Are Humans Meaningless?

I'm sorry if anyone feels depressed after reading this but it's something I've been thinking about a lot.

This is a video by my favorite YouTube video blogger. To give a quick summary, he pulls lots of facts from his astronomy textbook to show why we are insignificant worthless specks in the grand scheme of the earth and the universe. You should watch it.


While this video doesn't really mention the fact that most of the universe is just empty space and that we could be the only intelligent beings that exist, it's still scary. We really are just ants that can be squashed at any second. No, we're smaller than ants. As mentioned in the video, the ratio of the earth's mass to the universe's mass is at most 1 to 100 billion billion (yes, billion billion). If there were a theoretical god-like figure that could live for thousands of years and see everything in the universe, chances are that he/she would never find us in their lifetime.

The reason this scares me is that I worry that if everyone in the world realized how meaningless and insignificant our lives are, we would have a 2012-type apocalypse on our hands. And why not? If our lives don't matter, why not just disregard all rules and do what we want for our brief time on this earth?

And to answer that question, we must acknowledge that humanity is actually good. The reason we don't just do whatever we want is because we care. We care about our friends, our family, and most of all our children and we want to create a better world for them, not one that lies in the wake of our no-rules destruction.

Of all the things you can do with your 80-90 years on this planet, I would argue the best thing is to better the lives of others. Some of the most respected people in history like Martin Luther King Jr, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Malcolm X devoted their lives to making life enjoyable for everyone. All four of those men could have had happy, naive, and secluded lives but instead went to jail or even died for their cause of improving other people's lives.

Mathematically, you mean nothing. But as a human, you can mean a lot more than that.