'. . . each decrease in the sense of our own physical significance was the result of a huge expansion in our knowledge.' | Analysis
When the Polish polymath Nicolaus Copernicus proposed in 1543 that the sun, rather than the Earth, was the center of our solar system, he did more than resurrect the “heliocentric” model that had been devised some 18 centuries earlier by the Greek astronomer Aristarchus of Samos. Copernicus—or, rather, the “Copernican principle” that bears his name—tells us that we humans are nothing special.
Since 1995 we have discovered that even within our own Milky Way roughly one of every five sunlike or smaller stars harbors an Earth-size world orbiting in a “Goldilocks” region where liquid water may persist on a rocky planetary surface. This suggests there are at least a few hundred million planets in the Milky Way alone that may in principle be habitable.
Interestingly though, if a multiverse truly exists, it also suggests that Copernican cosmic humility can only be taken so far. Many of the same researchers who assume the existence of a multiverse further speculate that random chance rather than any fundamental laws sets the values for some of the three dozen physical constants that dictate the characteristics of our reality.
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