Even if there are billions of habitable planets in the Milky Way (and comparable numbers in every galaxy), they occupy a tiny volume, compared with the hostile empty reaches. If I travel about 100 miles north, I’m in Washington, DC if I travel 100 miles down, I’m in Earth’s mantle, undergoing crushing pressure and killingly high temperatures if I travel 100 miles up, I’m in space, with effectively no air and a lot less shielding from dangerous solar radiation.
Of course, it’s equally obvious that most of the Universe is extremely hostile to life. The “tree of life” is a much better metaphor than an ascending ladder of being, or the commonly-reproduced picture of hominid ancestors beginning with ape-like creatures and ending with us.
(One particularly odd one, at least to my way of thinking, says that God is in complete control of creation, so we can’t actually do any meaningful damage-so what we do to other species or to the environment doesn’t really matter.) The reality, of course, is less flattering: Earth and the Universe have been around a lot longer than our species, Earth is a small planet in a fairly ordinary star system (judging by recent exoplanet discoveries), evolution is undirected, with each species succeeding or not based on its adaptation to its environment. There are many variations of this self-centeredness, of course, depending on the era and culture. All things exist for our use, and if they have no apparent purpose, then there is no harm in expurgating them from existence. Earth or the Sun is the center of the Universe (which is quite small), we are the masters of creation (and have been since the beginning), even that evolution is a linear progression, starting with bacteria and culminating with us. One of the most difficult ideas to expunge from human thinking is that we are somehow the most important thing around. However, the anthropocentric view still holds on in our minds Copernicus’ revolution is not yet done. This was one of many scientific ideas that helped overthrow our arrogant assumption that humans occupy the special place in the Universe. –Terry Pratchett, Hogfather Copernicus helped us realize Earth isn’t the center of the Universe. But this was only a formal statement of the theory which absolutely everyone, with only some minor details of a “Fill in name here” nature, secretly believes to be true. The UU Professor of Anthropics had developed the Special and Inevitable Anthropic Principle, which was that the entire reason for the existence of the universe was the eventual evolution of the UU Professor of Anthropics. The Weak One says, basically, that it was jolly amazing of the universe to be constructed in such a way that humans could evolve to a point where they make a living in, for example, universities, while the Strong One says that, on the contrary, the whole point of the universe was that humans should not only work in universities but also write for huge sums books with words like “Cosmic” and “Chaos” in the titles.
Many people are aware of the Weak and Strong Anthropic Principles.
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