The importance of human beings in the universe

Man is just a pile of chemical residue on a typical planet, which orbits a typical star on the outer edge of a typical galaxy-Stephen Hawking.

I don't think humans will live in the next thousand years unless we spread them into space. On a lonely planet, life may encounter too many accidents. But I am an optimist. We will go to other planets. Stephen Hawking

Nowadays, the wrong idea of human-centered has been overthrown in almost all basic scientific fields. It is very rewarding to give up anthropocentrism, which is so important to the broader history of thought that anti-anthropocentrism is increasingly promoted to the status of universal law. It is sometimes called "the principle of mediocrity", and its proposition is that human beings are completely unimportant.

Another important concept related to the human condition is sometimes called spaceship earth dramatically. Imagine a "first generation spaceship". Its journey is so long that many generations of passengers have lived on it all their lives. This method has been proposed to colonize other star systems. In the concept of earth spacecraft, the first generation spacecraft is compared to the biosphere-a system composed of all living things on earth and their habitats. Passengers represent all human beings on the earth. The space environment outside the spacecraft is extremely harsh, but inside the spacecraft is a huge and complex life support system, which can provide passengers with everything they need for prosperity and development. Just like this spaceship, the biosphere can recycle all wastes and be completely self-sufficient by using its huge nuclear power plant (the sun).

Just as the life support system of spacecraft is designed to support passengers, the biosphere also has a "design appearance": the biosphere looks very suitable to support us because we have adapted to it through evolution. But its ability is limited: if we overload it, it will collapse, whether it is because there are too many people or people adopt a way that is too different from the evolved lifestyle (the way the biosphere is "designed" to support it). Just like the passengers on the spaceship, we won't get a second chance: if our lifestyle becomes too careless or extravagant, we will destroy our life support system and have nowhere to go.

The metaphor of the spaceship earth and the principle of mediocrity, which are widely accepted among people with scientific minds, have become well-known truths. Although in fact, at first glance, these two concepts run counter to each other in a sense: the mediocrity principle emphasizes how typical the earth and its chemical dregs are (in the sense that their existence is very ordinary), while the spaceship earth emphasizes how atypical they are (in the sense that they are unique to each other). However, if these two concepts are explained by a wide range of philosophical methods (usually), they can easily achieve the same goal through different routes. They all think that they have corrected the same narrow misconceptions, such as our experience of life on earth is representative in the universe, and the earth is vast, static and eternal. On the contrary, they all emphasize that the earth is small and its life span is short. Both oppose arrogance: the principle of mediocrity opposes arrogance before the Enlightenment and thinks that we are very important in the world; The spaceship earth opposes the arrogance of the Enlightenment determined to control the world. Both of them contain the same moral elements: we should not consider ourselves important, and we should not expect the world to succumb to our plunder indefinitely.

The principle of mediocrity and the metaphor of spaceship earth are consistent in extension proposition: they all think that the extension of the unique way of life of human beings, that is, the way of solving problems, creating knowledge and transforming the surrounding world, has boundaries. They also believe that this boundary is not far from where human ability has reached. The principle of mediocrity holds that trying to go beyond this range will lead to failure, while the metaphor of spaceship earth holds that it will lead to disaster.

In this way, these two concepts have produced a rich conceptual framework, which can provide information for a whole world outlook. However, as I will explain next, they are all wrong, even in a direct practical sense. In a broader sense, they are so misleading that if you want to find some aphorisms carved on stones or recited before breakfast every day, it is much better to choose the opposite of these two views. In other words, the truth is:

Man is important in all things in the universe;

The earth's biosphere is not suitable for supporting human life.

There are many things that are obviously more meaningful than people. Space and time are important because they exist in the explanation of almost all other physical phenomena. Similarly, electrons and atoms are also important. Humans seem to have no place in this noble group. Our history and politics, our science, art and philosophy, our aspirations and moral values-all these are minor side effects of a supernova explosion billions of years ago, which may be destroyed by another such explosion tomorrow. Among all things in the universe, the importance of supernovae is also unremarkable. But it seems that everything about supernovae and everything else can be explained without mentioning people or knowledge at all.

However, this is just another narrow mistake, the root of which is that we are currently in an atypical dominant position in the Enlightenment with a history of only a few hundred years. In the long run, humans may explore other star systems and control more powerful physical processes by increasing knowledge. If people choose to live near a star that may explode, they have every reason to want to stop such an explosion-perhaps by removing something from the star. The energy cost of such a project will be many orders of magnitude higher than the energy that human beings can control at present, and it will be much more advanced in technology. But it is a simple task in essence, and there is no need to approach the limit defined by the laws of physics. Therefore, with the right knowledge, this can be done. In fact, it seems to us that engineers in other parts of the universe have regularized this kind of work. So it is wrong to say that the nature of supernovae has nothing to do with whether anyone is present, what knowledge they know or what they want to do.

More generally, if we want to predict what a star will look like, we must first guess whether there are people nearby, if so, what kind of knowledge these people may have and what purpose they want to achieve. From our narrow point of view, the theory of astrophysics is incomplete without human beings, just like the theory of gravity or nuclear reaction. Please note that this conclusion does not depend on the assumption that humans or other species will explore galaxies and control any supernovae: the assumption that they will not do so is also a theory about the future behavior of knowledge. Knowledge is an important phenomenon in the universe, because to make any astrophysical prediction, it is almost necessary to take a stand on whether there will be any specific type of knowledge near the phenomenon under discussion. Therefore, all explanations about the real world should mention knowledge and people, even if only implicitly.

Consider the huge difference between the spontaneous behavior of the environment (that is, without knowledge) and the performance after having a little correct type of knowledge. We usually think that the moon colony originated from the earth, even after it had achieved self-sufficiency. However, did it actually originate from the earth? In the long run, all the atoms in it will come from the moon (or asteroids), and all the energy used will come from the sun. Only a part of knowledge comes from the earth, and the proportion of this knowledge will shrink rapidly under the assumption of complete isolation from the earth. What actually happened was that the moon was changed by matter from the earth-at first it changed only slightly. It is not matter that brings about change, but the knowledge it encodes. In response to this knowledge, the matter on the moon has been reorganized in a new, more and more extensive and complex way, and has begun to create an endless and constantly improving interpretation stream. Endless beginning.

The principle of mediocrity and the concept of spaceship earth are irretrievably narrow and wrong. From the least narrow point of view, man is the most important entity in the universe. Man is not "supported" by the environment, but by his own creation of knowledge. Once people have the right knowledge (in essence, the knowledge of the Enlightenment), they can trigger infinite progress. Apart from human thoughts, the only known process that can create knowledge is biological evolution, which is very similar to human knowledge. However, the knowledge it created (not created by people) was originally limited and narrow.