Before I start out, the point of this brief essay is to challenge people's preconceptions on what is important to them, and cast a value judgment on the priorities that dominate today's society.
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We Are Insignificant.

A person - a normal person - is composed of 10 trillion or so cells, has a mass of roughly 70 kilograms, and occupies a volume of about one square meter. Humans have an average lifespan of roughly 80 years, and humanity, as a collective, has the ability to change only a single planet - namely Earth - and not a single human soul has ventured more than about 100,000 kilometers away, since the farthest out anyone has gotten to is the moon. Mankind has sent probes to as far away as the outer solar system - near the Kuiper Belt - but to distances that don't even come close to a significant fraction of a light-year.

Humanity is insignificant - moreso individuals - when viewed in the backdrop of a macroperspective that is unrestrained by the common myopia of looking at ourselves from only an Earth perspective. Yes, we are truly truly beyond microscopic in terms of the scale and significance of our activities here on Earth. Compared to the planet that we live in, humanity as a collection of bodies, are a few billionths in size and in mass, and have lived through a nearly nonexistent blip in the history of our solar system.

Consider for once that we are but mere quarks in the matter of the Universe. Our sun is but one of nearly a hundred billion analogous stars within the galaxy, and that our galaxy is but one of the estimated billions to quadrillions of galaxies that the Universe holds. Given that perspective - how special then do you think you are? How special is the human race when, for one thing, life on Earth is but a statistical probability borne by the fact that 1) because the chances of life to crop up on a planetary system is a fraction of a fraction and 2) because there are a billion billion billion planetary systems in the known Universe?

No matter what people think of themselves, they really are a nanometer shy to nothingness - their existences are as brief as the half lives of unstable elements, and their activities only go so far as to change one puny little planet in one puny little galaxy. Given the fact that people - individually or collectively - are next to nothing, I've had to answer certain questions: do people even realize this? And if they do, what do they do about it?

The answer to the first question is this: According to my observations, a figurative 99% of people don't even know about it. If ever they have encountered this idea, they wouldn't give a damn about it. (Which partially answers my second question.) If they do know about it, a figurative 99% of those people wouldn't care, ignore, or rationalize it away - slinking behind religion or philosophy to justify their importance to the Universe. However, the cold hard fact still remains that the Universe wouldn't even fart, blink, or even scratch an itch at us no matter what we've ever done. We haven't conquered galaxies; we haven't blown up stars; hell, we've barely been able to escape the pull of gravity in order to send messages in metallic bottles (or probes, telescopes, and sattelites) away from our planet or to play golf on the moon. But I digress.

People subconsciously do ask themselves if they are nothing. And they try their best to break out of nothingness by doing something - anything - to make their mark in history. Some make works of art; some make grand buildings; some make great music; and a select few psycopaths decide to just kill as many people to get into the record books (yeah, i'm talking about you Stalin). The problem is that the common understanding of one's significance is extremely arbitrary. You need other people as measuring sticks of your importance - like how many people try to mob you when you go to your rock concert, or how frequently do the paparazzi stalk you as you do your groceries. Some people don't go through this arduous avenue and simply gauge their significance by their contribution to society and the respect that is reciprocated back.

That's all well and good, but then again, that is my point. Your importance is gauged by society - but who then should gauge the importance of humanity? If it's us, then things become tautological, endless, and will lead us to a postmodern conclusion that it wouldn't matter to even matter. When you take away all the people in the world, the planet (solar system, galaxy, or universe) wouldn't even pause for a microsecond to give you due respect. If you get run over, the ground wouldn't even hiccup in mourning. You might say that we're really not even supposed to get the respect of the ground, the planet, the galaxy or the Universe; that the only people who we should be trying to get respect from is our fellow men. By this point in time it should be apparent that I think that's just a crappy excuse of a justification.

Humankind suffers from a chronic myopia that prevents it from progressing in geometrical leaps and bounds. It is akin to the feudal days when people would only look as far as their counties for effecting change, making trade, and whatnot. It is the lack of a broader perspective that takes away the cosmopolitan factor that advanced intelligent species should have in order to advance. Because most people only look so far as their neighborhood (Earth) for opponents and don't see the bigger picture, that they don't see a reason for themselves to work together for greater goals. This is not to say that competition is bad - the particular nuance of my statement is made in the political sense wherein nationstates even exist at all and that some of them are wary of one another. That is why humanity has not made a concerted effort to reach out because of the infighting that is present within the planet. The myopia is pervasive and is persistent because individuals (be they in power or without) don't have the balls or the brains to look over the fence (the black void) and contemplate on their insignificance.

Because, to me, the only way to break out of that insignificance is to take the closest-to-absolute standard that we have (the universe) and take the challenge of making ourselves known at that level. Nevermind the fact that it might not be done in 1 or a thousand lifetimes, and nevermind the fact that you need the cooperation of many many peolple to do it - but know this: in the span of 3 generations (100 years), we've made incredible inventions, innovations, and institutions that have given civilization tools that are magical and fantastical when seen by the previous generations. Cooperation and progress leaps are possible. But it is foolish to think that greatness is inevitable - because it isn't. When myopic institutions do take the helm of power we can see its debilitating effects of making civilization backslide into destitution: like how the Church maintained the Dark Ages of next-to-zero scientific progress from 400AD to 1500AD.

Know your insignificance, and let that knowledge not fuel your insecurity, but the passion to break out of that insignificance.