Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. ISSN 0077-8923 ANNALS OF THE NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES Special Issue: The Will to Meaning COMMENTARY A touch of awe: crafting meaning from the wonder of the cosmos Steve Paulson, 1 Paul Davies, 2 Ard Louis, 3 and Lucianne Walkowicz 4 1 Wisconsin Public Radio, Madison, Wisconsin. 2 Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona. 3 University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom. 4 Adler Planetarium, Chicago, Illinois From the birth of galaxies to the self-organizing dynamics of our planet to the ongoing expansion of the universe, the more we discover about the evolution of the cosmos, the more acutely we realize the enormity of what remains to be known. Just this year astrophysicists at the University of Nottingham confirmed that there are at least two trillion galaxies in the cosmos, 10 times more than had been previously thought. What guidance or wisdom can the study of cosmology and astrophysics offer us in our search for meaning and purpose? In conversation with Steve Paulson, executive producer and host of To the Best of Our Knowledge, theoretical physicists Paul Davies and Ard Louis, and astrophysicist Lucianne Walkowicz share their perceptions based on years of gazing upward and beyond our own intimate planet. Keywords: meaning; evolution; space travel; cosmos; universe; multiverse; astrobiology; anthropology; Christianity; quantum mechanics Steve Paulson: I’m delighted to welcome this panel as we wrap up our series “The Will to Meaning: Seeking the Why of Our Existence.” We’re going to be talking this evening about how we can look for a sense of meaning or purpose in our lives in light of what we have learned from the science of the cosmos. But first, I want to put this conversation in context. Until about 500 years ago, pretty much everyone believed the earth was the center of everything, and then came along Copernicus. A little bit later, Galileo who showed that the earth was just one of many planets spinning around the sun. Our solar system was in fact just one of many star systems in our galaxy. More recent discoveries reveal that there are at least 100 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, with billions more planets. That’s just our galaxy. There are some estimates that there may be two trillion galaxies in the universe. That’s just our universe. There are theoretical physicists who believe there may actually be a whole bunch of other universes out there—that we live in a so-called multiverse. As for human beings, well, we’ve been around for maybe 200,000 years, at least in some version of what we would recognize today. To slightly misquote Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), “It doesn’t take too much to see the problems of a few people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy universe.” In other words, we are just a cosmic speck, utterly insignificant in the grand scheme of things—or so it would seem. How do you [to the audience] square the vastness of the universe with our own tiny place in it? Does this idea bother you at all in some existential sense? I have to say, I am looking for some solace tonight and hoping that I will get something to hang onto from our distinguished panel. Paul Davies, PhD, is a physicist, cosmologist, and astrobiologist at Arizona State University, where he runs the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science. Among his many popular books, the most recent is The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence. For several years he chaired the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Post-detection Task Group on behalf of the International Academy of Astronautics. He devised and presented a series of BBC Radio 3 science documentaries and a one-hour BBC TV documentary about his work in astrobiology called The Cradle of Life. In Australia, his two six-part TV series The Big Questions and More Big Questions won national acclaim. His other books include The Mind of God, How to Build a Time Machine, and The 5th Miracle: The Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life. doi: 10.1111/nyas.13875 1 Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. xxxx (2018) 1–17 C  2018 New York Academy of Sciences.