Feeling significant?

You're not. You're just the tiniest spec in an impossibly huge universe that might just be the tiniest spec in a foamy sea of universes...



That brings to mind Douglas Adams' novel The Restaurant at the End of the Universe , in which he conjures up the most insidious torture device in the universe - The Total Perspecive Vortex.

"When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, "You are here."

The effect, of course is to melt the brain of anyone who experiences it. (Except for Zaphod Beeblbrox who survives and even thrives for reasons that I won’t delve into here,)

Adam’s summed up the genius of the device by saying that "In an infinite universe, the one thing sentient life cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion."