Are We Special?

Are we special? We here now, on the earth, this time and this place, are WE special? Are we any better off now than our fore-bearers? Is there anything that sets one time apart distinctly from another, or are we always guilty of contemporary bias -- where every generation arrogantly thinks that it is better than the last, when in reality very little has changed. How different are we from the cavemen who first drew on the cave walls? Do we not suffer through most the same illnesses? Are our lives not still fraught with the same struggles of childhood and adolescence and adulthood and death that the first peoples of all the nations of the world struggled through? Can we set ourselves apart in any fundamental way (shift v. Continuum) from the people of the past?
The difference is in our story-telling ability and perspective. For thousands of years humans have looked in wonder at the world around them, questioning nature and then inventing their own stories when nature was being too mysterious, too evasive for them to ken her often subtle ways. They derived stories -- myths -- because any explanation is more (psychologically) comforting than no explanation. And so the sun was a great chariot drawn everyday across the sky, storms raged because an insecure power was offended; the world existed to serve the needs humans. These were piecemeal, ad hoc, explanations, filling in missing knowledge with what seemed reasonable at the time. The earth shook: people had no common sense of evidence-based knowledge to explain the phenomenon, and so myths were invented to explain away the gaps in our knowledge of the world.
And so generation after generation of people asked the questions: What is this place -- this 'earth'? What is the sun? How and why do the stars twinkle? Where are those thousands pin pricks of light in relation to me? Little ol' me. And to these questions we had to invent answers because they exceeded the bounds of knowledge. Supernatural explanations were added where our of knowledge of the natural world ended.
I would argue yes, yes we are special, we are privileged, we are of a unique generation because where the generations before us had only myths and speculation about the universe, we have access to real observations, we have data, we have facts. We can tell our children with confidence that the stars shine through the process of fusing atoms together to form heavier elements -- those same elements that make up everything in the world around them and their very own bodies were born in the bellies of long dead stars. We can show them pictures of far away galaxies -- billions of island universes unto themselves -- and explain that what they are seeing is a direct observation of the past. We can show them the interconnectedness of all life on earth and be internally consistent when explain the process by which all of this could happen.
And ours is the first generation where such knowledge is ubiquitous and inexpensive (if not free). We can now tell our children the story of the formation of the universe and not have to spin faerie tales -- and still the stories fill us with awe and wonder. But -- as importantly - it also fills us with understanding -- with knowledge -- of the real workings of the universe in which we find ourselves. I see this knowledge as valuable, as essential, to a balanced and reasonable view of the world. All of this because we stand on the shoulders of the giants that came before us, and the giants that we find ourselves among now.
The veil of ignorance has been nearly completely lifted from our eyes -- if only we are brave enough to open them fully.

The "Giants": Socrates, Aristotle, Galileo Galilei , Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Micheal Faraday, Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Brian Cox (accidentally cutting Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan)

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[stillstandin4you]

damn good video man - you have a new subscriber

[JPO1618]

@stillstandin4you Thanks kindly.

[tommosher]

I always love hearing your thoughts JPO, miss having you to bounce ideas and balls off. :)

[JPO1618]

@tommosher Thanks Tom, I miss...having...balls bounced off me...? Wait, that doesn't seem right...Delete! Delete! Dammit. :)

[harpiyon]

excellent video. maybe that´s the difference between people who really want to understand the world (with the help of science), and people who are still believing in myths: the scientific people allow the question if we are special; whilst religious people don´t even allow the question - maybe because their mythology / religion is built on the presupposition that we are special; and asking the question implies the risk that the answer will be negative, making their entire construct break down?

[CanadienAtheist]

That was a very cool video. Very thoughtful.

I'm going to feature this on my channel for awhile!

[fritspas]

Everything that is any different from most other things is special. Therefor everything is special. So we are special, but that's not a very special thing.

[pangeaprogress]

excellent thoughts here-thanks for sharing

[jebus6kryst]

Great video.