The book It's More Likely, We're Not Special is the result of approximately 10 years of photographic artistic work and the author's interest in cosmology and astrophysics. The narrative takes the reader through the philosophical aspects of scientific discoveries, theories, and hypotheses, as well as their significance to us, attempting to answer the question: in the context of our knowledge about the Universe, do we have the right to feel unique or privileged? After all, some estimates suggest that the probability of the laws of physics and fundamental cosmological constants aligning in such a way as to create a universe capable of sustaining life is incredibly small—just 1 in 10 raised to the 229th power. Or perhaps we are merely one of many forms matter can take, and we feel unique only because we define ourselves that way.
The book offers a proposal to shift our perspective to a cosmic one, which can be illustrated by the following paraphrase of Carl Sagan's words:
"There is a small, seemingly unremarkable piece of rock, on which water has spread in some places, while vegetation covers the areas it has not reached. This rock orbits an average star located on the outskirts of one of hundreds of billions of galaxies. Everyone you love, everyone you know, every admired actor, every politician, criminal, celebrity, and artist lives on it. Every historical figure has lived there too: from bloodthirsty tyrants to inspired philosophers. Wars have been waged over tiny fragments of this little rock, wars in which millions of so-called unique beings have perished."
"There is a small, seemingly unremarkable piece of rock, on which water has spread in some places, while vegetation covers the areas it has not reached. This rock orbits an average star located on the outskirts of one of hundreds of billions of galaxies. Everyone you love, everyone you know, every admired actor, every politician, criminal, celebrity, and artist lives on it. Every historical figure has lived there too: from bloodthirsty tyrants to inspired philosophers. Wars have been waged over tiny fragments of this little rock, wars in which millions of so-called unique beings have perished."
In 1990, it was Carl Sagan who convinced engineers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory—those overseeing the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 missions—to turn one of the spacecraft back toward the center of the Solar System and take photographs of the inner planets. In one of these images, we can see a tiny dot occupying only a few pixels, appearing within a rainbow streak caused by sunlight scattering on the lens. That dot was Earth. The photograph shows no clouds, no outlines of continents, and certainly no signs of human civilization. From the distance of 6.4 billion kilometers, or over 43 astronomical units, from which Voyager 1 took the image, Earth is barely discernible, no bigger than the granules of noise in the photograph.
The power of this image inspires humility and modesty, as the viewer sees their entire world as just a barely noticeable fragment of reality.
