I have nothing but admiration for people who can study space and not melt down into a permanent existential crisis.
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.
It's actually one of the things I enjoy about it. It is a reminder of just how unimportant we actually are. All of the rat races and stress and worry we endure and/or put ourselves through is ultimately for nothing. Since it doesn't matter anyways, might as well live it in the most free and self fulfilling way one can.
Whether something is important or unimportant is something that only humans, and possibly some animals, and possibly some AI, can reason about. Most of the universe does not reason, and does not think that things are important or not.
Importance is a local concept, and it can be quite relevant locally.
https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
I agree so much. For all we know yet, there's nothing out there. Nothing conscious or even sentient. So our lives and the life on earth are infinitely important.
I never understood this `we're but a speck`. Do you know of many other specks with life ?
The universe has been around long before humans existed, and it will be here long after humans no longer exist. If humans are the best the universe has, then that's just a sad bit of commentary. Not understanding the but a speck is just denying fact. We may be the only speck with life, but we're just a speck with life. If the life on this speck was able to hop from speck to speck and utilize all of the universe, we could have a conversation.
Consider this: In the movie, the Truman show: Truman is living on a giant hollwyood soundtage with thousands upon thousands of cameras following his every move allowing the TV Audience to subjectively experience his life - his life is writ large on the minds of billions of people- but it is only one 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
How does existence of life outside Earth (or lack of it) change importance of our life in the grand scheme of things?
It's important because we seem to be the only (visible) thing that can scheme.
I'm not so sure. I've watched my cat sit there and scheme. Sure, it may be not much further than "what's this thing do if I bat it with my paw?" or "what's that taste like?" or "can I train my hooman to refill the food dish if I incessantly whine and be as annoying as possible?", but they are definitely thinking about it. Then again, I've watched my cat stare off into space as if he's pondering the mysteries of the universe, but he's probably just trying to figure out the best route he could take to get that squirrel if he could just get outside.
Or perhaps the universe is overflowing with minds we haven't found yet!
I am sometimes tickled and intrigued by the (very New Agey woo-flavored) idea that consciousness is the fundamental building block of reality, not matter.
It makes absolutely no sense and at the same time makes about as much sense as anything.
“… we are the universe, experiencing itself subjectively.”
Fine. s/important/significant/ or any other word you feel befitting.
"Momentary masters of a fraction of a dot"
- Carl Sagan in Pale Blue Dot
This attitude is referred to as optimistic nihilism, if anyone wants to look more into it.
I'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! :)
Yep. Plus, with the Rubin telescope online, we have a pretty high resolution and high frequency scan of the solar system where we could detect anything that could hurt us pretty far out, probably even wandering black holes.
Like, if nothing really matters on a universal scale, then you're free to define your own meaning without all the pressure
I tried to do that, and ended up sitting at home watching TV eating chips. At the end of the day I felt way more tense and unsatisfied than whole day of working and worrying. Even "enduring" a jog or a gym gives more satisfaction.
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.
> 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
I wish. I'm a business owner, no one gives a thought about my hours.
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.
“Some people become depressed at the scale of the universe, because it makes them feel insignificant. Other people are relieved to feel insignificant, which is even worse. But, in any case, those are mistakes. Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow. Or a herd of cows. The universe is not there to overwhelm us; it is our home, and our resource. The bigger the better.” David Deutsch
Then there's Trin Tragula's wife telling him to get "sense of proportion", leading to the development of the Total Perspective Vortex.
Labeling the universe as a resource for humans is hubris in the original ancient Greek meaning of the word..
The resources are there in crazy abundance. But we will never get to them, the scale of the universe is unfathomable. Even at the speed of causality, human lifespans are simply not a match to the distances involved. And that implies we can somehow accelerate any real amounts of mass to those kinds of speeds which is already a non starter.
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.
It kind of became a daily obsession of mine recently, the question being - how can we NOT study space and what's around us as almost the main thing? I kind of regret not going that direction when I was in my 20s.
I thought this too when I was younger. After living in the US over the last decade and observing… things, I would rather we focus on curing all personality disorders as the main thing. _Then_ we can go to space. :)
Another fun one. The Cosmic Calendar. [1] Imagine breaking down the history of the universe into a single year. It really offers some amazing perspective on the length of life, and what it means.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ln8UwPd1z20
Same. The scales that the universe operates on (distance, time, mass/energy, etc) make the human experience so infinitely small as to be nearly nothing. Yet, here we are. Pondering our own existence.
The sheer unlikelihood of my individual self being alive and conscious in the present moment really freaks me out sometimes.
Same. As soon as I really let myself consider how vast, empty, desolate empty space is and then imagine myself floating in it with no reference and unable to tell if I am up or down or going anywhere ... I get all sorts of dread.
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...
You're in good company with the atoms in your fingernail, I'm sure :)
Tidal forces would still shred and disfigured you horrifically well before the event horizon. The term is literally 'spagghetification'
Depends on the size of the black hole. Small black holes, yes you get shredded. Supermassive black holes maybe not. Of course the rotation of the black hole may have a different idea about that.
exactly. I am thinking hyper massive -- super duper massive ones where I could ostensibly be falling for minutes? days? towards the end of time... what bliss
I wonder if it's similar to how mefical doctors feel about their jobs. It's gotta turn into a bit of a routine, otherwise they will just spend time in that existential crisis and not get anything done.
> 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.
Some form of life is probably quite common given the scale of entire universe, amino acids could be found in space for example coming from pre-solar times. If you understand what I just wrote you have to accept above as fact.
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.
If something that is true scares you, you should think about it and look at it, in little bits, until it doesn’t.
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.
In some sense, our small size with respect to astronomical-scale processes does not make us all that fragile, because we are also very short-lived with respect to these things.
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.
Reminds me of my favorite writing prompt that was so good it was it's own story too:
"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).
That’s already more or less the reality of our situation. If nothing else happens, the sun will begin to die in 5 billion years and eat us in the process. Granted it’s a larger timescale, 5 thousand of millions of years instead of hundreds of millions.
I love how this comment turned a good old physics to a thread about existential reflections - folks debating the meaning of life. :D
Conversely, people who study microscopic phenomena might end up with gigantic inflated egos. "Lord of the atoms"
It’s our job. It’s mundane. It’s only cool again when you step back for these kind of publications, or when you go to a conference and you see a bunch of adjacent (and importantly, completed) work. 99% of the time we look at a screen / piece of paper / whiteboard.
Completely orthogonal to the feeling of small/unimportant, my mind gets rolled up in thinking about how much activity is going on that's not being experienced by anyone. Think of the raging storms on venus' surface or the ice volcanoes on Io, or the methane raining down on Titan..all that stuff is happening right now, as we speak. But nobody is there to feel it or hear it or see it. And that's our own solar system. Imagine how many things are happening galaxy wide or beyond. So much stuff is happening right now!! This boggles my mind because it doesn't rely on any speculation about alien life. It's almost certainly a fact, unless we're in a simulation and the rest of the universe is in the "clipping plane" of the scene.
> ridiculously tiny and fragile my little life
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.
But hey, maybe that's the beauty of it