However, it's a different story once you look upwards from the earth and peer outwards into the depths of space.
In cosmic terms we're insignificant specks of dust in the incomprehensibly mind-numbing vastness of the universe. Our lives are less than the blink of a gnat's eye in the staggering immensity of eternity.
We're as nothing in the great, overwhelming, infinite scheme of things.
How many times have you heard such things being said? In fact you've probably said them yourself more than once.
If we, the creatures that dominate our planet so completely, feel so insignificant in cosmic terms, then imagine what other life-forms would feel like if they were capable of such thoughts. It's probably just as well that they aren't.
Perhaps we'd be better off if we didn't think about it either. The trouble is that we do - we just can't help it. It's lodged in our brains, damn them.
Our brains are fickle things however, and in different situations they are prone to think about such matters as size and scale in completely different ways.
Here's an example taken from personal experience.
I recently painted my kitchen, and it took me ages.
I usually think of my kitchen as being tiny and cramped, but while painting it, its space seemed to become miraculously larger as the enormity of the painting job that I had undertaken slowly revealed itself. It would take me days. I ended up getting a man in. True, my kitchen is quite small, especially when compared to the enormity of the universe, but for that brief moment in time it seemed huge. In fact for a few days my kitchen became the universe. I was so totally immersed in it that I stopped thinking about oceans and mountains and rivers and stars and galaxies - the only concept that I could hold in my brain was "thixotropic emulsion". (To complicate my feelings about the size of my kitchen further, I was using white paint. As you probably know, using light colours on walls has the effect of making rooms seem larger, while dark colours make them seem smaller. Consequently the room actually seemed to expand in size as a direct result of the lightness of the paint that I was applying.) Hang on though. Is my kitchen large, or tiny? It can't be both.
Well actually, in some ways it can be.
It's all a matter of how it's affecting my life at the time.
Size is relative.
I've got a woman friend who tells me that her nose is too big. Apparently it's too big by about three millimetres.
That's interesting I told her, because your nose is a lot smaller than my kitchen, which, apart from when I'm engaged in painting it, seems somewhat on the small side to me. And on the scale of the universe, I consoled her, your nose hardly exists - get things into perspective.
This got me thinking (while I was sitting over a coffee in my nice new kitchen).
Three millimetres on a nose is a big issue, but three millimetres on my kitchen would be nothing. Even three centimetres on my kitchen, which is ten times as much, would be nothing. Thirty centimetres may be useful though, as then I could fit a nice new coffee machine on my worktop.
There we have a significant point I think. It's not necessarily the size itself that matters, but its relevance.
Three millimetres on the size of a nose holds more significance than three centimetres on a kitchen. And, jumping up a few rungs on the ladder of significances, those three centimetres on a kitchen hold more significance than three million light years on the size of a universe. Would you have noticed if the universe had suddenly expanded by three million light years yesterday lunchtime? I think not. (In fact, I believe that it did.) When it comes to whether or not size matters, relevance is everything.
In fact, when it comes to weighing up the significance of almost any quality of anything, the thing's direct relevance to you personally is of paramount importance.
Take this example.
Let's look at something dramatic: something that you can hardly miss.
Explosions.
Say for instance you're in your kitchen, and the coffee machine explodes, because you forgot to put any water into it.
Okay, it's a very small explosion, and the only damage that's done is that it creates a burn mark on the kitchen wall. But it's very significant to you. Especially if you've just had the kitchen decorated.
Now, imagine that at about the same moment that your coffee machine goes up in smoke a gas leak elsewhere in your town destroys a local clothes shop. No casualties, thank heaven, and it was a shop that only sold clothing items for a gender and age group that you don't belong to, so you never used it - but it affects you none-the-less, as your feeling of security and wellbeing would be a little precarious when you walked past the wrecked store for the next few days. You couldn't help thinking that if all of the gas mains in town were that dodgy then maybe a shop that you frequented yourself - perhaps the one that you purchase coffee from - would be next to go.
At the same moment that your coffee machine and the clothing shop in town explodes, a lorry loaded with diesel explodes at the other end of the country. It kills the driver and a hitch-hiker he'd picked up. It's on the national news. You feel a brief pang of sadness because the hitch-hiker was, by pure chance, a student at the same college that you'd attended. You obviously feel sorry for the lorry driver too, but he doesn't lodge in your consciousness in quite the same way as the hitch-hiker because he was foreign.
At the same moment that these three simultaneous events occur, a ferry in a third world country (the name of which escapes you) explodes due to an engine malfunction. It kills most of the passengers, of whom there were many. It's on the news, but you are in the kitchen looking with dismay at the remains of your broken coffee maker, and though you hear the coverage on the TV in the other room, you ignore it.
By chance, at exactly the same moment a planet in a distant solar system is vaporized when its star exploded into a nova, snuffing out the peaceable civilisation that existed there. The nova makes it onto the pages of popular science journals, but only because the star involved was briefly visible to the naked eye here on earth. No-one even knew that the star had a planet orbiting it in the first place.
Simultaneously, a galaxy on the far edge of the universe explodes as the result of some scientific principle of which we are at present blissfully unaware. The galaxy was beyond the range of our most powerful telescopes, but its disappearance signalled the end of hundreds of thousands of planets hosting civilizations far more advanced than ours could ever hope to be in a million eternities.
Which one of these explosions is the most devastating to you? The coffee machine in your kitchen of course.
This is not you being selfish. This is just how things are.
Events that affect you are more important to you than events that don't.
These events follow a simple law.
The closer things are to you the more effect they have on you.
This law applies to many phenomena in the physical world, not only to things that have psychological effects such as explosions. It applies, for instance, to such phenomena as the effect of gravity or the illumination created by a light bulb, both of which get weaker with distance.
The general dropping off of the importance and the effect of things the further they are from you is good news when it comes to the issue of the ludicrously huge size of the universe. It means that things that happen close to you, such as in your house, are of riveting interest, while the degree of personal interest that you can muster in the goings-on further afield, such as in the next street, is significantly lower. As for anything that's going on in the street after that, your interest is lower still, and so on, until by the time we've got as far away as, say, the orbit of Pluto, you couldn't care less about what's going on at all.
For some people of course the orbit of Pluto is pushing it, as they don't give a damn about anything that's happening further away than, say, their refrigerator.
The consequence of this is that though the universe stretches almost endlessly beyond the orbit of Pluto, so what? It doesn't really matter. We won't be going there. After all, walking as far as the TV set to change channels when the remote control's been mislaid seems like a huge inconvenience to most of us. So next time someone tells you "The universe is millions and millions of light years across - doesn't that make you feel really insignificant?" you can reply "Well, due to the way that the significance of phenomena diminishes with distance - actually, no. And by the way, you've grossly underestimated the size of the universe." Or, at the risk of sounding even more smug and self-satisfied, you could point out that the whole huge universe/insignificant person dichotomy is possibly only an issue because we make it into one.
Because people don't like feeling dwarfed by things. It's bad for their self-esteem.
It's an ego thing.
Maybe if people worked on reducing the size of their egos a little they'd find that the size of the universe mysteriously stopped being a concern.
Maybe the universe isn't too big after all - maybe it's egos that are too big.
The next time that you find yourself feeling uneasy because the universe seems so mind-bogglingly vast, try looking at things in the following way instead, as a little experiment.
Imagine how you'd feel if it turned out that the universe wasn't huge at all. Imagine if it was actually really quite small.
Just think how you'd react if scientists discovered that everything which is more than a few thousand metres above the ground was in reality some weird sort of optical illusion, and that beyond that point everything was in fact nothingness. Everything stopped just above the air corridors that you use when you fly off on your holidays. (All space probes and manned space flights that have seemingly progressed beyond this level were in fact part of a government conspiracy to hide this incredible truth. This includes the Moon landings, which you may have been suspicious about already.) Could you cope with a universe that small? That parochial? That claustrophobic? Me neither.
If the universe was that tiny your life would be noticeably significant in the whole scheme of things. You'd be elevated into being quite an important person. Personally I can't handle that much significance. It's scary.
I want my impact on the universe to be a bit more inconsequential than would be possible in such a confined space.
I want to be insignificant enough to be able to have a lie-in some weekends and not feel too guilty about it. To be able to do something slightly immoral, like watching a bit of daytime television when I should be doing household chores, without feeling that I've set the entire cosmos on a course towards decadent disintegration.
I want to be just a tiny bit meaningless. What a weight off my shoulders.
I like to think that the bigger the universe, the smaller one's problems.
When it comes down to it, whether the universe is huge or minute, our feelings about its size may tell us more about ourselves than they do about the universe.
