We Provide Our Own Meaning

By: Lawrence Krauss, Theoretical Physicist / Cosmologist

The picture that science presents to us is, in some sense, uncomfortable. We evolved as human beings, a few million years ago on the Savana in Africa, and we evolved to escape tigers, or lions, or predators, and so what makes common sense to us is the world on our scale. You know, how to throw a rock or a spear, or where to find a cave, and we didn’t evolve to understand quantum mechanics.

Therefore it’s not too surprising that on scales vastly different than the kind of experience we had as we were evolving as a species that nature seems strange, and sometimes almost unfathomable, certainly violates our common sense, or sense of what is common sense and what is intuition. But, as I like to say, the universe doesn’t care about our common sense. We have to force our ideas to conform with the evidence of reality rather than the other way around; and if reality seems strange, that’s okay. In fact, that’s what makes science so wonderful. It expands our minds because it forces us to accept possibilities which, in advance, we may never have thought was possible.

I’ve said that scientists love mysteries and we do. That’s the reason I’m a scientist, because it’s the puzzles of the universe that make it so exciting. Now, it is true that we want to solve- resolve those and solve those puzzles, that’s part of the fun of doing science, it's solving puzzles basically. But each time we do, new questions arise. And I think for many of us, just as in our lives, the searching is often much more profound than the finding. It’s the searching for answers through life, in some sense, that make life worth living. If we had all the answers we could just sit back and stare at our navels.

And, I think, what makes the search so exciting is that the answers are so surprising. What we’ve learned is that we are more insignificant than we ever could have imagined. You could get rid of us, and all the galaxies and everything we see in the universe would be largely the same. So we're insignificant on a scale that Copernicus never would have imagined.

And in addition, it turns out the future is miserable. So the two little lessons that I like to say, I like to give, is first we’re insignificant, and second the future is miserable. Now, you might think that should depress you, but I would argue. That in fact, it should embolden you, and provide you a different kind of consolation.

Because if the universe doesn’t care about us, and if we’re an accident in a remote corner of the universe, in some sense, it makes us more precious. The meaning in our lives is provided by us. We provide our own meaning; and we are here by accidents, and we should enjoy our brief moment in the sun. We should make the most of our brief moment in the sun because this is all we have.

And even if we are so rare that were the only life forms in the universe which I doubt. That makes us, in some sense, while we’re more insignificant, we’re more special. We are endowed with a consciousness that can ask questions about the beginning of the universe and learn about the universe on its largest scales; and experience everything that it means to be human: music, arts, literature, and science.

So for me, it should be spiritually uplifting that we’re not created with a purpose by someone who takes care of us like a mannequin or with strings determining everything. We determine our future and that makes our future more precious.

The Pale Blue Dot

By: Carl Sagan (first published in 1994)

Inspired by an image taken, at Sagan's suggestion, by Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990. As the spacecraft left our planetary neighborhood for the fringes of the solar system.

(This next image is the Earth, a dot, as seen from Cassini Spacecraft, which was in orbit around Saturn, on July 19, 2013.)

Photo by NASA

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different.

Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, 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. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. 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 with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Man in His Arrogance Thinks Himself A Great Work

By: Carl Sagan (first aired September 28, 1980)

'See that star?”

"You mean that bright red one?” his daughter asks in return.

"Yes, it might not be there anymore. It might be gone by now, exploded or something. Its light is still crossing space, just reaching our eyes now. But we don't see it as it is, we see it as it was.”

Many people experience a stirring sense of wonder when they first confront this simple truth. Why? why should it be so compelling. The immense distances to the stars and the galaxies mean that we see everything in the past. Some as they were before the earth came to be. Telescopes are time machines.

Long ago, when an early galaxy began to pour light out into the surrounding darkness no witness could have known, that billions of years later, some remote clumps of rock and metal, ice and organic molecules would fall together to make a place called Earth. And surely nobody could have imagined that life would arise, and thinking beings evolve who would one day capture a fraction of that galactic light and would try to puzzle out what had sent it on its way.

We can recognize here a shortcoming, in some circumstances serious, in our ability to understand the world. Characteristically, willie-nilly we seem compelled to project our own nature onto nature. Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work worthy of the interposition of a deity. Darwin wrote telegraphically in his notebook, more humble, and I think truer to consider himself created from animals.

We're johnny-come-lately's; we live in the cosmic boondocks; we emerged from microbes in muck; Apes are our cousins; our thoughts and feelings are not fully under our own control, there may be much smarter and very different beings elsewhere, and on top of all that we're making a mess of our planet and becoming a danger to ourselves.

The trapdoor beneath our feet swings open. We find ourselves in bottomless free fall. We are lost in a great darkness and there is nobody to send out a search party. Given so harsh a reality, of course we are tempted to shut our eyes and pretend that we are safe and snug at home, that the fall is only a bad dream. If it takes a little myth and ritual to get us through a night that seems endless, who among us cannot sympathize and understand?

We long to be here for a purpose. Even though, despite much self-deception, none is evident. The significance of our lives and our fragile planet is then determined only by our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life's meaning. We long for a parent to care for us, to forgive us of our errors, to save us from our childish mistakes. But knowledge is preferable to ignorance. Better, by far, to embrace the harsh truth than a reassuring fable.

Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop. Our common sense intuitions can be mistaken. Our preferences don't count. We do not live in a privileged reference frame. If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal.