A Second Copernican Revolution

We have all heard this many times: In the middle ages, people believed that the Earth was in the center of the universe and the sun and stars revolved around it.  But Copernicus showed that the Earth revolves around the sun, taking it out of its central position. Now we know that it is 13 billion lights to the furthest stars, there are hundreds of billions - possibly trillions - of galaxies in the universe, and a hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone. Many of these stars have planets, there must be an immense number of planets that can support life, and intelligent life has probably evolved elsewhere. Far from being in the center of the universe, the Earth is the satellite of an undistinguished star at the edge of an undistinguished galaxy. 

But does that really make the Earth unimportant? Humans have consciousness, reason, and the ability to have some understanding of the nature of the universe, and that is more important than the sheer size and number of inanimate objects in the universe. Despite its small size, the human brain is the most complex object we know of. 

We talk about the number of stars in the universe to show that intelligent life must have evolved on other planets, which itself implies that intelligent life is the important thing, rather than size and number of inanimate objects.

We can test this implication by imagining what the universe will ultimately be like. Based on what we know, it seems that the universe will keep expanding forever, and that all the stars will ultimately burn out, leaving a much more immense but completely dead universe, unable to support life. There is much we do not know about the nature of the universe - we do not understand dark energy or dark matter - so this idea of the fate of the universe may be wrong.  But right or wrong, comparing today's universe with this dead universe should show us that sheer size is not the important thing: the dead universe would be much vaster than today's universe, but it would contain much less complexity, without life and without even the nuclear reactions that power the stars. And I think everyone would agree that that this vast, dead universe has less to offer than today's smaller and more complex universe. 

The Copernican revolution happened when scientists convinced us that the Earth is not in the center of the universe. We need a second revolution that happens when humanists convince us that physical location and size are not the most important thing. 

Pascal got it right in the seventeenth century, as modern science became dominant, when he said: "Man is only a reed ..., but he is a thinking reed. ... Even if the universe should crush him, man would still be more noble than that which destroys him, because he knows that he dies and he realizes the advantage that the universe possesses over him. The universe knows nothing of this."