Our place in the Cosmos

We indeed have come a long way from the times of Aristotle and Ptolemy. The ignorant era where man was boastful enough to believe that the entirety of creation- the vast (our concept of vast was ironically limited) universe revolves around us, and that we constitute its centre.
The belief was rooted in the deep seated philosophy that we are special and cherished creations of the almighty god. We maintained that the supremacy of mankind over every other species was a gift from the gods, a gift borne out of being special. We were quick to adapt such ego boosting notions and so the concept of Geocentrism stuck around for a long long time.

In about the 2nd century AD it was realised that the differences of seasons and retrograde motion of various planets should logically conclude to varying distance between the planets, earth and the sun. The original model was modified by shifting the centre of rotation of the cosmos away from the earth. All this while preserving the view that our precious planet would still sit at the middle of all the action, grand and resolute. Ptolemy's model explained the observations of the day well, but questions were soon being asked and the world gradually moved on to Heliocentrism, thanks to Copernicus.

 It took us ages (and god knows how many shouts of 'Sacrilege') to battle and ultimately defeat religious dogma and accept not what we would like to believe rather  what observation and mathematics pointed us towards.

It took exceptional courage to come to terms with the fact that the world does not revolve around us after all, and that we too were just another planet orbiting the mighty sun. 

But our notions of self-importance were to take many further hits.

Our dreams of perfectionism were shattered when Kepler helped establish the elliptical motion of the planets, rather than the more perfect-circular orbit.
With the advent of technology and telescopes, man was enabled a view of the cosmos that revealed great many secrets and most of them made us feel tinier and tinier, also more and more ordinary.
As we ventured beyond our solar system, into the Milky Way our collective ego took a grand hit as we realised that other than our sun, existed billions of more stars in a sparkling galaxy that we named the Milky Way. Our mighty sun was in actuality just another yellow dwarf and was out-numbered and out-shined by a plethora of hot and fiery worlds. 

We soon began to fashion the laws of the universe which were governed by reason (and started being reasonable about our own place in the universe).
We've established that we aren't the centre of the universe or our local group, or our galaxy not even our own solar system. 

So are we then, truly ordinary?

 A teeming group of species on a beautiful blue planet (with patches of green) in some solar system at the fringe of a galaxy somewhere in the big, vast universe? 

Or is there more to the story?

Astronomers and scientists have established that for life to thrive on planet earth there must have been a delicately balanced plate of ingredients to start with. Over the years our planet could have faced major disasters, and shifted the balance towards chaos. Somewhere about 4 million years ago our moon was bombarded by a heavy meteorite shower which had a significant effect on our future and most of all the inner planets. Termed as the Late Heavy Bombardment, this event may have rendered life possible on the blue planet. The earth's environment was drastically changed thanks to the bombardment and most of the water found in our oceans today can be traced back to water-rich comets that delivered the liquid of life to us. The event that made our blue planet blue! 

Another event that ensured that earth would be a habitable planet is its location- which is just right for living beings to exist and prosper.  We are one of the three planets located within the Goldilocks Zone- an area in space wherein a planet is just the right distance from its home star so that its surface is neither too hot nor too cold. Although our neighbours Mars and Venus are also within this life nurturing belt, the ravages of time haven't been kind to them. Mars has lost most of its atmosphere while Venus has a highly poisonous one composed of clouds of sulphuric acid. 

Counting our blessings, we have another one to include. The gas giant Jupiter protects us from the lumps of rock and ice in the asteroid belt. The gravitational influence of Jupiter has and continues to deflect many potential threats en route our home. 

We are the third planet from the centre of our solar system- the sun. Moving from our Solar System to a larger picture, we are about halfway between the centre and the edge of our galaxy.  Despite our humble location relative to other heavenly bodies we are the centre of our own observable universe. 

Narcissistic much? 

Maybe not this time. 

As we know nothing (PRETTY MUCH NOTHING) travels faster than light. Our universe began (by some solid estimates) about 13.8 billion years ago, in all that time light can travel very far. If we were to fashion this distance into a bounding sphere around our earth, we would get our observable universe and we would be its centre. The important thing to note here is that how significant the concept of our observable universe is. Since nothing (pretty much) travels faster than light, nothing on the outside of this great sphere (if there is anything at all, no way to know) can influence anything on the inside, in any manner. So who cares if we aren't the centre of the entire universe, right? We are the centre of the one that can possibly affect us. This area keeps growing with the passage of time, but the centre never changes. 

The further man has ventured out into the cosmos, the more insignificant we seem to become. Wonder and awe fills our hearts as we gaze up to the heavens but the most awesome wonder of all remains the one of Life and Civilisation.

Humans are curious beings, and we've gone through extreme measures to quench our hunger for knowledge. We are explorers by nature. The fact that makes us feel truly special (at least for now) is the miracle of life. Technology and human innovation has allowed us to peek into worlds far, far away from us. We have even been able to send probes, robots and messengers to some of these places in an effort to find out more about them. And truly, during this grand journey we have found some astonishing stuff. We know how stars are formed by spotting giant nebulae; we got to know how stars die in supernova explosions and the multiple fates they may undergo after the big boom. Man has walked on the moon, collected samples from Mars, seen the surfaces of Jupiter and Saturn up close and flown past a probe by Pluto beyond the realm of the Sun.  

We have found ice on the red planet, seas of ammonia and sulphur but we've never ever come close to finding life- intelligent or otherwise- beyond our planet.

In Arthur C Clarke's words -" Two possibilities exist, either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying." 

Despite the continued and zealous search for extra-terrestrial life, we have yet to come into direct contact with any. If we are truly alone in the Universe, which many say is a  statistic impossibility, maybe we are truly special.

On July 20 1969 as Neil Armstrong took one small step for a man, which was a giant leap for mankind he was in his own words, suddenly struck by the tiny pea that the earth was, pretty and blue. 

"I felt very, very small", he said.

Small we truly are, dwarfed by the magnanimity of infinity, but we sure aren't too small to count.The scale of the universe and the tiny speck that we are in it will serve as a constant reminder of our humble abode when (not if) humanity cruises to the zeniths of success. 

As for the question- Special or Not?

I'll leave that for you to answer. (I am a sadist who loved having you read all this without giving you a definitive answer.) For maybe it’s a good thing we can't say for sure, so we might not get too complacent or break our hearts.

 And no matter what the truth be, we still have time on our hands to sway it in our favour (Unless some crazy alien invasion happens soon, which -let's be honest- will be way more exciting.)