Wednesday’s Big Idea
Today's Big Idea: Cosmic Thinking
Time was when we felt an enormous amount of existential angst about our diminishing place in the universe. The more science taught us, the smaller we became.
Today the pendulum is swinging in the opposite direction, as our understanding of life in the universe increases. Intelligent life elsewhere is possible, but humans are extraordinarily rare. This new perspective is not just a pivot away from existential brooding.
As Nancy Ellen Abrams and Joel R. Primack argue in their book The New Universe and the Human Future: How a Shared Cosmology Could Transform the World, we need to use both the uniqueness of our condition along with our knowledge about the inflation of the universe as a model for a stable period of growth and resource use.
