The Cosmic Assumption: A Guess That Built Everything

The Assumption Beneath Everything

As humans, we operate with skepticism. We assume nothing is happening until there’s proof that something is. That’s the spirit of the null hypothesis, the default assumption of “no effect,” “no difference.” It’s the backbone of science. The bedrock of the courtroom. And perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s how we move through daily life:

• “This email isn’t a scam... unless there are typos and shady links.”

• “The suspect is innocent… until the evidence shows otherwise.”

• “My house is empty… until I hear footsteps upstairs”

We demand evidence. We look for data. We start with no and wait for a compelling yes. So why, when it comes to meaning, do we flip the script?

The Lottery of Purpose

To assume life has meaning is already a radical act of faith. There is no empirical evidence for life having inherent meaning. No cosmic footnote at the bottom of existence explaining why we are here. And yet, we live as if there is a reason. It’s our quiet, unspoken religion, that even the most secular minds seem to subscribe to. But we don’t stop there. We go further. We try to define what that meaning is. And this is where things start to fall apart for me. Say we give a generous 50/50 probability that life has any meaning. Already, that’s unprovable. But let’s play along. Now ask:

• Is the meaning singular or multiple?

• If singular, which one — connection, growth, happiness?

• If multiple, how many? And in what combination?

Any proposed meanings are completely unverified claims. The odds of randomly guessing the correct meaning (if there is one) are astronomically low. If you believe there are 10 possible meanings, there are over 1000 different possible combinations. That’s a philosophical lottery, and we behave as though we have already picked the winning ticket.

When I strip everything back, I’m left with a single meaning that I can reasonably accept: Existence. The raw, undeniable fact that I am (although the nature of that existence is a debate for another day). Because before we can wonder why we exist, we must exist in the first place. If I wish to build meaning on anything, it has to begin here.

Survival Without Context

If existence is the starting point, then survival might be its earliest impulse. From the beginning, human life has carried one primal force: the instinct to stay alive.

In the ancient world, survival of the individual was tightly linked to survival of the species. Lose enough individuals, and the lineage dies out. But population growth, largely supported by modern medicine, has severed that connection. Today, we preserve individual life, not for species continuity, but simply because we think we should. We resuscitate. We transplant. We fight to keep a heart beating — without any empirical evidence that life is better than death for the person experiencing it. We rarely question the assumption that keeping someone alive is inherently good. Even our fear of death is built on the assumption that death is inherently bad. That to die is to lose. We believe, by default, that life > death, full stop.

Why? It is possible that we have inherited an ancient instinct, one that outlasted its original context. We're no longer preserving humanity. We're preserving individuals. We choose to survive because that’s what we do. Even when we no longer know what we’re surviving for.

But what if individual survival isn’t just an outdated instinct? Evolution tends to optimize, not preserve without reason. So maybe survival has endured not because it’s obsolete, but because it still serves a function, one we don’t yet understand.

Time, Stardust, and Speculation

Now, let’s be clear, we have no evidence for cosmic purpose. But if we’re speculating anyway, let’s go big. Everything in life – every tree, person, animal – is built from carbon, a product of stellar nuclear fusion. In other words, the matter that makes you – your body, your brain, your breath – was created by ancient stars that existed billions of years ago. The universe literally built you with its own debris.

So, when Carl Sagan said, “We are a way for the universe to know itself,” he wasn’t being poetic. He was being accurate. And maybe, just maybe, we are more than that. What if we’re not just observers but agents of preservation?

Time, according to Einstein’s relativity, does not behave the way we experience it. In this framework, past, present, and future coexist, not as a sequence, but as a single, woven whole. If you traveled near the speed of light to the Andromeda galaxy (about 2.5 million light years away) and back, you’d return having aged only a few years, while millions of years would have passed on Earth. You could, quite literally, outlive your descendants by centuries or millennia. That’s not science fiction. That’s physics.

If time is simultaneous – if the universe contains all moments at once – then what we call “the future” already exists somewhere in the fabric of space-time. If our species has a deep, relentless urge to survive, maybe it’s not random. Maybe survival isn’t just instinctual but functional. Maybe the universe already knows something about us that we do not. A future role. A moment of importance that’s already encoded in the totality of time. From our linear view, we call it “potential.” From the universe’s view, maybe it’s just reality, already happening. Maybe that’s why, for me, existence is the only meaning that doesn’t demand evidence: because existence itself is the door to all possible meanings, even the ones we can’t yet imagine.

The Precondition of Meaning

Now, let’s say all of this is wrong. Let’s say existence has no deeper purpose. Let’s say survival is just a leftover evolutionary reflex. Let’s say the universe is indifferent. Even then, one thing becomes clear: Meaning cannot exist without life.

As physicist Brian Cox once pointed out, “We are definitely physically insignificant. The Earth is one planet, around one star, among 400 billion stars, in one galaxy, among two trillion galaxies, in a small patch of the universe.”

But – and this is the crucial part – he adds:

“If this is the only planet in the Milky Way galaxy that currently hosts an intelligent civilization, then it’s the only island of meaning in a sea of 400 billion stars […] If we mess it up, we’ll be responsible for annihilating meaning, perhaps forever, in this galaxy.”

This is what I have accepted as the weight of meaning. Our environment, our planet, is the most sacred thing we have. Not because it’s beautiful. Not because it’s rare. But because it’s the only place we know of where meaning is even possible. So maybe it doesn’t matter what the meaning of life is. Maybe what matters most is that we protect the only conditions in which meaning can begin.

The Possibility We Protect

We search for meaning in a universe that offers no clear answer. We love, pursue, grow, hope — without ever knowing why. And still, we keep going. Maybe that’s not irrational. Maybe that’s what it means to be human. To exist. To wonder. To me, the question of whether life has meaning – or what that meaning might be – feels unimportant. There’s no evidence either way. We don’t know if meaning exists, and if it does, we have no idea what it is. But meaning matters to us. And if there’s even a chance that life holds meaning, then the only thing we can do is keep the possibility alive. Meaning, then, isn’t about what we do, but whether what we do allows meaning to endure. If anything matters — anything at all — it’s that we ensure there’s still a world from which we can ask the very question: Why do we exist?