Insignificant Little Blue Planet/Headscratchers

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • I'm just posting it here because I don't know where else it fits, but here I go. Why are there people find us being just a small part of something much larger...terrifying? Being an extremely narrow minded person, I don't understand those kind of people; we can't (correct me if I'm wrong) even correctly understand every minute things that happens around us (I mean, for the love of god, we don't even know how consciousness work) and they are worried about what?
    • That we're a tiny, tiny, tiny part of something incomprehensibly large scares a lot of people because it challenges their worldview. Think about it: all of the major religions (or most, anyway) try to explain how Earth got there, its relationship with the sky, and what humans need to do to survive. Basically, religion teaches that humans are major players in the universe, just a step or two below the gods (or just one god), and basically only applies to humans. Religion says nothing about the vast amount of stars and galaxies and the possibility of other life-supporting planets; that all came MUCH later than most religions, and not without a considerable fight.
    • People think they matter. Finding out they don't is quite a hit to the ego.
    • Pretty much. For the longest time, we humans were taught that only we mattered, that God constructed everything for us. The idea that we...probably don't matter, that God likely created other intelligent beings like us is too horrific for some to fathom. We lose some of the 'we are so special' thing.
    • As far as Christianity is concerned The Bible never says that we humans were the only creature made in the image of God. One recent interpretation of the passage, "Man has become as one of us, knowing the difference between good and evil." has come to mean that God is conversing with aliens. Regardless of whether or not there are aliens we are not alone in the universe because God fills the universe and his love for us is what makes us special. It may be a hit to the ego to say that Man isn't perfect in his beauty and his reasoning and that we aren't the center of the universe, but Christians are supposed to throw ego out the window when they come to God.
  • Conversely, some people are terrified that we are alone in the universe, and that we will never come into contact with any other sentient species. They want there to be aliens out there, probably to some degree so that we can collaborate to create a better picture of what it means to exist. To these kind of people, they prefer to think of the earth as a little blue dot in a sea of possibilities.
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