The Big Picture

Thinking big can be overwhelming... or affirming

One of the potential advantages of education, especially a broad and eclectic education, is developing a sense of “the big picture.” It’s often wise to think about the big picture occasionally, although it’s possible to overdo it: an excessive emphasis on the big picture can lead to being disconnected from practical reality, with its more tactical emphasis on actions in the here and now. Thinking about the big picture offers a broad spectrum of potential insights about one’s place in the universe, from overwhelming to affirming.

Talking about it as “the big picture” is a little misleading. What people typically mean by that phrase is “a bigger picture than the one you are currently framing,” not “the biggest picture available.” One memorable example happens in the 1985 movie Creator, where Peter O’Toole plays a slightly deranged (and not entirely believable) scientist, in his usual over-the-top way. O’Toole’s character repeatedly makes reference to “the big picture,” underscoring to the protagonist that “it’s really big.”  The movie involves issues of cloning, love, loyalty, and mortality, which are all big compared to most people’s day-to-day concerns – but it would be strange to describe the movie’s framing as the big picture. It was just a big picture, bigger than the usual concerns of the characters in the movie.

What if we really want to identify and think about the big picture? If we want to consider the biggest possible picture, we probably wind up at cosmology and considering the origin and fate of the universe. Within that particular big picture, it’s interesting to consider the ways in which each of us does or doesn’t matter.

In most respects, of course, all of us are utterly insignificant within this big picture. Our lives are so much smaller than the lifetime of the universe, or indeed even the much-shorter lifetime of our utterly insignificant and rather boring planet, we can’t possibly matter. All of the usual metaphors for brief irrelevance, like “the blink of an eye,” turn out to be ridiculously long compared to our infinitesimal presence in the universe. In fact, that turns out to still be true even if we measure across all the generations that humans have existed, rather than just our own much shorter individual lives. So in one sense it seems clear that this big picture is almost too big, in the sense that all our human concerns vanish within the vast landscape. Douglas Adams was referring to this big picture when he described the Total Perspective Vortex in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy universe (1978, with subsequent revisions). The Total Perspective Vortex is a device that shows its victim, for just an instant, the sheer scale of the universe with a tiny dot labeled as “you are here.” This perspective destroys the victim’s mind.

So we could conclude that this biggest picture is not only useless but positively harmful, and best avoided. But there are a couple of ways in which our presence matters even at this mind-boggling scale.

First is that we are forms of life, and as far as we can tell our otherwise-insignificant planet in its otherwise-uninteresting present state is the only place in the entire universe and the entire history of the universe to have life. We haven’t proven that life is impossible elsewhere, and multiple Earth-like planets have been identified; but we equally haven’t actually found convincing signs of life anywhere else.  

It’s easy to take life for granted, both in the sense of one’s own individual life and in the sense of the broader collection of life on the planet. All around us, we can see the many ways in which life seems to exploit almost every available nook and cranny. On Earth, the problem is getting rid of pests and weeds, annoying life forms that you don’t want in the places where they are. In contrast, the rest of the universe seems unrelentingly hostile to life. From an Earth perspective, the universe seems very weird; meanwhile, from the universe’s perspective, Earth seems very weird. So even as mere carbon-based life forms, like all the many other denizens of the planet, we do seem to have a special status within the otherwise-overwhelming big picture.

Beyond that, we humans are even more special. After all, humans are a form of life with sufficient consciousness and knowledge to actually comprehend this big picture about the origin, scale, and fate of the universe. Accordingly, each of us who is able to perceive that structure represents one of the incredibly rare instances where the universe achieves a certain kind of self-awareness. That achievement was not even possible until the latter part of the 20^th century, and only for a small fraction of the population on the planet. Within this particular context, the fact that we are short-lived (compared to the universe) and few in number (compared to other life forms) implies that we are rare and special, adding to our significance.

Better yet, you, dear reader, are one of those very special entities. Although your existence and actions are incomprehensibly tiny compared to the size and age of the universe, in this biggest of big pictures, you are significant. You are rare and remarkable simply because you are a life form; and even more impressively, you are a consciousness in the universe who understands something about the universe’s very biggest picture. Congratulations!