Is human life cosmically insignificant?

Laurent Grenier, Canadian philosopher, author of “Life Revisited: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Purpose of Existence” (SOLEDIT, January, 2025).

Blaise Pascal, a French philosopher, physicist, and mathematician, once remarked that the enormity of the universe, in terms of space and time, admittedly dwarfing our human scale, matters little compared to our ability to perceive this universe and conceive of its nature. Indeed, a gargantuan being who isn’t conscious of their existence is nothing to speak of relative to a Lilliputian (6-inch tall people in the story of Gulliver’s travels by Jonathan swift) who is self-aware and can experience the whole spectrum of human emotions, including the joy of finding meaning and purpose in life.

As for the sobering law of increasing entropy and disorder described in classical thermodynamics, it must be qualified with this clarification: The law in question concerns closed systems that never exchange matter and energy with their surroundings. The thing is, life is an example of open system that is far from equilibrium and sustains itself through regeneration and reproduction, thanks to an ongoing process of energy and matter consumption, expenditure, or elimination. It is negentropic, in that it creates order within and disorder without.

Now, life is nonetheless local and transient in a galaxy whose sun is doomed to falter and die in approximately five billion years. Will humanity, against all odds, find a way to survive this cataclysmic event by moving to another galaxy with a sunlike star and earthlike planet that can support life? Then again, doom is doom, be it soon or later. 

This begs the following question: Is the universe as a whole truly a closed system that will ultimately reach what is usually referred to as a heat death? In my humble opinion, this remains a moot point. The manifest universe that we experience is arguably open onto an intangible and foundational reality: an infinite void that is not, strictly speaking, nothing as it latently contains everything that has the potential to become manifest and be experienced. What the far future holds is beyond our ken, mine, yours, and that of physicists alike. 

But what if the hypothesis of a heat death, as the bleak conclusion of the universal drama, is indeed correct, although my intuition says otherwise? In other words, what if all that we hold dear is inescapably destined to end at some point in time, eons from now? Does that negate the value we assign to life as we live it? Not at all. If anything, it increases this value or the urgency of making the best of it. Likewise, book lovers do not give up reading because books are finite and punctuated, after their last word, with a terminal period. In fact, they know that variety is the spice of life and can only exist if things are allowed to eventually draw to a close and be replaced by new things. Otherwise, they would be stuck on the same thing, the same book, the same theory or story, forever extended. What a narrow confinement as that of the famed, or rather infamous, Alcatraz! What a consummate bore!

Having said that, while our individual life includes many chapters, can we not object that our individual death amounts to more than just closing a book and opening another? Yes, we can, unless we identify with the creative and nurturing foundation of the universe, both within and beyond our human bounds. I find in this expanded view a welcome breath of timeless fresh air. But it requires an effort of mental elevation that portrays our individual experience as part of a universal adventure of extraordinary scope and richness. 

The problem is that we are creatures of habit who confuse their acquired ways of thinking and acting, their second nature, with their true nature, which is remarkably adaptable or capable of acquiring new habits, more compatible with their circumstances that necessarily change over time. 

In the face of our eventual death as individuals, I suggest we learn to look past this temporal horizon and consider that variety is the spice of an infinitely larger cosmic life that includes us and so much more.