For all our conceits about being the center of the universe, we live in a routine planet of a humdrum star stuck away in an obscure corner ... on an unexceptional galaxy which is one of about 100 billion galaxies. ... That is the fundamental fact of the universe we inhabit, and it is very good for us to understand that.
-Carl Sagan, astronomer and writer (1934-1996)
I read this quote in today’s AWAD, and it made me realize that I’m not sure I’ve ever understood the point of this extreme Copernican viewpoint. As far I am aware – Copernicus himself asserted no such truth – he merely showed that the Earth revolves around the Sun and not vice-versa. The only point, I feel, is to use this metaphor to imply that we are not special.
But we are ! In spite of more than a century of searching, not including SETI – we have not found trace of intelligence anywhere in the universe. And there’s the Fermi paradox to boot. And Earth is by no means a “routine planet” - we don’t even have conclusive evidence of life anywhere else, leave along intelligence. All that we have Sagan’s assertion that intelligence must exist – based on speculation and an “that’s the way the universe ought to be” attitude. But Sagan probably knew, better than most of us, that the universe does not really care of how we think it ought to be. And if there is no intelligence or sentient life anywhere else in the universe, it quickly becomes a mighty boring place. After all, if you’ve seen one quasar you’ve seen them all.
And from the subjective viewpoint – we are the center of *our* universe. The ultimate question in cosmology is asking why do *we* exist. If we were not to exist, the universe would be moot.
This statement is about as pointless as the kind that claim we are just apes. No, we are not simply another kind of ape1! We share a common ancestor with apes (i.e. modern apes are our cousins, *not* our ancestors) – but we are so much more than apes, in every way that matters to us. We are as much an ape as an ape is a dog. That 1% DNA difference is not trivial. Increasing the brain-size of an ape will not produce human being –our brains are qualitatively different2 – and remarkably so.
So, please can we acknowledge that we are different and special and stop with this fake and disingenuous humility.
1 Jonathan Marks, What It Really Means To Be 99% Chimpanzee, Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association , Nov 1999 http://personal.uncc.edu/jmarks/interests/aaa/marksaaa99.htm
2 D.Premack, Human and animal cognition: continuity and discontinuity. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, 2007, 104, 13861-13867 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1955772/
0 comments:
Post a Comment