Introduction

Behind me lie myriads of infusoria,
Before me, myriads of stars unfold.
I stretch between them, lying bold—
A sea that binds two shores in euphoria,
A bridge where two cosmoses are consoled.

Arseny Tarkovsky

Truly the central question of any worldview is the question of THE PLACE OF HUMANITY AND LIFE IN THE WHOLE UNIVERSE.

At all times, mankind has been searching for an answer to this question in different epochs, in different cultures, and in different traditions. It has found different answers involving art, religion, philosophy, and science.

We live in an era of scientific and technological progress, and whether one likes it or not, the answer to this question is primarily given by science, even if this answer contradicts religious and philosophical traditions. If up to Nicolaus Copernicus, science considered the human world as the central area of the Universe, and central not only in the geometric, but also in the physical sense, then after Copernicus, Bruno, Kepler, and Galileo’s view on this question underwent a radical, revolutionary change.

Let's go back to the Middle Ages. People of that time believed that their world was the surface of a flat Earth floating on whales in the World Ocean and covered by a starry dome. Let's not ironize the physical ridiculousness of such a model of the world, let's pay attention to another thing - to the way the man of that time perceived himself in the Universe. And he perceived his world as the CENTER of the universe. After all, the planets and stars revolved around this world, even the bright Sun rose above the horizon and went beyond it in a circle, in the center of which (in any point of the Earth) there was always an observer. And the whole cosmos "was at the service" of man: the Sun illuminated and warmed the Earth, at night the Moon shone in the darkness, the stars told the way to the navigator, the planets - the fate of the ruler, and comets warned of the coming cataclysms. Indeed, "everything is for the good of man, everything is for his sake".

Of course, most people believed that such a wonderful, cozy, reasonable and comfortable world order arose thanks to the Creator, who created this world for man. Therefore, when speaking only of the material world of the Universe, there were no doubts for many centuries: humanity was always considered to be at the center of the physical universe. Geometry, physics, and the entire connection between cosmic events and earthly ones all confirmed this belief to ancient people.

Moreover, the cosmos has always been commensurate to man in scale, for the stars fell to the Earth - this was a visible and undeniable fact. The moon was represented as a big piece of cheese, planets rotated in the sky with the help of mechanical gears and solid spheres. The sun in ancient Egypt floated on the celestial Nile on a boat, and in fairy tales of ancient peoples, it could be swallowed by a bird, crocodile, etc.

Therefore, it did not even occur to ancient man that the cosmos is a vast empty expanse. That any star is millions of times larger than the Earth, that nothing but the Moon actually revolves around the Earth 1.

If we now look at Copernicus' theory from this angle, it will appear that the main thing in it was not a change in the physical principle of the rotation of the planets and luminaries, but that it completely destroyed the idea of the central position of the human world in the universe. Thus, it broke the core of the ancient worldview. (It is not without reason that the Church actively fought against Copernicus' teachings for centuries.)

However, it was impossible to stop the development of science. After all, it was the change in the physical picture of the Universe that opened the door for mankind to a new physics, which after a while brought thermodynamics (steam engines), electrodynamics (electricity), aerodynamics (airplanes), and everything that makes up the practical basis of most people's lives today.

And now, when it is unthinkable to refuse the benefits of modern science, it has become impossible not to consider the picture of the universe drawn by it, and it is so.

Somewhere off to the side of the center of the solar system revolves the small planet Earth. The inhabitants of this planet already know that their central luminary is just one of the outlying stars, of which there are tens of billions in the galactic archipelago. After Hubble's discovery of other galaxies, it turned out that our galaxy is also just a small part of a huge world with about ten billion other galaxies.

There were, however, still esoteric traditions, in which the world was drawn differently, but their hermeticism did not have any noticeable influence on the mass consciousness.

What is our Earth on this canvas? A speck of dust, or even a molecule? The human world shrinks to quite microscopic scales and is lost on the outskirts of the margins. Moreover, the geometric insignificance is complemented by a physical abyss - because beyond our world is dominated by the icy expanses of hostile and almost empty space, which is permeated with radiation destroying all living things.

Why do we care about these empty spaces, hostile to all living things? Why should we think about them? After all, our planet is an insignificant trifle for the gigantic cosmos, where energies that destroy whole galaxies are raging.

And what can man change in this world? Is it possible from the thin top film of our planet, a man can change things?

It turns out that man is on his own, the Universe is on its own, the connection of events in these two worlds is impossible due to the difference of scales and gigantic distances. It seems absurd and ridiculous to talk about the return of the idea of the central position of man in the Universe from the scientific point of view.

Modern science paints a depressing and (I would say) tragic picture of the universe. It is not without reason that Academician Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky in one of his article, "The Study of the Phenomena of Life and the New Physics,” (1931) expressed his concern about the nature of the development of modern natural science: "Increasing the world to extraordinary proportions, the new scientific outlook at the same time relegated man with all his interests and achievements - relegated all the phenomena of life - to the position of an insignificant detail in the Cosmos." 2

An insignificant detail... We hardly fully realize how much this picture of the world penetrates every pore of our consciousness, down to the personal and deepest tragedies of individuals who cannot find meaning in an animal and short-lived stay on the surface of a microatom of the vast world.

This picture can only inspire horror and fear to anyone who seriously tries to imagine the place of life in this gigantic world - it leaves behind universal gloom and longing. It is not without reason that the famous cosmologist Paul Davies wrote "mankind has never fully recovered from the intellectual shock of losing the privileges of the Earth."3

Isn't it terrible that mankind will never be able to forget about these endless empty spaces, never any observations will return us to such a cozy and homely picture of the Universe of the Middle Ages.

We will never be able to forget our own minuscule scale in this vast world. In our spatial periphery, a rocket will take thousands of years to reach the nearest star. The Copernican hypothesis has become a fact of our time, and there is no way to erase this fact.

...And now, when it seems that there is no way out of this worldview deadlock, that the accumulation of facts about distant galaxies and about the depths of the cosmos increasingly humiliates man, makes him a more and more insignificant element of the Universe. At this moment, suddenly, through the chaos of accumulated information, there appears a glimmer of the most beautiful picture of the world, in which man occupies not an accidental, but the CENTRAL POSITION.

However, this position is central not in the usual and habitual three-dimensional space, but in the hierarchical world order. We can call it a MASSIVE SPACE. To understand how important for all of us this objective scientific fact - the central position of life in the large-scale space - is, we must first show that this space plays a dominant role in the Universe and that events occurring, according to the laws of three-dimensional space, are only a consequence of causes that originate in this dimension unknown to us so far.

  1. To be more precise, such an idea came from time to time, for example, to Aristarchus of Samos in the second century BC. However, such an idea was perceived as wild, absurd and contrary to the totality of observations and practice. ↩

  2. Vernadsky V. I. Problems of biogeochemistry / V. I. Vernadsky // Proc. I. Problems of biogeochemistry / V. I. Vernadsky // Proc. of the Biogeochemical Laboratory. Biogeochemical Laboratory. - 1980. - VOL. XV1., 247. ↩

  3. Davis P. Space and Time in the Modern Picture of the Universe. M.: Mir, 1979. p. 32. ↩