Less Wrong 02 - Principle of Mediocrity
The Principle of Mediocrity is another idea that David Deutsch questions in The Beginning of Infinity. Again, I considered this idea to be true without giving it much thought. The idea suggests that humans and the Earth are insignificant on the cosmic scale. Some quotes on this idea and its incorrectness, all taken from chapter three.
So fruitful has this abandonment of anthropocentric theories been, and so important in the broader history of ideas, that anti-anthropocentrism has increasingly been elevated to the status of a universal principle, sometimes called the 'Principle of Mediocrity': there is nothing significant about humans in the cosmic scheme of things.
As the physicist Stephen Hawking puts it, humans are 'just a chemical scum on the surface of a typical planet that's in orbit around a typical start on the outskirts of a typical galaxy'.
This turns out to not be true. 95% of the constituents of the universe is dark energy and dark matter. Atomic matter makes up the remaining 5%. All of this matter and energy is distributed out over so much space that the typical spot in the universe is a vacuum. Which means both what we're made of and the point in the universe where we exist are definitely rare and possibly significant in our rareness.
Cold, dark and empty. That unimaginably desolate environment is typical of the universe - and is another measure of how untypical the Earth and its chemical scum are, in a straightforward physical sense.
You can find the other Less Wrong issue, Spaceship Earth, here.