What if that Copernican insignificance was actually all wrong?

Yet each pales to insignificance with the completion of that magnificent accomplishment of twenty first century technology, the Digital Superhighway.

This tells us that that insignificance paradigm that we somehow got to learn from the Copernican principle, it's all wrong.

And half the time, what's happened is it's related this kind of sense of insignificance to humankind, to the Earth in a bigger space.

Yet, the international community allows poverty to destroy lives on a scale before which the impact of all of the world's natural disasters pales into insignificance.

In the 17th century, the mathematician and philosopher, Blaise Pascal, wrote of his dread of the infinite, his feeling of insignificance at contemplating the vast reaches of outer space.

Brazil and Indonesia also contribute a significant number of new cases. Compared to the numbers who fall ill with diseases such as HIV AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis, however, leprosy almost pales into insignificance.

Second, the intervention once again highlights the strategic insignificance of the European Union, which is promoting a comprehensive strategy for Mali and the whole region in order to avoid the crucial question Under what conditions will Europe use force?

The ECB s newfound ability to print money, essentially without limit, to support both banks and governments has reduced Greek contagion to insignificance. That represents a profound change in Europe s financial environment, which Greek politicians, along with many economic analysts, still fail to understand.

But that would destroy the useful together with the embarrassing or irrelevant. If a clean start is impossible, the best that can be done is to try to bury the old information with such an inflationary flood of new data that it simply dwindles into insignificance.

PRINCETON Nicolás Maduro s narrow victory in Venezuela s presidential election raises an important question (quite apart from the opposition s question as to whether Maduro really won) Can populism thrive without a genuinely popular, charismatic leader, or are movements like Chávismo doomed to fade into insignificance once they have lost their quasi deities?

Employing CSF troops in the sensitive border region where jihadis have established their strongholds is similarly indicative of Sinai s insignificance in Egyptian military thought. Created to absorb army rejects who must still complete their mandatory national service, the CSF is a lower rung security organization in a country whose armed forces are subpar to begin with.

The Islamic Action Front, the Brotherhood s political party in Jordan, continued to reject the majoritarian electoral system, which favors tribes over political parties and other important social groups. In particular, owing to the relative insignificance of national party lists, Jordanians of Palestinian origin, who comprise nearly half the electorate, receive only a small percentage of elected officials.

After World War II, when the world was divided into nuclear armed camps threatening each other with mutual destruction, Russell did not take the view that our insignificance, when considered against the vastness of the universe, meant that the end of life on Earth did not matter. On the contrary, he made nuclear disarmament the chief focus of his political activity for the remainder of his life.