The earth is a tiny speck in an unfathomably huge cosmos.

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The human range of action is rarely larger than a small portion of this speck. We are trapped with the looping routines and irrational fears of our imperfect minds.
In relativity a single human has little more potency than a single bacteria.

Yes, but in my beliefs, at least humans can do something about their fears and insecurities and their thoughts and emotions unlike bacteria. Humans are more intellectual, and we underestimate ourselves often, most likely due to the fact that our flaws ostensibly overweighs our good traits.
We're apparently the only race capable of being evil.
At the same time, we're one of the few races capable of expressing love amongst other emotions. (IMO, because I am scientifically ignorant in this field, many animals have primal emotions, but not complex ones such as love)

Actually, many of the more complex animals have been observed doing things we might equate with love. And not just great apes. For example, elephants hold funerals and seem to morn their dead. I'm reminded of a documentary where a mother zebra had died. Her foal kept on trying to wake her p (thinking she was asleep). Now the father had a whole harem of females and cold have had a Brazillion more foals if he had left this one to die. But he didn't. He stood right there with his foal. Their herd past them by and he lost all the females he had fought so hard to get. But he wasn't going to abandon that one foal. Finally he convinced his foal it was time to move on, and they wandered the savannah, among strange herds that would probably not accept them, seeking some new place to fit in and survive, the odds against them. Most humans can't muster up that much love.

That said, I do agree we sell ourselves short. Humans are not small: the universe is just really, really big.

no animals have love, lots have love
birds, to deer, to some forms of mice, all sorts
we are not so special

I once had this thought that what if we're so small and the universe is a living entity in which we inhabit on a floating piece of dust.

Sometimes something can be so big, you don't even know it's there. You need a different perspective or cartographer.

Duplicate post while trying to edit. See the next one below.

Here are some literary works that discuss the topic of relativity of size:
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Alice in Wonderland
Gulliver's Travels

The first of these deals with the topic directly.


I agree with Tensu when he said that the size of the universe does not affect our significance. It is good, however, to keep a broader perspective than most people do. Thinking about the size of the universe helps us do this.

"And this habitation might seem a little thing to those who consider only the majesty of the Ainur, and not their terrible sharpness; as who should take the whole field of Arda for the foundation of a pillar and so raise it until the cone of its summit were more bitter than a needle; or who consider only the immeasurable vastness of the World, which still the Ainur are shaping, and not the minute precision to which they shape all things therein."

I think the world would be a better place if people thought more about the cosmos.

(deleted)

That's very rich, for a Tuesday afternoon.

Stephen Crane (1871-1900)
from War Is Kind (1899)

A man said to the universe:
"Sir I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."

Well there are trillion of cells in your body, do you think that an individual cell might think for itself that it is just a tiny speck that knows little of cells located in other tissues and organs and has little control over its own matters, but sometimes it does for better or worse such as in development or in cancer. Everything in the universe eventually influences everything else. To say we are insignificant is wrong. I think a good question is what impact our recognition of existence has on the universe.