I am important! Right?

“A man said to the universe: 'Sir, I exist!' 
'However,' replied the universe. 
'The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.” 
― Stephen Crane, War Is Kind and Other Poems

At 6:30 in the morning your alarm goes off.  You crawl slowly out of bed all the while thinking how much you would rather still be in it.   Your mind begins to ponder the scheduled day ahead.  The drive through dreadful traffic, the big lunch meeting with a new client, picking up the kids from school, and even what you might eat for your meals.  During your pondering you have sheerly out of habit showered, chosen clothing, brushed your teeth, and combed your hair.  Throughout your busy day you interact with dozens of relations in person, and hundreds more when taking social media into account.  These interactions produce a variety of emotions and thoughts that couldn't possibly be counted.  The experiences, thoughts and emotions continue until you once again crawl back into your bed to start the cycle all over again.

Our lives as human beings are a wonder of cellular, pyschological and social complexity.  So much so that with a recent world population estimate of nearly 7.1 billion, it seems unfathomable that each of those people has a life just as full of thoughts, emotions and relationships as complex if not more so than my own.  Suddenly my important life seems a little less important.

Now let's take a step back and observe from a different angle.  I am talking a step waaaaaaay back!  7.1Billion human beings live on the planet we call earth along with many other forms of life.  Our planet is huge yet according to http://solarsystemfacts.net/sun-facts.html we could place the earth inside our sun over 1,300,000 times!  The distances in space are equally as immense and seriously hard for my feeble brain to comprehend.  For example the nearest star to our own is called Proxima Centauri.  This star is located about 4.2 light years away from the sun.  In other words the distance that light can travel in the span of 4.2 years.  Light travels fast folks, like 299,792,458 meters per second fast!  If we launched our fastest spacecraft from earth tomorrow it would arrive in about 50,000 years.  I will be dead by then. :) Our solar system is a tiny dot in the milky way galaxy and and our galaxy is a tiny dot in the scope of the entire universe. I don't need to keep rambling off random facts about space distances as I think by now you can see that space is incredibly immense and is governed by many many physical forces which keep everything neatly in place.

So does my tiny life really matter in the grand scope of the universe?  If space is a giant vast wasteland with no other form of life, then you better believe my life matters.  If space however is full of life and even higher life forms than our own, then our importance could be highly debatable.  Whether life exists out there is quite another topic in itself which I will give opinion on another time.