Stephen Hawking famously said,

people are nothing special.

People are chemical scum on a very typical planet,

orbiting an average star in the outer suburbs

of a very typical galaxy, which is one among hundreds

of billions of galaxies in the universe.

This vision of what people are

and of what the planet Earth is,

it's true in a trivial sense,

but it misses the point

that in people are a hub of a kind.

We are, so far as we know,

the sole place in the universe,

which is creating knowledge

and open-ended stream of knowledge that

could transform the rest of reality.

In the same way that gravity is able to pull that galaxy

into a particular shape,

knowledge in the future

will be able to shape the course of the planet,

the solar system, eventually the galaxy.

We will have this profound impact upon everything

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