The human race

I was looking up at the night sky earlier and I looked across at the hundreds of lights I could see in the sky. I realized that half of them at the most were stars and half of them were airplanes and helicopters and satellites. Mankind have put man on the moon, sent probes to all the planets within billions of miles and looked back on our solar system from outside it. We have designed telescopes to look out on the vast sea of space, microscopes to look at the tiny worlds inside cells and split the atom. Even a hundred years ago we had put men in the sky, visited the Antarctic and spoken thousands of languages with millions of words.

And yet despite being so clever – so ingenious – we have a broken economy, millions of people die every year of diseases we could cure and we’re are destroying our planet. We seem to have an incredible talent at being so good and brilliant and yet so stupid.

The odds are that we are not alone in the universe. Perhaps our galaxy doesn’t contain intelligent life. Perhaps intelligent life is millions of light years away. Assume that there is other intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. How significant does that make us – seven billion people – in a universe of millions of galaxies with billions of stars with trillions of planets? How significant are you individually in all that.

Looking out at the night sky you do wonder how significant you are. Our lives are so small in the history of the universe and yet so much seems to happen. We seem to have so many worries and life may not seem that it is fair but that is the way that universe works. Humanity may die out in another million years. We may plunge back into a stone age. Today may be the most technologically advanced day in the history of the human race. Eventually Earth will be engulfed by the dying sun and that will be the end of it all.

Long prosper humanity.