Seven Ways We Are Central to the Universe

The New Universe and the Human Future

When people say, “I’m human,” they usually mean “I make mistakes,” “I have my limits,” “Don’t expect too much of me.” Admitting our own imperfections is admirable, but thinking of being human essentially as a limitation is a self-fulfilling prophecy and denies an astonishing truth that science has just discovered: in the expanding universe, human beings are not only significant – we are central! Not, of course, in a literal, geographic sense. There is no geographic center to our expanding universe. But we humans are cosmically central or special in at least seven fascinating ways never before imagined, all of which follow directly from the principles of modern astrophysics.

The authors’ book, The New Universe and the Human Future: How a Shared Cosmology Could Transform the World, will be published by Yale University Press in April 2011. This material is also discussed in their 2006 book, The View from the Center of the Universe: Discovering Our Extraordinary Place in the Cosmos. Joel R. Primack is one of the world’s leading cosmologists and Nancy Ellen Abrams is a philosopher of science.

We Are Made of the Rarest Material in the Universe: Stardust

Stardust is a name for the heavy atoms created inside stars and blown out as dust as the stars age and die, to drift through space. Stardust represents only one-hundredth of one percent of the density of the universe but 90% of the weight of each one of us. All the atomic matter in the universe makes up about four and a half percent of the cosmic density, but most of this material is invisible. All the stars and glowing gas that light up the night sky represent only about half a percent of the cosmic density. The rest of the universe is mainly non-atomic dark matter (23%) and dark energy (72%). If you never learned this in school, it’s because the composition of the universe has only been known since 1998.

We Live at the Peak Period for Astronomical Observation in the Entire 13.7 Billion Year Evolution of the Universe

It took many billions of years for the evolution of life that is so complex and competent that it can observe and understand the universe. But no sooner did we acquire the technological ability to see hundreds of billions of distant galaxies than we discovered that they are beginning to disappear over the cosmic horizon. The reason is that the expansion of the universe has begun to accelerate. As space expands faster, light from more and more galaxies will no longer be able to cross such rapidly expanding space to reach our galaxy. The universe as we are observing it today will become mythic; it will be the lost Golden Age – a fabulously rich sky full of galaxies that, our very distant descendants will know, actually existed but will never be seen again.

Our Bodies are at the Midpoint of All Possible Sizes

The largest size we know is the size of the visible universe; the smallest size is set by the interaction of relativity and quantum mechanics, and it’s called the Planck length. Logarithmically, we are right in the middle. And we couldn’t be anywhere else, since if we were much smaller, we wouldn’t be made of enough atoms to be complex enough to have our consciousness. If we were much bigger, the speed of communications among our parts (which is limited by the speed of light) would be too slow. If there were an intelligence as big as a galaxy, it would only have had time for the number of thoughts most of us have in a few minutes. Complex consciousness is the job of creatures about our size, and this goes for intelligent aliens, too, if they exist.

Our Entire Universe May Be a Rare Bubble of Spacetime in the Infinite Superuniverse

If modern theories about this are right (they may not be, since we have not yet obtained any relevant observational evidence), then beyond our unique and isolated bubble that formed in the Big Bang, there is neither space nor time as we know it – just a pure quantum regime where every tiny region is racing away from ever other one at such speeds that nothing larger than an elementary particle can ever form. But here inside our bubble, there is time for evolution and history, and there is space across which connections can form and structures can develop.

We are at the Center of the Principles That Uphold the Universe

Every culture from ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia until the beginning of modern science in the 17th century always assumed they were central to their universe. How amazing that after pooh-poohing that idea for the last four centuries, we discover that it’s not the longing to be central that makes us central or special: it’s the structure of the universe. We are at the center of the principles that uphold the universe, and our generation is the first to know it and start to contemplate its significance.