Welcome back to Polite Disputes. In this episode, we’re going to discuss the humanocentric perspective that is automatic and intuitive for ‘we’. Because of how our consciousness functions, that is, from a first-person point of view, our species stretches its search for meaning until it resembles a water balloon in a summer backyard fight. It bulges and distorts, thin and transparent, and any observer will notice the precariousness of the container — it is, at all times, about to burst.
Nevertheless, for us homo sapiens, it somehow continues to hold water.
This perspective is as endemic for humankind as the instinctive and demonstrably false intuition that we have two parts. That there is, somehow, an inner and an outer self, simultaneous, opposing, and irreconcilable… and yet, that’s just how it feels like it is.
From our popular entertainment to our scientific literature to our inner dialogue, there are humanocentric tropes and cliches everywhere. We feel, somehow, that this is all for us, that all the billions of years, the literally endless expanse of the cosmos, the positioning of our planet in the habitable zone around the sun, and the “advancement” of our civilization at this particular point in history — it all led to this, a plan or a design or fate.
I want to reiterate that I believe these tropes are far too widespread to be anything less than instinctive. That is, if we want to understand our existence more realistically, we have to work at it. We can’t wait, or we’ll wait forever. We have to proactively engage in some unnatural cognitive exercise.
Here are some of the examples I find most exasperating:
Everything happens for a reason / This is all part of a plan”
Everyday dialogue — The notion that cosmic forces orchestrate events specifically for human learning, growth, or purpose.
This is bizarrely widespread, and the reason, in my opinion, is that is easier for us to think of things as intentional than it is to realize that this is all an ongoing series of events, a cascade of physics. It is so much easier that most people will argue with you if you point out that their lives have been a series of coincidences out of their control. They will be, in fact, be offended at the suggestion.
“We’re living during the most important moments in human history”
Political speeches, self-help, tech evangelism — Every generation is convinced they’re the climactic chapter, not just another page. Our species has hundreds of thousands of years of history, and it seems almost certain that for that entire time, they looked up at the stars from their first-person perspectives and wondered why the almighty sky intentionality placed them there.
We don’t look at the trees and the rocks and the animals running around and think, “Why them, in this particular place, in this particular time? What could the reason be that that squirrel mated with that one over there, and how would the world have been different if they hadn’t?” And yet, that question makes perfect sense to an eight-year-old, regardless of any religious education or lack thereof.
“The aliens are watching to see if we’re ready”
Science fiction trope — Advanced civilizations withholding contact until humans “prove themselves” worthy, as if we’re taking some cosmic entrance exam.
This is another endemic trope. There’s this idea that whatever’s out there must be incredibly curious about us, or envious of us.
If an alien civilization had the technology to explore outside of their own solar system, that would indicate a level of sophistication that would make them post-scarcity. They wouldn’t need our water, our precious metals, or our brains. We would not be a mystery to them, or a challenge, or equals waiting for recognition. We would just be part of the planet’s biodiversity.
“Earth is a classroom / testing ground for souls”
Religious and spiritual philosophies — The planet exists specifically as humanity’s spiritual gymnasium, with everything calibrated for our moral development.
This delusion is everywhere. We warn that as ocean acidification increases, “our” fisheries are being depleted. We speak about failing a “test of stewardship” for this world. We conceive of everything else only as it relates to us.
Right now, as you read or listen to this essay, species around the globe are being exterminated. From what we can read of the fossil record, the rate at which we are destroying everything we don’t find useful, tasty, or cool is unprecedented.
“We’re the chosen species”
Religious and secular variations — Humans uniquely selected by divine forces, evolution, or cosmic accident to carry forward some special destiny.
This is apparent in our language. We speak of ourselves as the “result” of evolution. We talk about the advancement of civilization as if there’s an external timeline just sort of vaguely out there. Think about the fear of going “back” to the Stone Age. Backwards? Forwards? On what scale? Was there a beginning? Is there an end to be reached?
This smacks of destiny.
And finally, we arrive at the language used by many people who are passionate about stopping anthropogenic climate change. They say, “We have to save the planet.”
Earth is presented as a helpless victim awaiting either rescue or destruction, depending on the outcome of human choices.
Listeners, the universe does not give a ****. It is not aware. The Earth is not a cradle. It is an accident, and compared to the enormity of its physical existence, we are merely a vanishingly thin layer of biological fuzz growing on its outside.
Let’s talk about space, and how we are not its centre. Then, we’ll talk about our relationship to our planet. Finally, I’ll discuss a little bit of why consciousness induces egocentrism.
The Big Bang never ended
Picture an avalanche beginning with a single stone dislodged from a mountainside. In that first moment of release, everything that follows becomes inevitable: The cascade of debris, the thunder of displacement, the reshaping of the landscape below. We are not the mountain. We are not the purpose of the avalanche. We are simply part of the debris field, part of a process that began 13.8 billion years ago and will inevitably continue until the energy of that first explosion finally dissipates.
This is our best understanding of how everything exists, and how we exist within it.
The Echo of the Beginning
In 1965, two Bell Labs engineers named Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were trying to eliminate mysterious static from their radio antenna. No matter where they pointed their equipment, a persistent hiss contaminated their signals. They cleaned bird droppings from the receiver. They recalibrated their instruments. The noise remained, coming from every direction at once, uniform and unrelenting.
What they had discovered was the afterglow of creation itself: The Cosmic Microwave Background radiation. This faint signal, the remnants of what was once everything, contained in a soup of plasma so hot it couldn’t yet form distinct molecules, is now cooled to just 2.7 degrees above absolute zero, and represents the moment our universe became transparent to light — roughly 380,000 years after the initial explosion we call the Big Bang. Before this cosmic dawn, the universe was so hot and dense that photons couldn’t travel freely; they were constantly absorbed and re-emitted by free electrons in an opaque plasma. As expansion cooled this primordial energy field below 3,000 degrees Kelvin, electrons combined with nuclei to form the first atoms, and light broke free to travel across space.
That light has been traveling ever since, stretched not by its own travel, but by the expansion of space itself, from visible wavelengths into the microwave spectrum we detect today. The CMB is the most direct evidence we have that our universe began in an unimaginably hot, dense state and has been expanding and cooling ever since. It’s the smoke from a cosmic explosion, still drifting through space nearly 14 billion years later.
This background radiation is astonishingly uniform — varying by only about 0.00001 degrees across the entire sky. Yet within these tiny fluctuations lie the seeds of everything that followed: Galaxies, stars, planets, and us.
The Stretching of Everything
The evidence for this ongoing expansion comes from one of the most profound discoveries in astronomy: Redshift. When Edwin Hubble pointed his telescope at distant galaxies in the 1920s, he noticed something extraordinary. The light from these galaxies was systematically shifted toward the red end of the spectrum, and the more distant the galaxy, the greater the redshift. This is mind-blowing, because it tells us, again, that the universe didn’t form and settle into a stable form. From the moment the explosion began, it has continued.
Redshift occurs because space itself is expanding. It can’t be explained by just distance: The only explanation is that as light travels from distant galaxies toward us, the wavelengths get stretched along with the expanding space they’re traveling through. Space itself is, somehow, growing.
Hubble’s observations revealed that every galaxy beyond our local cluster is moving away from us, and the speed of recession increases with distance. This relationship — now known as Hubble’s Law — provides the foundation for our understanding of cosmic expansion. The universe is not a gas, expanding to fill a space. It is the space, and it’s getting bigger, pushing galaxies apart like raisins in rising bread dough.
Observations of distant supernovae in the late 1990s revealed that galaxies aren’t just moving away from each other — they’re moving away faster and faster. This discovery earned several scientists the Nobel Prize and forced cosmologists to confront an uncomfortable reality: Most of the universe consists of something we can’t see or directly detect.
The Weight of Emptiness
What we call “empty” space — what, according to our current best understanding, functions as a vacuum — turns out to be anything but empty. Between the galaxies, between the stars, even between the atoms that make up our bodies, space itself has properties that shape the evolution of everything within it.
Dark energy — the name we’ve given to whatever is driving accelerated expansion — comprises roughly 68% of the universe’s total energy density. We have no idea what it actually is. It could be a property of space itself, a quantum field that fills all of existence, or something even stranger. What we know is that it acts like a repulsive force on cosmic scales, pushing space apart against the attractive slope of gravity.
Another 27% of the universe consists of dark matter — matter that interacts gravitationally but doesn’t emit, absorb, or reflect electromagnetic radiation. We’ve mapped its distribution through gravitational lensing, where its mass bends light from background galaxies like a cosmic lens. Dark matter forms the scaffolding upon which ordinary matter accumulates, creating the filamentary structure of cosmic web we observe today.
This means that everything we can see — all the stars, planets, gas, and dust in the observable universe — represents less than 5% of what’s actually there. We are not just a small part of the cosmos; we’re made of a tiny fraction of what the cosmos contains. The vast majority of reality remains invisible to us, its presence known only through the effects we observe, peering fish-like from the bowl of our solar system.
The “emptiness” between things turns out to be the most influential component of everything that exists.
When Energy Becomes Matter Becomes Energy
Einstein’s famous equation E=mc² reveals something profound about the nature of reality: Mass and energy are interchangeable. That little “c²” — the speed of light squared — is an enormous number, which means that even tiny amounts of matter contain tremendous amounts of energy. A single kilogram of matter, if completely converted to energy, would release roughly 90 petajoules — enough to power a large city for weeks.
This relationship isn’t just theoretical; it’s the engine of existence. In the cores of stars, hydrogen nuclei overcome electromagnetic repulsion to fuse into helium, converting a small amount of mass into the energy that lights the cosmos. Every photon that has ever warmed your face represents matter transformed into pure energy according to Einstein’s equation.
At extreme speeds approaching the speed of light, the distinction between matter and energy becomes ever more fluid. As objects accelerate, their mass effectively increases, requiring ever more energy to achieve further acceleration. At the speed of light itself, the boundary dissolves entirely — photons are pure energy with zero rest mass, yet they carry momentum and can exert pressure.
This is why nothing with mass can reach light speed: It would require infinite energy. The universe has built-in speed limits, and these limits define the very structure of reality. Time and space themselves become malleable at high velocities, with moving clocks running slow and lengths contracting in the direction of motion.
But there’s something even deeper here. The speed of light isn’t just the speed of light — it’s the speed of causality itself, the maximum rate at which cause and effect can propagate through space. It represents the conversion factor between space and time, revealing them to be aspects of a unified spacetime continuum. Although we haven’t yet cracked the case, this means that light, matter, energy, dark matter, dark energy, the quote/unquote “fabric” of space-time — these are, in some way, indistinguishable.
The Fabric of Everything
Light doesn’t travel “through” space — it travels “with” space. The speed of light in a vacuum, roughly 300 million meters per second, isn’t arbitrary; it’s a result of the geometric structure of reality itself. This speed represents the rate at which temporal separation can be converted into spatial separation, and vice versa. At a cosmic scale, distance is exactly the same as the time it takes to travel that distance.
When we say space and time are “curved” by mass and energy, we’re describing how matter tells spacetime how to bend, and curved spacetime tells matter how to move. Gravity isn’t a force pulling objects together; it’s geometry. Objects follow the straightest possible paths through curved spacetime, and we interpret their motion as gravitational attraction. Newton’s insights work within our physics; the equations are provable. But they aren’t conceptually accurate.
This means that every object — from subatomic particles to galactic clusters — shapes the fabric of reality around it. Earth doesn’t orbit the Sun because of some mysterious force reaching across empty space; it follows a geodesic route through spacetime curved by the Sun’s mass. We don’t fall toward Earth because gravity pulls us down; we follow the local geometry of spacetime, which happens to point toward the center of our planet.
Each of these things is travelling in a straight line. It’s falling, the way the International Space Station is falling around the planet. It’s just also moving fast enough that it never actually gets closer.
The speed of light emerges naturally from this geometric picture. It represents the fundamental relationship between temporal and spatial dimensions — the rate at which “here and now” becomes “there and then.” In a very real sense, the speed of light is the speed of existence itself.
When Our Solar System Assembled Itself
About 4.6 billion years ago, in an unremarkable region of an unremarkable galaxy, a cloud of gas and dust began to collapse under its own gravity. This wasn’t special — it was inevitable. Molecular clouds throughout the galaxy were undergoing similar collapse, triggered by density fluctuations, stellar winds, or shock waves from nearby supernovae.
As this particular cloud contracted, conservation of angular momentum caused it to spin faster and flatten into a disk. Most of the material fell toward the center, eventually becoming hot and dense enough to ignite nuclear fusion — our Sun was born. But not all the matter made it to the center. The remaining material, still orbiting, falling in the flattened disk, began to stick together.
At first, microscopic dust grains collided and formed larger particles through electrostatic attraction. These particles grew into pebbles, the pebbles into boulders, the boulders into asteroids. Some regions of the disk became dense enough for gravitational collapse to take over, sweeping up surrounding material to form planetary embryos.
The inner regions of the disk, where temperatures were high, could only support rocky materials — silicates and metals that remained solid near the young Sun. This is where the terrestrial planets formed: Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. Further out, beyond the “frost line” where water could freeze, ice joined rock and metal as building material. Here, planetary cores could grow large enough to gravitationally capture the abundant hydrogen and helium gas still drifting around, forming the giant planets we’ve named Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.
Earth’s formation was violent and chaotic. As its mass accumulated and everything close enough fell toward it, countless impacts heated our planet to molten temperatures, and its early atmosphere was likely stripped away multiple times. A Mars-sized object we’ve called Theia probably collided with the proto-Earth, ejecting debris that would eventually coalesce into the Moon. Through this rockfall of chaos, the basic architecture of our solar system emerged through simple physical processes: Gravity, conservation of energy and momentum, and the temperature gradient in the protoplanetary disk.
Nothing about this process required fine-tuning or special conditions. It was simply gravity doing what gravity does, following the path of least resistance toward lower energy states. Our solar system assembled itself according to the laws of physics, just as countless other systems have done throughout cosmic history.
The Inevitability of Us
The universe as we have been able to observe it so far contains roughly two trillion galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars. Many of these stars host planetary systems, formed through the same basic processes that created our own. Recent observations suggest that rocky planets in the “habitable zone” — where liquid water can exist — are common rather than rare.
But the numbers go deeper than this. The observable universe represents only a tiny fraction of what likely exists. If cosmic inflation theory is correct, the total universe may be infinite in extent, containing a literally infinite number of galaxies, stars, and planets. In an infinite universe, everything that can happen will happen — not just once, but infinitely many times.
Even in a finite but sufficiently large universe, the emergence of complexity becomes statistically inevitable. Given enough time and enough opportunities, matter will spontaneously organize itself into increasingly complex structures. Stars will form and die, enriching space with heavy elements. Planets will develop complex chemistry. On some fraction of these worlds, chemistry will cross the threshold into biology.
We are not a miraculous exception to the laws of physics — we are an inevitable consequence of them. The same forces that drive cosmic expansion, stellar nucleosynthesis, and planetary formation also drive biological evolution and the emergence of consciousness. There is no separate category of “life” that requires different explanations from the rest of physics.
Consider the chain of causation: Quantum fluctuations in the early universe create density variations. These variations grow under gravity into the first stars and galaxies. Massive stars synthesize heavy elements and distribute them through supernovae. Second-generation stars then form with rocky planets. Complex chemistry emerges in warm, protected environments. Self-replicating molecular systems arise and begin evolving. Complexity increases through natural selection until nervous systems develop capable of modeling their environment.
Each step follows naturally from the previous one. There are no gaps requiring intervention, no moments where physics stops and something else takes over. We are star-stuff contemplating star-stuff, as Carl Sagan put it — not because we’re special, but because in a universe full of star-stuff, contemplation becomes inevitable given enough time and opportunity.
Heat death and the arrow of time
The rockfall that began with the Big Bang is still in progress, and we can see where it’s heading. The second law of thermodynamics, another one of those observations that has been true, so far, everywhere we look, tells us that entropy — roughly, the amount of disorder in a system — always increases in isolated systems. The universe as a whole is the ultimate isolated system, so its total entropy must continue increasing until it reaches maximum.
This process is already well underway. The cosmic microwave background represents the universe moving toward thermal equilibrium, with temperature differences gradually evening out across space. Star formation peaked billions of years ago and is now declining as the universe expands and cools. Eventually, existing stars will burn out, and no new ones will form. Black holes will slowly evaporate through Hawking radiation, taking trillions upon trillions of years to finally disappear.
In the far future, the universe will reach heat death — a state of maximum entropy where no more work can be extracted from the system. This isn’t destruction in any dramatic sense; it’s the final equilibrium state toward which the universe has been moving since the beginning.
We are temporary eddies in the cosmic flow toward equilibrium — complex structures that emerge spontaneously in the transition from order to disorder. Our existence doesn’t violate the second law of thermodynamics; it exemplifies it.
From our perspective within the cosmic rockfall, it’s natural to feel that we must be important, that our emergence must represent some kind of purpose or goal. This feeling is understandable but ultimately misguided. We are not the reason the universe exists — we are simply one of the things that exists within it.
The universe wasn’t designed to produce us, any more than a river was designed to produce the specific pattern of ripples on its surface. Both phenomena emerge from the interplay of simple physical laws with complex initial conditions. The beauty, complexity, and apparent purpose we perceive are side effects of physical processes, not their intended outcomes.
We are not the planet
When we zoom out from human scale to planetary scale, the result is both humbling and vertigo-inducing. Every analogy that attempts to capture our true proportional relationship to Earth reveals the same startling truth: We are so small as to be essentially invisible, living on a surface so thin it barely exists, breathing an atmosphere so insubstantial it might as well be a whisper, on a planet casually indifferent to the biology growing on it.
How Much Space We Actually Occupy
Picture Earth as a standard basketball. On this scale, every human being who has ever lived — all 100+ billion people throughout history — would be represented by a collection of particles invisible to the naked eye. We’re talking about entities smaller than bacteria, smaller than viruses, approaching the scale of large molecules.
If you wanted to represent all currently living humans on our basketball Earth, you’d need to imagine roughly 8 billion specks of dust, each about 100 nanometers across. The entire human population would fit comfortably on the head of a pin with room to spare. All our cities, roads, farmland, and infrastructure would form a film thinner than a soap bubble across scattered portions of the basketball’s surface.
Consider this another way: Earth’s surface area is roughly 510 million square kilometers. Every human being currently alive could be given 65 square meters — about the size of a small apartment — and we’d only occupy 520,000 square kilometers total. That’s roughly the area of France. On a planet where the Pacific Ocean alone covers 165 million square kilometers, our entire species could disappear into an area smaller than Madagascar, leaving 99.9% of Earth’s surface exactly as it was before we existed.
But even that understates our insignificance, because we don’t actually occupy space uniformly. Most of us are crammed into dense urban areas that represent tiny fractions of continental landmasses. If you could view Earth from space with vision sharp enough to see individual humans, we would appear as small, scattered clusters of barely visible dots, like specs of mold growing on a few scattered grains of rice.
The International Space Station orbits about 400 kilometers above Earth’s surface. From that distance — practically skimming the planet’s atmosphere — Earth fills the entire visual field, and individual countries are easily visible. Yet humans remain completely invisible. You have to get much closer, to the altitude of commercial aircraft, before cities become apparent as patches of different coloration. Only from a few kilometers up do individual buildings become visible, and only from a few hundred meters can you actually see people.
This means that from the perspective of space — the vantage point from which Earth’s true nature becomes apparent — humanity simply doesn’t exist. We are not just small; we are beneath the threshold of visibility at planetary scales.
The Thinness of Everything We Touch
The Earth’s crust — the solid ground beneath our feet, the foundation of continents and ocean floors — averages about 40 kilometers thick on land and 10 kilometers thick under the oceans. This might sound substantial until you realize that Earth’s radius is 6,371 kilometers.
Using our basketball analogy, the crust would be thinner than a coat of paint. Actually, it would be thinner than the molecular layer of oils from your fingerprints when you handle the ball. If Earth were an apple, the crust would be significantly thinner than the apple’s skin — we’re talking about something like plastic wrap stretched tightly over the fruit’s surface.
Consider a more visceral comparison: If you could shrink yourself down and journey to Earth’s center, and if you could drive there at highway speeds, it would take you about 48 hours of continuous driving to reach the core. The entire thickness of the crust — every mountain, every ocean floor, every layer of rock that has ever been drilled or mined — would flash past in the first 45 minutes of your journey. Everything humans have ever seen, touched, or directly experienced represents less than 2% of the distance to Earth’s center.
We live on the thinnest possible skin of a vast, molten sphere. Every earthquake reminds us that this skin is not only thin but unstable, broken into plates that drift and collide like ice floes on a planetary scale. The “solid ground” beneath our feet is more like a raft floating on an ocean of liquid rock.
Yet even this impossibly thin crust contains more matter than we can truly comprehend. If you could somehow collect all the water in all the oceans and freeze it into a single block of ice, that block would be small enough to fit between Dallas and Austin, with a height of about 6 kilometers. The crust itself, thin as it is proportionally to the planet, contains enough rock to bury this ice block under thousands of kilometers of stone.
Our atmospheric bubble
The atmosphere — the envelope of gases that makes life possible and contains all weather, all clouds, all breathable air — is even more insubstantial than the crust beneath us. Using our basketball Earth, the entire atmosphere would be thinner than plastic wrap.
Half of the atmosphere’s mass lies below 5.6 kilometers altitude. That means that half of all the air that has ever existed sits in a layer thinner than the distance you could hike in a few hours. Commercial airliners cruise at about 11 kilometers, above roughly 75% of the atmosphere. The edge of space, defined as 100 kilometers altitude, lies beyond 99.9% of atmospheric mass.
We’ll try again for some perspective: If you could drive your car straight up at highway speeds, you’d reach the edge of space in about an hour. The entire life-supporting atmosphere of Earth — every breath ever taken by every living thing — exists in a layer so thin you could traverse it faster than a typical person’s commute to work.
The International Space Station orbits at 400 kilometers, which seems high until you realize it’s only 6% of Earth’s radius. It’s like hovering six millimeters above our basketball — close enough that atmospheric drag still slows the station down, requiring periodic boosts to maintain orbit.
Consider Mount Everest, at 8.8 kilometers high. Climbers at its summit are already above roughly 66% of the atmosphere. They’re essentially poking their heads out of the planetary envelope that sustains life. Yet Everest represents less than 0.14% of Earth’s radius — on our basketball, it would be a bump smaller than the texture of the ball’s surface grip.
Weather — all of it, from gentle spring rains to devastating hurricanes — occurs almost entirely within the troposphere, the lowest layer of atmosphere extending up to about 12 kilometers. The entire drama of climate and weather, everything that affects life on Earth’s surface, plays out in a space proportionally thinner than the fuzz on a tennis ball. It is insignificant, and that makes the changes we’re making to it all the more intimidating.
The Graveyard of Worlds
Perhaps most humbling of all is the realization that we are late arrivals to a planet that has repeatedly seen the slate wiped clean. Earth is not just not our world — it’s a graveyard containing the remains of at least five previous worlds, each populated by entirely different communities of life that all lasted a lot longer, putting it mildly, than we have to this point.
Paleontologists have identified five major mass extinctions in the fossil record, events so catastrophic they reset the entire trajectory of life on Earth. The most recent, 66 million years ago, ended the age of dinosaurs. The most severe, 252 million years ago at the end of the Permian period, eliminated roughly 96% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial species. Life came closer to complete extinction than at any other time in Earth’s history.
But these major extinctions represent only the most dramatic episodes in an ongoing story of turnover and replacement. Background extinction rates ensure that most species last only 1-10 million years before disappearing. Forever. The average mammalian species exists for about 1 million years; for marine invertebrates, it’s closer to 11 million years.
The most consistent math we can produce shows that over 99% of all species that have ever lived on Earth are now extinct. The current biosphere — every living thing we can observe today — represents less than 1% of all the biodiversity that has ever existed. We live in a world populated by the survivors, the refugees, the lucky inheritors of a planet where extinction is the norm and survival is the rare exception.
Current estimates suggest that Earth has hosted between 1 billion and 1 trillion species throughout its history. Today, we can identify roughly 8.7 million species, with new discoveries constantly revising this number upward. But even if the true number of current species is 10 or 20 million, we’re still looking at less than 2% of all the life forms that have ever existed.
The fossil record itself represents only a tiny fraction of past life. Most organisms never fossilize; they decay completely, leaving no trace of their existence. Soft-bodied creatures, small organisms, and anything living in environments where fossilization is unlikely simply vanish from the historical record. What we know about past life comes from the exceptional circumstances where hard parts like shells, bones, or teeth become buried in sediments under just the right conditions.
This means that our entire understanding of life’s history on Earth comes from studying less than 1% of 1% of everything that has ever lived. We are examining scattered pages from a vast library, most of which has been burned and scattered to the winds.
Our Place in Deep Time
Humans as a species have existed for roughly 300,000 years. Complex human civilization — agriculture, cities, writing — is less than 10,000 years old. Industrial civilization spans about 200 years. In Earth’s 4.6-billion-year history, our entire species represents 0.007% of the planet’s existence. Human civilization represents 0.0002%. Industrial society represents 0.000004%.
If Earth’s history were compressed into a single year, humans would appear in the final minutes of December 31st. All of recorded history would flash by in the last few seconds before midnight. The entire Industrial Revolution — steam engines, electricity, automobiles, computers, space travel — would occur in the final millisecond.
Yet during our geological eyeblink of existence, we’ve managed to trigger what many scientists consider the sixth mass extinction. Current species extinction rates are 100 to 1,000 times higher than background rates, driven by habitat destruction, climate change, pollution, and direct exploitation. We are witnessing the end of the current biological world and the beginning of whatever comes next.
This perspective doesn’t diminish human experience, achievement, and engineering — it locates them within the proper context. We are not the inheritors of a planet designed for us; we are temporary residents of a dynamic system that has supported countless different forms of life throughout its history. Our layer of the fossil record will someday be studied by whatever intelligence emerges from the ruins of our current biosphere, just as we now study the traces left by trilobites, dinosaurs, and countless other experiments in living that flourished and vanished long before we arrived.
We occupy an infinitesimally thin slice of space and time on a planet that has already forgotten more about life than we will ever know.
A note for those listening: If you visit the written article on Substack, I’ve embedded a YouTube video that effectively illustrates the depth of the earth. It’s mind-blowing, you should check it out.
Our egocentrism
After contemplating our cosmic insignificance — our invisibility from space, our residence on a paper-thin crust, our brief flicker in deep time — you might expect human egocentrism to crumble under the weight of evidence. Yet somehow, it persists with remarkable tenacity. The reason lies not in our rational minds, which can grasp these scales intellectually, but in the fundamental structure of conscious experience itself. Every moment of awareness reinforces a profound illusion: That we are at the center of reality.
The Headless Experiment
British philosopher Douglas Harding discovered something remarkable when he simply asked people to examine their own direct experience. Try this now: Look around you without moving your head. What do you actually see?
You see the world spreading out before you — walls, objects, perhaps other people. You see your body from the shoulders down. You might catch a glimpse of your nose in peripheral vision. But there’s something you definitely don’t see: Your own head and face. From your own perspective, you are literally headless. From your own perspective, you are only a perspective.
This isn’t a metaphor or philosophical abstraction. Right now, as you read these words, you are experiencing yourself as a conscious space from which the world appears, not as a physical object within that world. You are aware of being aware, but you cannot see the thing doing the being aware. Your head — the very location where neuroscience tells us consciousness arises — is invisible to you.
Point to yourself. Where are you pointing? Not to your chest or your heart, but to your face. Yet your face is the one part of your body you’ve never directly seen. Everything you know about your own appearance comes from reflected light in mirrors and photographs, or the reports of others. The face you identify as “you” exists only as a reflection.
Harding called this “headlessness” — the immediate, undeniable fact that from your own perspective, you appear to be not a thing among things, but the very space in which things appear. You seem to be less like an object in the world and more like the world itself, with reality radiating outward from a centerless center that you call “here.”
The Bubble That Travels With You
This creates a strange and persistent illusion: Wherever you go, you take the center of the universe with you. Reality always appears to be organized around your location, extending outward in all directions from the point you occupy. Objects are “near” or “far” relative to you. Events happen “here” where you are, or “there” in the distance.
Walk across a room and notice how the entire spatial organization of reality rearranges itself around your new position. What was “over there” is now “over here.” What was “in front” is now “behind.” The center of the coordinate system — the point from which all distances are measured — travels with you seamlessly and invisibly.
This isn’t just spatial. Time, too, seems to revolve around your experience. Events are “now” when you experience them, “past” when they’ve left your awareness, “future” when you haven’t done anything yet but imagine them. The present moment — the eternally moving boundary between past and future — follows you through time just as the spatial center follows you through space.
You carry with you not just a point of view, but apparently the viewing point for all of reality. Wherever you go, “here” comes with you. Whenever you exist, “now” accompanies you. From our perspective — from my perspective — the entire universe seems to pivot around my awareness, reorganizing itself moment by moment to maintain me at its center.
The Asymmetry of Perspective
This creates a profound asymmetry in how we experience ourselves versus how we experience others. When you look at another person, you see them clearly as an object in the world — a body with a head, occupying a particular location in space, existing at a certain distance from you. They appear as a thing among things, solid and visible and finite.
But when you “look” at yourself, you find no object at all. You discover what Harding called “capacity” — an open, aware emptiness in which the world appears. You seem to be not a what but a where, not a thing but the space in which things exist. While others appear as limited objects with clear boundaries, you seem to be unlimited space with no boundaries at all.
This asymmetry is built into the structure of consciousness itself. You can never experience yourself the way you experience others, and you can never experience others the way you experience yourself. Others will always appear “out there” as objects in your awareness, while you will always appear to yourself as the awareness in which objects appear.
When other people look toward you, they see what you cannot see: Your face, your head, your body as a discrete object in space. When you look toward others, you see what they cannot see of themselves: Their appearance as objects in the world. Everyone else experiences themselves as headless awareness while seeing everyone else as headed bodies — a perfect recipe for mutual misunderstanding about the nature of consciousness and identity.
The Mirror Revelation
The shock of seeing yourself in a mirror for the first time — something every child experiences around 18 months of age — represents a profound ontological crisis. Suddenly, the headless awareness you’ve always known yourself to be acquires a face, a definite appearance, a clear location as an object among objects.
But notice what happens when you look in a mirror right now. You still don’t see your actual face — you see a reflection of your face. The real face, the one attached to your skull, remains as invisible as ever. Even mirrors don’t allow you to see yourself as you actually are; they only show you a reversed image of how you appear to others.
This is why photographs of ourselves often look strange, why recorded videos of our own voices sound alien, why we’re surprised by our appearance in unexpected mirrors. The self we know from the inside — the headless, spacious awareness that seems to be the center of everything — bears no resemblance to the finite, located object that others see when they look at us.
Yet gradually, through repeated exposure to mirrors and photographs, we learn to identify with this reflected image. We come to believe that the face in the mirror is who we really are, despite never having directly seen it. We internalize an external view of ourselves, creating a mental self-image based on how we appear to others rather than how we appear to ourselves.
The Persistence of Centrality
Even when we intellectually understand that we’re not at the center of the universe — when we’ve grasped the vastness of space, the antiquity of time, our biological insignificance — the immediate structure of experience continues to suggest otherwise. Every moment of consciousness reinforces the feeling that reality revolves around us.
This isn’t mere selfishness or psychological immaturity. Those qualities can definitely make it worse, but perspective is just a necessary feature of how awareness works. Consciousness always requires a perspective, a point from which the world appears. That point, by definition, must seem central to the conscious being experiencing from it. You cannot be aware of the world from someone else’s perspective; you can only imagine what their perspective might be like from your own perspective.
This creates what we might call “the perspectival fallacy” — the assumption that because reality appears to be organized around our viewpoint, it actually is organized around us. We mistake the structure of consciousness for the structure of reality itself.
Consider how this reinforces every form of human egocentrism we’ve discussed. If you seem to be at the spatial center of the universe, it feels natural to assume that the universe was designed with you in mind. If “now” always coincides with your present moment, it feels obvious that you’re living in the most important time in history. If reality reorganizes itself around your location wherever you go, why wouldn’t cosmic forces be conspiring to help you?
Every conscious being experiences itself as the center of reality. Right now, billions of humans are simultaneously experiencing themselves as the focal point around which the universe revolves. Each person carries their own “here” and “now,” their own sense of being the aware space in which the world appears.
From a third-person perspective, this creates an almost absurd situation: Billions of centers, each convinced of its own centrality, each invisible to itself while visible to all others. Every human walks around in a private universe centered on their own awareness, while simultaneously being a peripheral object in billions of other private universes.
And it’s not like humans are the only aware things on this world. Everything else has a perspective, too. Your pets don’t perceive themselves as part of your reality, an addendum to your existence. They just perceive, first-person just like you and I.
The Expansion of Identity
Harding’s insight points toward a resolution of this cosmic joke. If you are not the small, located thing you appear to be to others, and if others are not the small, located things they appear to be to you, then what are we all really?
The headless experiment suggests that, philosophically, at the deepest level, we are not separate centers of awareness but expressions of a single, centerless awareness appearing as multiple perspectives. What looks like billions of individual consciousnesses from the outside might be one consciousness experiencing itself from billions of vantage points.
I don’t mean this literally. I’m talking now about taking that headless perspective to its logical conclusion, if for a moment we can drop the feeling of ownership over ourselves. This kind of recognition has been demonstrated many times with perception-altering drugs, through mental illness and brain injuries, and by people who have spent long years practicing concentration.
This doesn’t collapse into solipsism — the belief that only you exist — but rather into what we might call “non-dual awareness.” You are not the only one who is really awareness; everyone is awareness, appearing to themselves as centerless space while appearing to others as centered objects.
If this is true, then the perspectival fallacy becomes not just an individual mistake but a collective one. Humanity as a whole is not at the center of the universe, but neither is any individual human. The center is everywhere and nowhere — a function of awareness itself rather than a location in space or time.
Breaking the Spell
Understanding the illusion of centrality doesn’t make it disappear — you’ll continue to experience yourself as headless awareness for as long as you’re conscious. But it can break the spell of believing that your perspective is privileged, that your experience is more real or important than others’, that the universe was designed with you or your species in mind.
The same consciousness that creates the illusion of human specialness also creates the capacity to see through that illusion, although it takes work to do so, as opposed to just accepting the default. We can recognize our perspectival limitations, acknowledge the universality of the central-feeling experience, and locate ourselves more humbly within the larger cosmos.
We are not the center of reality, but we are points where reality becomes conscious of itself. We are not separate from the universe, but ways the universe experiences itself subjectively. We are not special among conscious beings, but we are expressions of something — awareness itself — that may be the most remarkable feature of existence.
Certainly, it is for us.
The headless perspective reveals both our cosmic insignificance and our absolute intimacy with the cosmos. We are nothing special, and we are the very capacity in which the special and unspecial alike appear. We are infinitesimally small parts of an incomprehensibly vast universe, and we are the openness in which that universe manifests itself.
This paradox may be the closest we can come to understanding our true position: Neither central nor peripheral, neither important nor unimportant, but rather the aware space in which questions of center and periphery, importance and unimportance, arise and are contemplated. We are the rockfall becoming conscious of itself, debris that has learned to wonder about the avalanche of which it is part.
To close, if we don’t figure out how to sustainably manage our immediate environment, the Earth is not going to end. It’ll be just fine. It will just continue to change, without us, as it has for most of existence.
