Pale Blue Dot

As Charles Lee once said: “No one, especially not you, can change an entire universe's purpose at the drop of a dramatic speech. Like the rest... You're just another speck of dust on God's windshield.”.

My thoughts are like the universe, unending and staying the same for no more than a mere moment. I’ve had this issue since I was just a kid. Writing this paragraph alone, I’ve thought of over one hundred different things ranging from how non-physical data in a computer is stored in physical form for storage, to how cells in a body are alive. The most prevalent of those thoughts being our significance.

Significance: a word sparsely used, and insignificance even more so. Are we possibly afraid that nothing is actually significant? A person without power or influence is insignificant. A person that is meaningless is insignificant. A person that is unimportant is insignificant. When you look at the big picture, we are all incredibly insignificant. Say everybody on our planet was wiped out right now, nothing in the universe would change. Nobody would find out, nobody would care. We all live on one pale blue dot out of one hundred billion planets in the milky way. The milky way is only one of two hundred billion galaxies. That’s one septillion planets total.

Sometimes I wonder if life would be better not being self aware. Not knowing how insignificant this pale blue dot is in this expansive universe. If we were like ants, oblivious of the universe around themselves, unknowing of their insignificance, would we be happier? Does knowing our insignificance have any significance? Would it really change anything?

Like atoms solitarily drifting in space, forming connections to the ones nearby, they have no use; they aren’t significant. They magnetize together to create larger, but nonetheless insignificant chunks; just like us humans, always working together in our hopeless journey into inevitable oblivion, careless of the insignificance of this pale blue dot. Saying that humans are significant in their own way is a hopeless attempt to make oneself feel more important. Knowing that you aren’t important and don’t have a role is a hard thing to accept. If you truly want to get away from the fact that you are insignificant, you must perish the thought.

Significance: a condition never being met. A statement without validity. In this universe, how can we say that anything is significant? If the whole universe were to vanish entirely, what would happen? That’s what I think about. Right here.

On this pale blue dot.