At Aeon, Monash University philosopher Tim Bayne urges us to consider our insignificance in the light of two famous photos of Earth, one taken from 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometres) away — the famous Pale Blue Dot:

Pale Blue Dot inspires a range of feelings – wonderment, vulnerability, anxiety. But perhaps the dominant response it elicits is that of cosmic insignificance. The image seems to capture in concrete form the fact that we don’t really matter. “Just a pale blue dot,” April 25, 2025

But wait. What should Earth have been expected to look like at that distance?

What would the Louvre, for example, or the Library of Congress, or the Taj Mahal look like from Earth’s stratosphere? Does the view from a vast distance have any relationship to the significance of a human cultural achievement? Does the view from nowhere have any relationship to the significance of Earth?

Then he shows us Earthrise, taken from the Moon in 1968:

Inspiring awe, reverence and concern for the planet’s health, the photographer Galen Rowell described it as perhaps the ‘most influential environmental photograph ever taken’. Pale Blue Dot is a much more ambivalent image. It speaks not to Earth’s fecundity and life-supporting powers, but to its – and, by extension, our – insignificance in the vastness of space. “Just a pale blue dot”

Vast distance makes it difficult to determine what human efforts are significant. From the Moon, we wouldn’t be able to tell the Taj Mahal from the Agra city bus barns. But that doesn’t demonstrate anything in principle about significance.

A hidden agenda?

Looking beyond Professor Bayne’s reflections, most writing on this subject seems to follow a hidden agenda: To use the mere physical size of the universe to dwarf the significance of human intellectual and spiritual achievements. Presumably, it does something for those who believe it — and a surprising number of people do.

Astronomer and science writer Carl Sagan (1934–1996) popularized the trend:

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. Genius

“Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark”?

By any rational standard of significance, our planet matters a great deal more than the vast heaps of rubble currently in orbit — for the same reasons as King Tut’s tomb matters a great deal more than the massive drifts of sand that surround it.

In short, because significance is an intellectual, moral, and spiritual idea, we are in reality a lonely speck of significance in a great enveloping cosmic dark.

But again, wait. What if we are NOT alone?

Dr. Bayne, who is the author of Philosophy of Mind: An Introduction (Routledge 2021) and other books in the genre, then turns to the issue of life on other planets. He imagines a “consciousness camera” that can detect it and assign a red dot to the planets that feature conscious life:

One possibility is that Earth would emerge as the sole red dot in a vast expanse of blackness. (‘Nothing like us anywhere,’ we might say to ourselves with justifiable pride.) But the odds of that are surely low – perhaps vanishingly so. Astronomers suggest that there may be as many as 50 quintillion (50,000,000,000,000,000,000) habitable planets in the cosmos. What percentage of those planets actually sustain life? And, of those that sustain life, what percentage sustain conscious life? We don’t know. But let’s suppose that consciousness is found in only one of every billion or so life-supporting planets. Even on that relatively conservative assumption, there may be as many as 50 billion consciousness-supporting planets. Earth, as viewed through our consciousness camera, would be just one more red dot among a vast cloud of such dots.

Human creativity might be unmatched on this planet; it may even be without peer in the Orion arm of the Milky Way. But, given the numbers, we’re unlikely to be eye-catching from a cosmic point of view. “Just a pale blue dot”

It sounds as though Dr. Bayne wants to have it both ways. We are insignificant because it appears that we are alone but we are also insignificant if we are part of a crowd. A vast, lonely crowd…

But why aren’t they all significant?

Dr. Bayne’s numbers appear to be pulled out of nowhere but let’s grant them for the sake of argument. If 50 billion planets feature entities with at least a human level of conscious awareness, they amount to 50 billion significant planets. In that case, significance is far more common in the universe than Pale Blue Dot-ologists would seem to want us to think.

Now someone may wish to argue that all these planets full of conscious beings are somehow “not significant” — even though the very concept of significance depends crucially on the higher order of consciousness that those beings possess, as we do ourselves. But adopting the view that none of us are significant is merely a choice. It is a choice quite common among materialist atheists but it is certainly not forced upon us by any evidence from nature.

Pale Blue Dot-ology, on the face of it, seems like an attempt to brand science as an intellectual property of materialist atheism. Perhaps more of us should start calling out these kinds of assumptions that do not arise from the evidence from nature — as we are urged to believe — but rather fromunderlying intellectual commitments.