. He gave me a quizzical look, so I asked him "Where were you before you were born and what was it like?"

[James]

Michael T doesn't seem to understand the difference between faith and a reasoned, evidence based belief system. Reverence for the cosmos, the attributes of which are known through empiricism, is not the same as an unjustified belief, regardless of how much he wants to make it seem that way. We do not require faith to understand the attributes of the universe. We likewise do not require faith to understand the difference in scale between us and the universe. He attempts to assert that the "atheistic worldview" is based on unwarranted certainty, when it is really just a disbelief in one type of supernatural claim due to lack of evidence. He also states that love, compassion, and humility are outside of the physical world, when there is at the very least a reasonable amount of empirical evidence to suggest that all aspects of our consciousness can be attributed to purely physical functions of our brains. We don't need to appeal to the supernatural to explain these things, although we don't yet fully understand all aspects of our brain. I should probably not have bothered to write a response to his baseless assertions, but I have a hard time leaving flawed logic unchallenged.

[James]

By the way, that was a beautifully written post. I just heard of you through the Bad AStronomy blog and will likely become a regular reader.

[Doug Little]

James, Yeah good luck with that. From my experience it is very difficult concept for the faithful to comprehend.

[TJ]

Some a-theists might benefit from an investigation of Eastern spirituality, which is less based in speculation and more in experience.

The general drift of it is non-theist (e.g. Buddha is not a 'god') and more 'natural philsophy' (e.g. Tao/Zen inner nature, understanding your connectedness to the whole) and nurtures a holistic point-of-view that includes us as a part of a whole. The 'authority' is the self experiencing the world (and humility is a plus).

The uninitiated might start with Alan Watts. That's what got me started (as a freshman science major).

[Brain of Gustav]

Great post. Must also commend you of two great choices of of images, those two may be my all-time favorite astro-photos.

[scibuff]

actually, the "Pale Blue Dot" (image #1) is not taken from "vantage point of Saturn" but by Voyager 1 in 1990 from a distance of 6 billion kilometres (3.7 miles), i.e. 1.5 bil. km past the orbit of Neptune

[Pedro J.]

Should watch youtube videos of Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot Speech. I like this one
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYmDyHC4Oc0

[Blake Stacey]

Yes, the original "Pale Blue Dot" was taken from quite a ways beyond Saturn, and should not be confused with another photograph on a similar theme, the also-famous Cassini image of Earth looking like a lost bit of methane ice in Saturn's rings.

Incidentally, I regret to say I missed the chance to say hello at TAM7. I was only there to attend Rebecca Watson's wedding, so I missed almost all of the conference itself; in retrospect, I realized that you might've been the one talking with Yau-Man Chan in the hallway, but I'd been looking for someone else at the time and completely failed to process the visual input. So it goes.

[PaulJ]

I too came here via BadAstronomy. I wasn't at TAM but I watched your own talk and "The Most Intimidating Panel on the Planet" on the Ustream live video. I say keep up the great work, and thanks for a thought-provoking post.

Incidentally, that Hubble Deep Field image is in an astronomy book I recently purchased. The caption says it was taken with a 100-hour time exposure, and the field of view is equivalent to a grain of salt held at arm's length.

[Scott]

Unfortunately, with the rejection of God, your experience may not be quite as pleasant as simply 'not existing anymore,' but burning in an eternal fire. Believe it or not, I say this with love: what if you're wrong? It truly is your choice!! God = love. God bless you all.

[Jennifer Ouellette]

Um, right. God equals love but condemns people to burn in an eternal fire. That is a very twisted definition of love.

[Shawnotron]

@Scott
What if you are wrong? There are thousands of gods to believe in. What if the one you chose, or more likely were born into, was not the right god? What sort of punishments do the other gods have in store? The idea of trying to scare people into believing in god to avoid "an eternal fire" is silly, unless you want to believe in all of them; and even then most gods have a thing about not accepting any other gods.

If you weren't told as a young child what god to believe in, and you set about to find out for yourself the mysteries of the universe, what do you think the odds are that you would end up believing what you do now? Assume no one introduced you to the bible, or any other religion. Do you think you would rewrite this religious text on your own?

@Ms. Ouelette
I think while speaking about our insignificance in the vastness of the universe it is important to remember that we are sentient life forms. The beauty, and rarity of intelligence in the universe also makes us huge. In the words of Carl Sagan "We are a way for the cosmos to know itself". I don't think there is a better way of expressing our own importance, no matter how small. We, as a species, are a spark of intelligent life in a cold, dark place. If we can survive ourselves and move beyond our tiny home we just may end up being one of the most important parts, one of the rarest and most beautiful things about this vast universe.

[Shawnotron]

P.S. I found your blog through Bad Astronomy. I think you post was great so put me down as another regular reader.