2487: The Utter Insignificance of You and Everything You’ve Ever Known

I had the great pleasure of seeing Professor Brian Cox speak at the Southampton Guildhall this evening. This isn’t the sort of thing I’d generally go along to, but a friend had an extra ticket and said he would rather it went to someone in his immediate circle of friends rather than his backup list, so along I went.

I won’t pretend to have followed much (or possibly any) of the lecture as a whole, but it was an interesting and inspiring experience to be in the presence of someone so obviously knowledgeable and passionate about their work. Cox’s lecture was punctuated by occasional interruptions from his podcast partner Robin Ince, perfectly timed so that just when the sciencey bits were getting a bit heavy, he was there to inject some much-needed levity into proceedings with impressions of his colleague and Brian Blessed, among others.

Cox’s lecture was on cosmology and the study of the universe, with particular emphasis on theories surrounding the Big Bang, the theoretical period of “inflation” which took place before the Big Bang that we’ve historically regarded as the beginning of everything — “the day with no yesterday” — and how modern theories suggest that what we understand as “our universe” might actually just be one of a potentially infinite number of “bubbles” out there in the wider context of perpetually inflating space.

I won’t bore you with the science or the mathematics — largely because I didn’t understand a lot of it and can’t accurately remember the rest of it — but I will share with you one thing that I found particularly impactful in his whole lecture.

My friend Emily told me as we were going in to the lecture that she was almost hoping for a reminder of how utterly insignificant we and everyone around us actually are in the grand scheme of things; how unimportant our little blue dot is to the universe as a whole, and how little things like, say, Donald Trump being elected president of the United States really matter when you actually think about it in the context of the whole universe.

Cox delivered on this front, acknowledging that while we are a seeming anomaly — the Fermi paradox suggesting that if there were other advanced civilisations out there, we should almost certainly have seen some sort of evidence of them by now — we are ultimately insignificant to the universe as a whole. Just one pale blue dot, as Sagan put it, a “very small stage in a vast cosmic arena”.

And yet both Sagan’s quote and Cox’s lecture continued beyond this point: apparent insignificance can also be interpreted as uniqueness that should be cherished and treasured. We may be just one pale blue dot, but it’s our blue dot, a home we’ve made our own, for better or worse. And each of us may just be one individual taking up a tiny fraction of a tiny pale blue dot, but there is no-one in the world exactly like us, there never has been and there never will be. All of us, every single one of us, is precious and important in our own way, because there’ll never be anyone quite like us ever again.

“Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot,” said Sagan in his famous 1994 speech. “Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light… to my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”