We live, Douglas Adams once observed, in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy where our utterly insignificant little blue-green planet orbits a small unregarded yellow sun. As a summation of the peripheral importance of Homo sapiens, these words from The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy could not be bettered. As Adams makes clear, our planet is the Croydon of the cosmos, an unexalted, rather tedious interplanetary suburb.
This notion is more seriously known as the principle of mediocrity and it stems directly from the ideas of Copernicus, who replaced our old self-important, geocentric view of the universe with one that makes our planet a mere adjunct of the sun. Thus humanitys place in the heavens was displaced, making us neither central nor special.
Continue reading...