Earth

For a diversion, consider what happens if we, as individuals and society, don't matter.

Matter: c.1300, "material of thought, speech, or expression," from Anglo-Norm. matere, from L. materia "substance from which something is made," also "hard inner wood of a tree" (cf. Port. madeira "wood"), perhaps from mater "origin, source, mother." Or, on another theory, it represents *dmateria, from PIE root *dem-/*dom- (cf. L. domus "house," Eng. timber). With sense development influenced by Gk. hyle, of which it was the equivalent in philosophy. Meaning "substance of which physical objects are made" is attested from mid-14c. That of "grounds, reason, or cause for something" also is first recorded mid-14c. The verb meaning "to be of importance or consequence" is from 1580s. What is the matter "what concerns (someone)" is attested from mid-15c.

Importance. We could follow that trail and find that the root is import, that it is derived from port and that it is also about conveying. But that trail simply shows us our society's history, how language evolved as we did, and how our concepts changed over the years. Being a 'man of import' in the 15th century would probably mean that one was a man who imported things - and that person would have been 'important' because what they 'imported' was seen as valuable by some who would think such a person would be... important in the sense that we use the word now. But if we as individuals and a society don not matter, there can be no such importance in the grand scheme of things because all of such values are implicit to only our own species. Maybe, too, it has to do with our thinking we are important - because maybe, we think, we didn't evolve here but were imported by some being who bothered to have other homo sapiens write about it.

And we'd have to consider that our species doesn't matter, that homo sapiens are insignificant. To think that would mean unraveling ourselves from all myriad of things that we believe matter, from economies to medicine. From grandparents to children. From kitten videos to porn on the internet. None of it would matter. The lethal car accident, the tornados and tsunamis and earthquakes - none of it would matter. After all, we think all of this is important because we think that we matter. That we have some value - but that value can almost always be traced back to a premise that we are supposed to have some mystical value as an explanation for being here. We're important only because we want to be. To the planet we're unimportant, and to other species we are as important as our dominance over them - from the household dog to the Great White Shark, which we have become bold enough to catch and release in its own environment.

Therefore, we must be important. We must be significant. And that importance, that significance, derives fully from our own circular logic - and it is rarely demonstrated in meaningful ways, even to each other. Value is implicitly relative in our lives, from bank account statements to inches of land to laws that curtail creativity. The world I see seems one in which people find less value in each other - and if that is so, if that is correct, then our value as individuals and a species approaches zero. And that means that we, whose value we contrive, will disappear.

And so the choice: To decide whether we matter or not.

It's kind of interesting to consider that, right now, there's a young man - a child in our culture - facing down elephants to get his cows to water in a desert. Or that there are people diving hundreds of feet down with lifelines of air coming from an old diesel compressor, the air tainted with the taste of diesel, so that they can put out nets on the ocean floor to corral fish in. Or that for 700 years, people have been digging under the desert and interconnecting wells for 700 years so that they can have a date farm.

We homo sapiens tend to think that our opposable thumbs give us dominion over the Earth - and honestly, the fact that we have the capacity to pass along vast quantities of information from generation to generation through written communication is extraordinary. Yet, if the living beings on planet Earth formed a democracy, there is no doubt in my mind that homo sapiens would be a minority. It's possible that the bacteria, viruses and insects might lobby for us - and they are powerful lobbies. Dead species can't vote, so we have it pretty easy there as well.