Why humanity is a cosmic tale of despair

and hope
On a cosmic scale, our existence seems insignificant and inconsequential. But from another
perspective, humans are completely remarkable.
In 1977, NASA's Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft began their pioneering journey across the Solar
System to visit the giant outer planets. Now, the Voyagers are hurtling through unexplored
territory on their road trip beyond our Solar System. Along the way, they are measuring the
interstellar medium, the mysterious environment between stars that is filled with the debris
from long-dead stars. Voyager 1 became the most distant spacecraft from Earth in 1998, and
no other spacecraft launched, to date, has a chance of catching it.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon
Key Takeaways
 On one hand, human beings are alive for only a blip in cosmic history, confined to a
tiny planet around an unremarkable star within a modest, run-of-the-mill galaxy
within our vast cosmos.
 But from another perspective, we’re a collection of octillions of atoms, bound
together in a living, breathing, sentient, conscious configuration, allowing us to
conceptualize even realms that never were.
 Depending on how we look at it, humanity can be a cosmic tale of despair or one of
tremendous hope. The choice of perspective is up to each of us.
Ethan Siegel

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On the scale of the Universe, humanity isn’t even a speck.

This vertically oriented logarithmic map of the Universe spans nearly 20 orders of magnitude,
taking us from planet Earth to the edge of the visible Universe. Each large “mark” on the
right side’s scale bar corresponds to an increase in distance scales by a factor of 10.
Credit: Pablo Carlos Budassi
We’re each just a tiny, minuscule fraction of our own planet: Earth.
Apollo 8 astronauts were the first humans to reach great enough distances from our planet to
be able to view the entire Earth at once. Here, the closest (left) and farthest (right) images of
the Earth are shown as acquired with the same Hasselblad camera. Except for the three
humans on board at the moment, all of humanity is confined to the pale, blue dot on the right.
Credit: NASA/Apollo 8/Johnson Space Center
It would take nearly an Avogadro’s number of humans to equal Earth’s mass.

Under ideal dark sky conditions, the unaided human eye can see up to 6000 stars at once, and
up to 9000 stars total if they could see the full sky at once, unblocked by the Earth itself.
Compared to the Earth, at ~6 septillion kilograms, all 8+ billion humans, combined, are
barely a drop in the bucket of planet Earth’s total mass.
Credit: callisto / Adobe Stock
Earth is just one modest planet orbiting our Sun: one of ~400 billion stars within the Milky
Way.
This color-coded map shows the heavy element abundances of more than 6 million stars
within the Milky Way. Stars in red, orange, and yellow are all rich enough in heavy elements
that they should have planets; green and cyan-coded stars should only rarely have planets,
and stars coded blue or violet should have absolutely no planets at all around them. Note that
the central plane of the galactic disk, extending all the way into the galactic core, has the
potential for habitable, rocky planets. This map shows fewer than 0.01% of the stars within
our galaxy.
Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
Our Milky Way is second to Andromeda within our Local Group of galaxies.
Our Local Group of galaxies is dominated by Andromeda and the Milky Way, but there’s no
denying that Andromeda is the biggest, the Milky Way is #2, Triangulum is #3, and the LMC
is #4. At just 165,000 light-years away, it’s by far the closest among the top 10+ galaxies to
our own, and as such it takes up the largest angular span on the sky of all galaxies outside the
Milky Way. There are over 100 galaxies within the Local Group, but Andromeda and the
Milky Way contain most of the stars, as well as most of the mass.
Credit: Andrew Z. Colvin/Wikimedia Commons
Beyond the Local Group, much larger, richer, more massive groups and clusters of galaxies
abound.
This 2014 composite Hubble image of the colliding galaxy cluster, El Gordo, showcases the
most massive galaxy cluster ever discovered from the first half of our cosmic history. Known
officially as ACT-CLJ0102-4915, it is the largest, hottest, and X-ray brightest galaxy cluster
ever discovered in the distant Universe, containing many thousands of times the mass of the
Local Group.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, RELICS
Altogether, trillions of galaxies are strewn throughout the observable, expanding Universe.
In a Universe that comes to be dominated by dark energy, there are four regions: one where
everything within it is reachable, communicable and observable, one where everything is
observable but unreachable and incommunicable, one where things will someday be
observable but aren’t today, and one where things will never be observable. The labeled
numbers correspond to our consensus cosmology as of 2024, with boundaries of 18 billion
light-years, 46 billion light-years, and 61 billion light-years separating the four regions. On
scales of ~10 billion light-years and larger, the Universe is almost perfectly uniform.
Credit: Andrew Z. Colvin/Wikimedia Commons; annotations: E. Siegel
Owing to dark energy, news of humanity’s greatest exploits will never reach practically all of
them.
This 1997 artwork shows the planets of the Solar System and the relative trajectories of the
first four spacecraft on a course to exit the Solar System. In 1998, Voyager 1 overtook
Pioneer 10, and in 2012, it passed the heliopause and entered interstellar space. Voyager 2
entered interstellar space in 2018 and recently surpassed Pioneer 10’s distance in 2023;
therefore we strongly suspect that Pioneer 10 is in interstellar space as well, but it is no longer
functional, so we cannot make the critical measurements necessary to make such a
determination.
Credit: NASA
And yet, from a different perspective, we truly are remarkable.
30 protoplanetary disks, or proplyds, as imaged by Hubble in the Orion Nebula. Hubble is a
brilliant resource for identifying these disk signatures in the optical, but has little power to
probe the internal features of these disks, even from its location in space. Radio telescopes
like ALMA, as well as infrared observatories like the VLT and JWST, are far superior at that
aspect of measuring these details. Planets largely arise from protoplanetary disks, but
different mechanisms might be responsible for different planetary formation scenarios at
various distances from the parent star.
Credit: NASA/ESA and L. Ricci (ESO)
We inhabit a rocky world, formed from ancient stellar ashes.
This conceptual image shows meteoroids delivering all five of the nucleobases found in life
processes to ancient Earth. All the nucleobases used in life processes, A, C, G, T, and U, have
now been found in meteorites, along with more than 80 species of amino acids as well: far
more than the 22 that are known to be used in life processes here on Earth. Similar processes
no doubt happened in stellar systems all throughout most galaxies over the course of cosmic
history, bringing the raw ingredients for life to all sorts of young worlds.
Credit: NASA Goddard/CI Lab/Dan Gallagher
For some ~4 billion years, continents and oceans have persisted on Earth’s surface.
This aerial view of Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park is one of the most
iconic hydrothermal features on land in the world. The colors are due to the various
organisms living under these extreme conditions, and depend on the amount of sunlight that
reaches the various parts of the springs. Hydrothermal fields like this are some of the best
candidate locations for life to have first arisen on a young Earth, and may be home to
abundant life on a variety of exoplanets.
Credit: Jim Peaco/National Parks Service
Life emerged early on Earth, surviving and thriving ever since.
This tunneling electron microscope image shows a few specimens of the cyanobacterium
species Prochlorococcus marinus. Each one of these organisms is only about half a micron in
size, but all together, cyanobacteria are largely responsible for the creation of Earth’s oxygen:
both initially and largely even during the present day. Like all bacteria, their lifetime is much,
much shorter than the lifetime of a human, and while cyanobacteria are relatively primitive
organisms, they “only” date back to no earlier than 2.7 billion years ago, whereas life on
Earth goes back more than a billion years, at least, farther than this.
Credit: Luke Thompson from Chisholm Lab and Nikki Watson from Whitehead, MIT
Multicellularity, sexual reproduction, complexity, and high levels of differentiation
eventually arose.
A fascinating class of organisms known as siphonophores is itself a collection of small
animals working together to form a larger colonial organism. These lifeforms straddle the
boundary between a multicellular organism and a colonial organism. The ability of single life
forms to combine features such as multicellularity, complexity, and high levels of
differentiation have led to the explosive diversity of life that has abounded on Earth for the
past ~500 million years.
Credit: Kevin Raskoff, Cal State Monterey; Crisco 1492/Wikimedia Commons
Within ourselves, an organ powers “thought” like no other: the human brain.
This drawing shows a variety of human, monkey, and ape skulls from a variety of extant
species. The older apes have smaller cranial capacities and smaller brains than humans, but
stronger jaws, on average, by far. In order for large brains to develop, the jawbones needed to
weaken: a loss-of-function adaptation. Modern humans have the greatest encephalization
quotient of all known animals, followed by dolphins and then, more distantly, chimpanzees
and some birds.
Credit: schinz de Visser, 1845/public domain
After 13.8 billion years, civilized humans finally comprehend our Universe.
This colorful view of the Pillars of Creation leverages a large suite of JWST data, showcasing
the tenuous and transient nature of these neutral gas features. Stars form within nebulae such
as this, but once the gas evaporates, all they can do is burn through their fuel until they die.
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Alyssa Pagan
(STScI), Anton M. Koekemoer (STScI)
Humanity’s imagination, creativity, and intelligence remains unmatched.

This museum exhibit showcases Deep Blue: the computer that first defeated a reigning world
chess champion in a chess match, defeating Garry Kasparov. Since Ruslan Ponomariov
defeated Fritz in 2005, no human has defeated a top performing computer in a game of
classical chess.
Credit: Pedro Villavicencio/flickr
Perhaps, someday, we’ll sufficiently appreciate our achievements.
Although many claim that the advent of quantum computing will lead to a speed-up in
computations across-the-board as compared to classical computers, this is wildly unlikely to
be the case. Instead, the best computers will be hybrids: capable of leveraging the quantum
portion for applications where Quantum Advantage can be achieved, but resorting to classical
computing techniques for all other (i.e., most) applications.
Credit: fotogurmespb/Adobe Stock
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