Does The Show Need An Audience? - Historum

**Earl_of_Rochester** · March 26th, 2012, 04:55 AM

How special are we? I've always found it quite odd that creatures should evolve from their environment and then reign in meaningless confusion. Things would certainly exist whether we were here to assign labels to them or not. The difference, as far as I can see, is in the experience of things.

We can know time because our consciousness feels its passing, we can measure the world with our ruler and be shocked by it. The vast cosmos and the tiny atom, the discrepancy is acute. It's troubling to consider that so much went unnoticed, and so much still does due to our inability to see.

Great events have passed prior to our being, a sublime sunset on a distant planet, raging storms and mighty impacts of celestial bodies on a scale too grand to realise. Time too would have its own place, but with nothing to keep track of its steady pace seconds would merge with aeons and a billion years might pass as a moment.

All these fantastic events have eclipsed into obscurity because there were no witnesses, indeed, had we never evolved at all the entire show would have run without an audience. It would all be for nothing as far as our own experience is concerned because we would not be here to know it. There would be no measurement, wonder, beauty or curiosity and no-one to ask 'why?'. The dawning realisation of this truth makes the mind appear quite giddy as we gaze into the abyss.

We all know that the world will go on without us, but perhaps on a more intimate level, we all know that when it's our own time to go it will never be the same again.

I have the honour, &c.

~EoR.

**Jake10** · March 26th, 2012, 08:38 PM

String theory says that there are six dimensions present which we are unaware of, yet they affect what we are aware of. Perhaps most parts of the universe are unaware of us, but our existence affects what is there. If not now, then in the future. You're asking if we matter? If we need to be here? Of course, because I'm the most important person in the world, and my species is the most important species in the universe.