during the Second World War, Japanese soldiers were willing to sacrifice their lives for the sake of their emperor, Hirohito. But in view of our recent realization that there are approximately a zetta (or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) of habitable planets in the observable universe, the emperor’s status cannot be more significant than that of an ant hugging a single grain of sand on a huge beach. And what is true of an emperor is no less true for a soldier or anyone else on Earth. We would do well to look up and look beyond that grain of sand. Perhaps, rather than behaving like outsize actors
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