The universe is vast and infinite, and human beings are as small as dust in it, so what is the meaning of existence?

For an individual organism, any part that makes up the body, even an extremely small cell, has its own necessity and importance.

In a normal state, once any of them have a deficiency, then for the whole system is extremely fatal, because this deficiency is not a simple addition or subtraction operation, but means irreversible damage or even death.

The same idea applies to human society. In the whole society, every person or institution is a member and participant of the society. If one day the society allows these constituent individuals to disappear for no reason, the impact on the whole society will be more than simply 100-1. It is for this reason that a stable and harmonious society is inseparable from the protection of the law.

From a higher and more macroscopic point of view, any flower or grass that has survived billions of years of change on earth has its own value and meaning, and they are not superfluous.

If we put this logic and viewpoint into the entire universe, an intriguing question arises: in the entire universe, the earth is a grain of dust, what is the meaning of the existence of this grain of dust? And in the dust above the human, is too small to add, what is the meaning of human existence?

If we simply look at the problem from the perspective of physics can be found, whether it is life flourishing earth, or carrying all things vast and infinite universe, in fact, are made of countless coincidences stacked up.

We all know that the universe is "ruled" by four fundamental forces. Since the birth of the universe, these four basic forces have been divided and constant, because of their existence, to create a world full of order.

However, once any one of them has changed, then the original world full of order will collapse in an instant. Just like a block landscape supported by four pillars, once these four pillars have any slight change, the whole block landscape will collapse instantly.

Of course, the "coincidence" of the universe can not only be reflected by the four fundamental forces, there are many tiny constants, all reflecting this precise coincidence.

To put it in another way, the Earth is just an ordinary rocky planet in the solar system, and the solar system is equally different and insignificant in the galaxy where it is located. According to the data, there are at least 100 billion solar systems in our galaxy.

The solar system at the galactic scale is insignificant, but at the scale of the observable universe, the insignificant object becomes the Milky Way, because there are at least 2 trillion "galaxies" in the entire observable universe.

Many people know that every light we see, in fact, are from 8 minutes ago, because the distance between the Earth and the Sun 150 million kilometers, photons need to travel more than 8 minutes.

Looking at the entire universe, the extremely fast photon would feel deep despair and helplessness because it would take it 100,000 years just to traverse the galaxy, not to mention the amazing 96 billion years it would take to traverse the observable universe.

In this desperate vastness of space, the Earth exists as Carl Sagan described it: "like dust suspended in bright light.

In the scale of the universe, the huge size of the Earth is like a grain of dust, then the "dust" on the human population, and how small is it?

If the universe 13.8 billion years of time is condensed into one year, January 1, zero is the moment of the birth of the universe, then the first homo sapiens appeared on Earth at 22:24 on December 31, all human history occurred on December 31, 23:59 minutes and 46 seconds.

Stephen Hawking pointed out during his lifetime that at the next midnight bell, human civilization, which has created countless glorious achievements, may be mercilessly swallowed up by the river of time, and those probes that are now buried in the depths of the universe may be the only traces left by humans in the universe.

Back to the beginning of the question, human not only appeared very late, the development of time is also very short, and even live in a world is also so small, is it for the universe, human existence is no longer any meaning?

Of course not, on the one hand as philosopher Guy Kahane said, "The very fact that intelligent beings like humans are like gems glittering in the wilderness when compared with uncivilized beasts and stones without any thought is full of meaning."

On the other hand, although there are countless stars in the vast universe and the existence of intelligent life is almost a certainty from a probability point of view, the reality seen so far is a dead silence, which means that humans may really be the only intelligent life in the universe.

After all, there are still an incredible number of coincidences that make it possible for the Earth to produce humans, such as being within the habitable zone of the solar system, having the right thickness of atmosphere, having moons of sufficient size and unique plate movements, etc.

If there is really only one intelligent life in the infinite universe, then the meaning of human existence will be infinitely magnified, because at this point in time, humans are like a lighthouse without words, giving the direction of the later, so that they are not in the dark slowly groping for the way forward.

In the end, the meaning of human existence is not what the universe gives us, but what we give ourselves. And smallness is not scary, what is scary is the self-abandonment mentality that arises from smallness.

Just as until Eradose calculated the radius of the Earth, human beings do not know how vast the earth currently living; until Galileo used the telescope to peer at the Milky Way, we do not know that there are so many stars in the universe; until Hubble calculated the distance between the galaxies, we know that the Milky Way is so ordinary in the universe.

In fact, every confirmation of human insignificance is an unspeakable and great progress for ourselves.