And why?
Here we are, farther from extraterrestrial life (maybe) than we have the ability to detect.
As far as humans have been able to determine so far, earth has the only life around. How’s that for bleak???
As an aside, isn’t that wild The Roman Empire rose and fell without those folks knowing about “The New World?”
Anyway, back to my non-point point. Where is earth? Why is earth?
Firstly, where? So far as we can tell, there’s infinite nothingness in every direction. In our own solar system, earth is the only habitable planet. You may be able to live on mars when the sun’s shining, but as soon as it sets, it’s gonna be coooolllllld. Tbh, it’ll be cold when the sun’s shining, too. When I hear dipshit charlatans talk about colonizing mars, I’m like, “Fuck that — let’s find a way to fold space so we can go somewhere _good_.” Actually, for way less money, we could just, like, clean up the beaches here.
Wherever “here” is.
I really start believing that time is like a sphere. Or I guess it’d be a circle, as that’d do map more cleanly on to the “timeline” metaphor.
My point is simply that there is no beginning and no end. It’s like in the original Planet of the Apes. They’re like walking along a deserted beach, and a young Charlton Heston sees the Statue of Liberty sticking out of the ground, in sand to like (the statue’s) armpit-level, and at that point we realize the planet of the apes is earth — which makes sense. Like he could breathe normally, the woman he met appeared to be human, and everyone spoke english. In fact, if apes talk, you really gotta inspect your water.
But where are we??? I know I keep dithering and dodging the question, but I’m gonna speculate that we have no means of knowing the answer. It’s like the value of Pi. You can approximate it, and you can get to like the 1000th decimal place. However, you cannot determine the exact value.
It seems like humans lack the ability to find certainty with confidence, which has got to be one of the things humans hate most (while generally being theists, ironically).