De revolutionibus orbium coelestium

I was musing the other day on the relative primitiveness of "us," this current human civilization. With the advent of carbon dating, archeological excavations, and other scientific breakthroughs, we seem to be much more adept at seeing backward than we are at looking ahead. We can look back today on prehistoric peoples that had little awareness of the next village over, let alone their geographic location in the world. We were amused as school children by misguided stories that Columbus may have been afraid of sailing off the edge of the earth. We find these ancient civilizations unevolved and primal. Indeed, we have come a long way since some version of the flat earth concept was pop science, but are we not just as geocentric in our views today as the sixteenth-century Copernican detractors? We can no more conceptualize a light-year than Cro-Magnon man could conceive of a nautical mile, and we are no more aware of other life forms (ok, aliens) than the Mesopotamians were of the Incas.

To get to my point, I believe we are now in view of another Copernican Revolution, and that humans many generations from now (if the earth is still able to sustain our population in many generations) will look back on us, in the 2000s, as a mole-like culture only able to visualize our immediate environment. We will be their ancients. If you search YouTube for “The Most Important Image Ever Taken,” you will see a short video on the deep space images captured by the Hubble Telescope. The narrator explains that, even in a patch of night sky that appears dark and vacant to our eye, there are billions of galaxies that contain ever more billions of stars not unlike our sun, which could conceivably be orbited by billions of planets not unlike our own. With this knowledge, are we really to hold fast to the narcissistic sixteenth-century notion that we are the center of the universe, that we are the only ones?

Anyway, all of this brought to mind an old poem that has been a favorite of mine since I was a teenager:

EARTH

If this little world to-night
Suddenly should fall through space
In a hissing, headlong flight,
As it falls into the sun,
In an instant every trace
Of little crawling things--
Ants, philosophers, and lice,
Cattle, cockroaches, and kings,
Beggers, millionaires, and mice,
Men and maggots all as one
As it falls into the Sun. . .
Who can say but at the same
Instant from some planet far,
A child may watch us and exclaim
“See the pretty shooting star!”

Oliver Herford, The Bashful Earthquake, 1898

This delightful verse, written 70 years before man landed on the moon, debunks our own self-importance, both in biological and social classification (a millionaire is no better than a maggot in an apocalypse), as well as among the other inhabitants of deep space. It also helps to soften the impact (pun intended) of the realization of our eventual destruction; it makes it all so...pretty. But the actual light at the end of this tunnel vision comes with the conclusion that, while human beings may not be vitally important, and while all the “little crawling things” of Earth are nothing if not inconsequential, the same cannot be said for the individual. The parts are greater than the whole. Like the starfish tossed back to the safety of the sea by the kind passerby, we are all dependent on and important to someone. It’s true, we can hardly claim to call ourselves a speck within the vastness of the universe. But to someone, I alone may be colossal.