Via Dan Bertolet of hugeasscity:
Humans have a penchant for believing they are living in revolutionary times, on the brink of massive change. Just ask anyone who spent time in San Francisco during the late 1960s (not me ? I was here). It?s a tendency lodged deep in our psyches, no doubt rooted in the same reptilian muck that fuels religious obsession with imminent Armageddon.
But oh yes indeed, there would appear to be some rather serious shit going down these days. So then, are we truly on the verge of revolutionary change? Or are we once again succumbing to the propensity to overestimate the importance of our own era?
The Copernican Principle, in simplest possible terms, states that we are not special. Earth is not at the center of the universe, and human civilization may not be at the high water mark that we think we’re at. Therefore, we shouldn’t take ourselves too seriously. But then again, the universe we’re in is a powerful place, full of huge amounts of energy, and therefore everything that happens is “serious shit” when compared with the fragility of human life.
So even if we’re not at a crucial pinnacle of everything, we still need to take good care of that tiny blue sphere you see at the top of this post (this is photo taken by the NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter — in other words, how someone from Mars would see Planet Earth). It’s small; we’re even smaller. But we’ve still got a lot of potential, and we need to take really good care of ourselves, even if armageddon is not, in fact, nigh.
By the way, I’ve found that listening to George Carlin rant about people like me is a good cure for taking myself too seriously.
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