A Step Into The Light

From Cervantes:

This is the cosmos that we have discovered with our senses, and our reason, and our wondrous tools. But it is very difficult for most people to accept, and most people do not accept it. Two hundred thousand years of cultural development, of attitudes about the world, of explanation, of belief; the bedrock of the social order in religious authority, the answer to the terror of death and the futility of bereavement, the anchor of purpose; all swept away in a few hundred years, in a devastating avalanche of nearly incomprehensible truth.

Cervantes makes a great point about the necessity of a changed worldview in light of cosmological discovery. I would also add that our increased knowledge of existence at its most fundamental level also leads to a profound shift in perspective. We are an intrinsic part of the universe and it is part of us. No meaningful difference can be drawn. The same building blocks, be they particles, strings or membranes, make up humans, animals, plants, rocks, the seas and the furthest galaxies. We've spent so much of our history creating whimsical designers and purposes for the human race; spent so much effort on separating ourselves from the rest of the universe, only to find that we were the poorer for doing so.