The Importance Of Being Human : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR
It's easy to bash humans. We are making a mess of this world. We kill
each other. We are incapable of respecting differing points of view. We
are selfish, destructive, parasitic. I'm sure you could add a few
derisive comments of your own here. I remember, as a teenager, how
infuriated I became when I learned about holy wars, about how people can
actually justify killing others based on faith. Not that other wars are
any better. But what happened, I wondered, to the most basic of
notions, shared by all major religions, that life is sacred?
The jumps from single-celled to multi-cellular organisms and then to
highly functioning, intelligent beings are immensely unlikely, depending
on a series of random, unrepeatable accidents. Even if complex life
exists elsewhere in the cosmos, and we can't say that it doesn't, it is
so far removed from us that for all practical purposes we are alone. And
if we are alone and can think, we are rare and precious. And if we are
rare and precious, we have a new directive that goes beyond the
destructiveness that has ruled human history for millennia. We must
preserve life at all costs, be the guardians of this world. To counter
the Copernican Principle, we should develop a "humancentrism":
we alone have the power to ruin or to save this precious world we live
in. And I don't mean this in some kind of naive, la-la way. I mean it
quite literally. If we don't mend our ways, we will only have ourselves
to blame. Judging from the past few thousands of years, no one, alien
intelligence or God, will come to our rescue. It's really up to us.
