Space Opera - Front Cover
- SPACE OPERA: Front Cover - A black ink and gray pencil drawing on an 11 x 14 size vellum paper. It appears in the book, "Space Opera," by Jack Vance, published by Underwood-Miller in 1984.
Bertrand Russell, who died in 1970, was a famous British essayist, philosopher, and historian, who wrote, "The entire saga of mankind is not of the slightest significance in the limitless expanse of interstellar space, in the light of the quadrillion stars that twinkle around us".
Well, I don't know about that, I don't know how Mr. Russell reached his conclusion that the human race is "insignificant"!
Interstellar Space. We humans live on a tiny planet that is spinning around a tiny star that is part of a Galaxy of billions of stars that is spinning along with other uncountable numbers of Galaxies, all spinning along as part of a Universe that is itself spinning toward some unknown destiny.
If there is no other intelligent "life" form anywhere else in this whirling universe of stars except for us humans here on Earth . . . then I put to you that it is "man," who has a brain capable of independent thought, and a capacity for love, that gives profound significance to this so-called miracle that is the Universe.
But the "miracle" is not the creation of the Universe, the "miracle" is the creation of "life". The Universe is our environment, we have eternity to explore it, and that does makes us "significant!" The big question is whether other forms of "life" exist anywhere else in the universe, or was it all created just for us?
So there you are, you have Mr. Russell's philosophy, and you have mine. What's yours?
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