There was a knock on the door and Paz, the Royal Astronomer, came into the room. He was a young pink-cheeked man in a pink robe and his pink eyes peered through pink lenses.
“A huge pink comet, Sire,” he said, “just barely missed the earth a little while ago. It made an awful hissing sound, like hot irons stuck in water.”
“They aim these things at me,” said Clode. “Everything is aimed at me.”
-James Thurber (The White Deer)
We may have a unique capacity to change the Earth’s surface environment in a short period of time (although photosynthetic bacteria had a far greater effect on Earth’s atmosphere by producing oxygen when they first evolved), but we are certainly not “central to existence,” nor does everything exist in order to serve us. If we disappeared, the Earth’s environment would recover from the minor blip of disturbance we caused in comparatively short order.
Bacteria are the dominant form of life on this planet. They even dominate our bodies. As for intelligence, it has been around for a little while in geological time scales, but it will disappear, and bacteria will probably do it in if we don’t ourselves, with intelligently designed bacteria. Bacteria would laugh at intelligence, if bacteria got the joke, which it doesn’t. Cuz it’s bacteria.
The kardashev scale may just be guesswork, but by stage 2 a species becomes virtually eternal. No natural phenomena can drive them to extinction. There is a reasonable chance our descendants will be around in billions of years when the sun fries the earth and kills all the bacteria here.
As we develop intelligent bioweapons we also develop better treatments. So I don’t know if we will ever die.
Frankly, there needs to be a name for this kind of extreme pessimism regarding the human condition. This “humans are weak and puny, intelligence is overrated, bacteria out mass us, put a human in a cage with a hungry lion and see who wins, we haven’t been around very long and we’re going to be extinct in a few thousand years” moping. At least in recently-written literature, that attitude shows up a lot more frequently than the “humans are nature’s great triumph” thing.
Out of curiosity, does any species conduct itself as if it’s anything other than the most important on earth?
Okay, right, I forgot this started with Cosmos.
Let’s start with this: we have not one shred of proof that there is life on any other planet of our own system, much less anywhere else. At all. Anywhere. All of the available evidence is that life is unique to Earth.
The only arguments against the superiority of humans to all other life on Earth are self-flagellating ethical tropes - “Oh, we’re so bad for doing so much damage and crowding out the Mission Blue butterfly! Wail! Gnash!”
So yes, within the known sphere, humans *are *exceptional, and while the universe at large may seem to be ignoring us, there’s no evidence that it *wasn’t *created for us.
Now, I’m not saying any of this is part of my own beliefs - I “know” in my bones that there is some equivalent creature making these same arguments somewhere within the universe that I can see with my primitive eye. Maybe many, all making the same joke at the same time from the same precepts. I know we’re a fragile, temporary condition of the planet that a geological fart could erase. I don’t have any base notion that we are a “superior” creation.
Alla same, I get just a wee bit tired of the Cosmos-y, pot-smoking, navel-gazing sophomorisms about how we’re really so small and insignificant and our supposed dominance of life on Earth is just a hubristic fallacy and bears and slugs really have just as much right to things as we do yadda yadda whine bleat moan.
We need to take the best care we can of each other and our “spaceship Earth” and all it contains… but we have that obligation *because *we are the currently dominant and superior species of the known universe.
Anthropocentricity. Oddly, the same answer as the one for the OP! 
Those humans who believe themselves to be pointless have been bred out of existence long ago. Those of us who have made it this far have to believe we’re a little special. In the end, it doesn’t matter how important we are but it’s critical to our individual survival that we think we are.
The custom made importantometer on my desk is pointing straight at me. The dials are all lit up, the diaphram is fully puffed out, the balls are spinning at full speed and the needle is all the way over at 11. To me, the device seems to be working perfectly.
I don’t think there is any objective way to determine what is the “dominant” life form on earth or if there even is one.
Since the discussion here has gone beyond the definition of a word, let’s move this over to Great Debates.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
You just moved it to Great Debates (emphasis added) because you think humans are so important.
That is an untestable claim.
Well, I expect the fact that to many decimal places the universe is 100% hard vacuum, which we can not survive in, is good evidence that the universe at large wasn’t created for us. At least it wasn’t created for us by someone who likes us .
Of course, “the universe wasn’t created for us” is not the same thing as “we’re not important”.
It is silly to write us off, especially with such flippancy.
Sophisticated immunology has been in existence for only about 200 years and antibiotics for well under 100 years- geologically insignificant intervals. Yet in that time we have provided ourselves with defense against numerous microbiological killers to which we had no resistance from the beginning of our existence. One of the worst of those, smallpox, has been totally eradicated, and another, polio, is now on the verge of eradication. Resistant strains of others have appeared, but they have not led to reversal of the ongoing rise in international life expectancy: all trendlines remain dramatically in our favor. We have become dominant, and our dominance is increasing.
I don’t think humans are superior, and I certainly would not use that argument to prove it. That’s touchy-feely New Agy stuff. My argument is that:
There is no objective way to determine which species are superior or not, except in an evolutionary context.
We’ve only been around as a species for a very short time, so the jury is still out.
We are, of course, a highly successful species of large mammal, clearly the most successful (ie, plentiful) of all the ape species (maybe of all the primate species). But there are many types of animals that are as successful or more so. We have some unique abilities. But so do cuttlefish.
Well, right, the “can you dive to 30,000 feet to grab a quick bite, or see in the dark, or fly” argument for species equivalence.
The answer, of course, is “yes” - if the adaptability and creative ability of humans is allowed in the equation. Tool-using chimps, sex-changing fish and birds all have their evolved tricks. We pretty much own the magician’s shop.
It’s a good point. If we are all so small and insignificant, why should we care about taking care of the planet? It’s not like we matter all that much, so so what if future generations have to clean up our mess, and perhaps fail at doing so.
We are on the verge of being capable of moving minor astronomical objects like asteroids and comets to suit our desire.
Bringing order to the solar system seems like a big deal.