Our Place In The Universe

Tonight, while indulging in my usual routine of walking the dog before bed, I also indulged in a favourite pastime...Moon-watching. As all two of my readers may realise, this is a particularly favourite hobby of mine.
The Moon represents, to me at least, mankind's first big step away from the safety of the skirts of Mother Earth. This is how Man gained his independence from the Earth...how he proved that it was possible for a person to live away from home.
Of course it is not finalised....as I stood in the street tonight and saw a Moon, just one day past it's fullness, and thought...."a man stood there, and looked at this", I became solemnly aware of how insignificant my life, my home, and my presence were, in the shadow of this great achievement.
And yet, I felt like I owned a piece of Outer Space....

We are so insignificant, we are so tiny. Yet we are so powerful.
To the universe we are less than a heartbeat, less than a blink of an eye. If we disappeared tomorrow, our existence will have never mattered to the universe, because in the events that take place in the cosmos; the formation of galaxies, supernovas, black holes eating solar systems....to all of this, our entire history means less than the lifetime of a single atom. That is how tiny we are.
Yet....

We are the most dominant species our planet has ever seen.
Our species is the only sentient species we have found in the entire solar system.
We have left our planet and visited our nearest neighbour, with plans to visit our next nearest neighbour within a century of our first visit outside home.
We have split the atom and investigated the beginnings of our universe.
We have brought our species to the edge of self-destruction and have pulled back from that brink.

For all that we are not, there is so much that we are and still could be.
This is not about science, or religion, or money, or politics.
It is about humans, good and bad, great and small.
It is about Perspective....we are all great...if we choose to contribute to making all of us great....