Sublime

Obsession over “end times” is nothing new. Most cultures have as part of their belief system some ultimate fate of the human race, with most foreseeing a calamitous end. The beliefs are so widely held that we have a word for such systems: eschatology.

in the Kenoma, you're subject to Fate. You convince yourself that you have to do what you’re doing because of the influence of external powers (the need for food, shelter, etc.). Horoscopes work for you, and so do other divinatory systems like weathermen or work schedules,

The universe is a razor’s edge of precisely balanced life-permitting conditions.

Our expanding horizon of knowledge has also consistently revealed a system that’s precisely balanced, exquisitely poised, in the alignments necessary to generate our specific kind of biological life.

if instead we assumed we are randomly selected among the much larger ensemble of observers inhabiting island universes differing both in their cosmological constant and in the size of their galactic seeds, then the predicted value of λ would be a thousand times larger than what we measure.[7]

To a degree unique among life-forms, human beings are not confined to adapting to their environment. They are capable of adapting the environment to themselves.

So fruitful has this abandonment of anthropocentric theories been, and so important in the broader history of ideas, that anti-anthropocentrism has increasingly been elevated to the status of a universal principle, sometimes called the ‘Principle of Mediocrity’: there is nothing significant about humans (in the cosmic scheme of things). As the