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But the immense time horizons that stretch ahead—though familiar to every astronomer—haven’t permeated our culture to the same extent.
Awareness of the “deep time” lying ahead is still not pervasive. Indeed, most people—and not only those for whom this view is enshrined in religious beliefs—envisage humans as in some sense the culmination of evolution. But no astronomer could believe this; on the contrary, it would be equally plausible to surmise that we are not even at the halfway stage.
Darwin himself realized that “not one living species will preserve its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity.” We now know that “futurity” extends far further—and alterations can occur far faster—than Darwin envisioned.
We humans are entitled to feel uniquely important, as the first known species with the power to mold its evolutionary legacy.
I will argue that modern science, traditionally considered guilty of reducing our existence to a pointless accident in an indifferent universe, is actually saying the opposite. Whereas it does say that we are an accident in an indifferent universe, it also says that we are a rare accident and thus not pointless.
There is an enormous difference between life and intelligent life.
the existence of single-celled organisms doesn’t necessarily lead to that of multicellular ones, much less to that of intelligent multicellular ones.
And if we are alone, and alone are aware of what it means to be alive and of the importance of remaining alive, we gain a new kind of cosmic centrality, very different and much more meaningful than the religion-inspired one of pre-Copernican days, when Earth was the center of Creation. We matter because we are rare and we know it.
The joint realization that we live in a remarkable cosmic cocoon and can create languages and rocket ships in an otherwise apparently dumb universe ought to be transformative. Until we find other self-aware intelligences, we are how the universe thinks. We might as well start enjoying one another’s company.
The mediocrity principle simply states that you aren’t special. The universe does not revolve around you; this planet isn’t privileged in any unique way; your country is not the perfect product of divine destiny; your existence isn’t the product of directed, intentional fate; and that tuna sandwich you had for lunch was not plotting to give you indigestion. Most of what happens in the world is just a consequence of natural, universal laws—laws that apply everywhere and to everything, with no special exemptions or amplifications for your benefit—given variety by the input of chance.
If humans had gone extinct a hundred thousand years ago, the world would go on turning, life would go on thriving, and some other species would be prospering in our place—and most likely not by following the same intelligence-driven, technological path we did. And that’s OK—if you understand the mediocrity principle.
What the mediocrity principle tells us is that our state is not the product of intent, that the universe lacks both malice and benevolence, but that everything does follow rules—and that grasping those rules should be the goal of science.
The world consists of things, which obey rules. If you keep asking “why” questions about what happens in the universe, you ultimately reach the answer “because of the state of the universe and the laws of nature.”
Looking at the universe through our anthropocentric eyes, we can’t help but view things in terms of causes, purposes, and natural ways of being.
it wasn’t until our understanding of physics was advanced by thinkers such as Avicenna, Galileo, and Newton that it became reasonable to conceive of the universe evolving under its own power, free of guidance and support from anything beyond itself.
the world doesn’t need to be sustained, it can simply be.
If we specify the complete state of the universe (or any isolated part of it) at some particular instant, the laws of physics tell us what its state will be at the very next moment.
This is not a universe that is advancing toward a goal; it is one that is caught in the iron grip of an unbreakable pattern.
This view of the processes at the heart of the physical world has important consequences for how we come to terms with the social world. Human beings like to insist that there are reasons why things happen.
Life on Earth doesn’t arise in fulfillment of a grand scheme but as a by-product of the increase of entropy in an environment very far from equilibrium.
We are far smaller than most of the cosmos, far larger than most chemistry, far slower than much that occurs at subatomic scales, and far faster than geological and evolutionary processes. This principle leads us to study the successively larger and smaller orders of magnitude of our world, because we cannot assume that everything interesting is at the same scale as ourselves.
The paradox of the Copernican Principle is that by properly understanding our place, even if it be humbling, we can only then truly understand our particular circumstances. And when we do, we don’t seem so insignificant after all.
lack of training in how to think critically and how to discount personal opinion, prejudice, and anecdote in favor of evidence.
The core of a scientific lifestyle is to change your mind when faced with information that disagrees with your views, avoiding intellectual inertia, yet many of us praise leaders who stubbornly stick to their views as “strong.”
Logic forms the basis of scientific reasoning, yet wishful thinking, irrational fears, and other cognitive biases often dominate decisions.
Yet we scientists are often painfully naïve, deluding ourselves that just because we think we have the moral high ground, we can somehow defeat this corporate-fundamentalist coalition by using obsolete unscientific strategies.
To teach people what a scientific concept is and how a scientific lifestyle will improve their lives, we need to go about it scientifically: We need new science advocacy organizations, which use all the same scientific marketing and fund-raising tools as the antiscientific coalition. We’ll need to use many of the tools that make scientists cringe, from ads and lobbying to focus groups that identify the most effective sound bites.
The scientific concept that most people would do well to understand and exploit is the one that almost defines science itself: the controlled experiment.
Because so many scientific theories from bygone eras have turned out to be wrong, we must assume that most of today’s theories will eventually prove incorrect as well.
“The habit of equating one’s age with the apogee of civilization, one’s town with the hub of the universe, one’s horizons with the limits of human awareness, is paradoxically widespread.”
Recognizing how much we share with others promotes compassion, humility, respect, and brotherhood. Recognizing that we are each unique promotes pride, self-development, creativity, and achievement.
Hamlet may have said that human beings are noble in reason and infinite in faculties, but in reality—as four decades of experiments in cognitive psychology have shown—our minds are finite and far from noble.
When we need to remember something in a situation other than the one in which it was stored, the memory is often hard to retrieve. One of the biggest challenges in education, for example, is to get children to apply what they learn in school to real-world situations.
Bias is an intuition—a sensitivity, a receptiveness—that acts as a lens or filter on all our perceptions.
In recent decades, psychology and neuroscience have severely eroded classical notions of free will. The unconscious mind, it turns out, is most of the mind. And yet, we can still control the spotlight of attention, focusing on those ideas that will help us succeed. In the end, this may be the only thing we can control. We don’t have to look at the marshmallow.
The mismatch in the allocation of attention between thinking about a life condition and actually living it is the cause of the focusing illusion.
“If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research.”
If the public could be brought to a greater understanding of how to evaluate the risks inherent in exploring future technology, and the merits of accepting some short-term risk in the interests of overwhelmingly greater expected long-term benefit, progress in all areas of technology—especially biomedical technology—would be greatly accelerated.
the greatest risk is that we’ll get to the end of our lives having never risked them on anything.
