Galactic Exploration

by Peter Cawdron

“You see,” he continued, “it is not the universe or our quest to find intelligent life that gives purpose and meaning to our lives. Rather the opposite is true. We give meaning to the universe. To be conscious, to be alive and self-aware, to appreciate the brilliance of this majestic universe, is to appreciate life itself. “There’s no central point from which the Big Bang emanated, rather it's true to say, it happened everywhere.

“We tend to oversimplify things. We think in terms of black and white. And we tend to see things from only one vantage point—our own. So we’ve looked at Earth as though it were something special, something unique, a single point for the origin of life. We don’t see Earth for what it actually is. We don’t see it as the third minor planet in orbit around an average star roughly three-quarters of the way from the center of a modest-sized galaxy, and yet that’s all it is.

“You see, we've got it all backwards. It's not that Earth was special and so life thrived. On the contrary, life transformed a barren, noxious, poisonous wasteland into paradise. There have been times when Earth was as blisteringly hot as Venus and as cold and desolate as Mars, and yet over billions of years microbes transformed the planet into the moderate environment we see today.