"Human Dimension is all there is, ..."

My immediate reaction to that, Suibhne, is: "Oh no it isn't!" There's a lot more to existence than humans, and if we don't start acknowledging that soon we'll all be well and truly scundered! Besides us (and our petty concerns) there's various classes of micro-organisms, plants, fungi, molluscs, crustaceans, insects (countless thousands of beetles, for example), birds and mammals (plus loads of stuff I've missed). There's the various components of the Earth's interior and plate techtonics and volcanoes and oceans, rivers and lakes. There's weather, clouds and thunder and lightning and various other atmospheric phenomena. There's the Sun (an on-going thermonuclear explosion held together by gravity) and planets, moons, asteroids and comets, the Oort Cloud and the complex boundaries of the Solar System. There are the terrifying gulfs of interstellar space and other suns (at least 100 billion of them in our galaxy alone); these include red and brown dwarfs and blue and red giants giants and it appears now that many of these have planets - some of which could be earth-like; I believe that there are suns that are so big that it would take a modern jet airliner several thousand years to circumnavigate them. There are black holes - collapsed stars with such intense gravitational fields that they swallow light. There is the galaxy itself: a vast, lens-shaped conglomeration of stars around 100,000 light years in diameter. There are the even more terrifying gulfs of intergalactic space and countless billions of other galaxies. Finally there is the Universe itself: I one saw a representation of it which looked like a 3-dimensional filigree or net - with inconceivably vast, empty 'cells' between the skeins of galaxies. And all of this is composed 'stuff' we call 'matter' which has a complex structure on a sub-microscopic scale governed by the outre laws of quantum mechanics.

Where do you and I fit into all of this? Do you know, I haven't got the faintest clue!