Through the practice of astrophotography, I am constantly reminded of the immense scale of the universe – therefore I am reminded that we live on quite a small world … This wider view brings a sense of humility and helps place everyday concerns into perspective. Yet it also raises an important question: while science has shown us how far from the center of the cosmos we truly are, has our way of thinking changed just as deeply — or do we still, in many ways, see the world as people once did in the medieval era, with humanity at the center of everything?

At Home in the Cosmos

Recently, I came across a remarkable book by a fellow astrophotographer that captures this idea with striking clarity and elegance already in its opening pages. The following text is my English translation of the German original by Bernd Pröschold [1].

We have learned that the universe came into being 13.8 billion years ago, that it is expanding at an ever increasing rate, and that the Milky Way is only one galaxy among billions of others. We have learned that distant suns are orbited by planets and that Earth is merely one of many billions of worlds. And we have learned that humanity is probably nothing more than a fleeting curiosity in an evolutionary history hundreds of millions of years old, and can no longer be regarded as the crown of creation.

The journey of discovery that is reshaping our worldview is evidently far from over. Exotic phenomena such as dark matter and the strangeness of quantum physics suggest that beyond the observable world, further mysterious abysses may yet open up in the future. Our realm of experience could prove to be nothing more than a ripple of wind on the surface of an ocean, beneath which a deeper level of reality lies hidden.

Despite these staggering insights, our everyday world remains strangely grounded. Astronomical phenomena play at most a marginal role and are assigned the status of tourist attractions: sunsets, shooting stars, eclipses, ideally staged in an Instagram friendly way. In our perception, we still seem to inhabit the world of antiquity, with the Earth at the center and the stars circling around it. And this simultaneously means: with human beings at the center and everything else revolving around them.

Some brief reflections on what this evokes

In this sense, the persistent tendency to place humans once again at the center of all perception evokes what Umberto Eco described as a return to medieval modes of thinking [2]. Just as people in the premodern world believed that the Earth stood at the center of the cosmos, modern society often continues to interpret reality from a human-centered perspective, despite clear scientific evidence to the contrary.

This is not simply a lack of scientific knowledge, but a deeper human tendency to maintain a sense of central importance within an immense and indifferent universe. Culturally and cognitively, we therefore keep constructing a world that revolves around ourselves, echoing medieval conceptions described by Eco. A brief reflection on this issue is already worthwhile, particularly in light of some of the currently questionable developments we are witnessing.

References

[1] Bernd Pröschold. Im Kosmos zu Hause: Wie astronomische Fotografien unsere Sicht auf die Welt verändern. Springer Verlag, Berlin, 2023.

[2] Umberto Eco. Auf dem Wege zu einem neuen Mittelalter. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1986.