Chemical scum that happen to populate a backwards little planet

The common conception is that evolution has shown us humans came from fish, tadpoles, to monkeys. We're not that special, mere improvements on them; a slightly smarter chimp. Chemical scum who happen to have populated this tiny planet in a vast universe, akin to the bacteria populating your pen.

As Stephen Hawking put it:

Wrong. Humans are qualitatively different from all other animals. People are universal explainers; anything that can be understood is comprehensible by humans. Anything is possible subject to the laws of physics, and anything can be brought about given the requisite knowledge.

People counter by showing Chimps outperforming humans on certain memory tasks, the fact some chimps have learned sign language, etc. What's interesting here is that even though Chimps can learn rudimentary communication using sign language, they have never asked a question, not once.

Humans make stories to explain reality, that's what a scientific explanation is. A story which accounts for the phenomenon and doesn't invoke the supernatural. Our scientific institutions have embedded a culture of criticism. A culture of conjecturing explanations about reality, pitting them against each other, criticizing them, and coming out with one as our best explanation which accounts for the phenomenon. There's no finality to it, the science is never settled. It is open-ended problem solving. Our best explanation would be better defined as our best scientific misconception that has stood up to all available criticisms yet posed. Through this process of creative conjecture and refutation we make objective progress: knowledge is created. The scientific institution is an error-correcting mechanism which makes falsifiable predictions about reality.

This applies not only to scientific explanations but all knowledge creation. Philosophical doctrines are largely untestable, or it's immoral/unfeasible to do so. How would you set up the experiment to test the philosophical doctrine: "reality is an illusion"? Yet, philosophical claims may still be critiqued through logical inconsistencies, coherence with existing knowledge, and importantly their ability to solve problems.

The above claim about reality being an illusion can logically be refuted. It's solipsism and has many permutations; the simulation argument, Descartes' demon, everything's a dream, god beams images into my mind, etc. It is inherently unfalsifiable as it appeals to something outside reality, this is what's called a supernatural explanation (super → above, natural → reality). As it's unfalsifiable there's nothing we can possibly do to prove its non-existence, but the assertion that it does exist is untenable. It may or may not exist but as we cannot hope to know, one can't invoke it in explanations about reality. It's also inherently uninteresting as there's nothing in it that could possibly explain anything about the world around you.

So what's so special about this hairless ape which happens to have populated the earth? Knowledge creation. Information is that which is embedded in a physical system and has counterfactual properties (i.e. it could have been another way). Knowledge is a class of information which solves a problem, because of this knowledge also tends to get itself replicated. There are two existing types of knowledge that we know of: biological knowledge instanciated in genes and human-type knowledge. Biological knowledge can only be improved incrementally through variation and selection of genes. The bird's wing must be practical for getting itself replicated prior to being able to fly. Human-type knowledge needn't be incremental. As Karl Popper puts it: "we can let our theories die in our stead." Humans can cut through vast swathes of search space and need not die in the criticism of our conjectures, unlike genetic variations.

To fully understand reality, one must understand knowledge and its physical significance. To understand why a copper atom resides on the tip of the nose of a statue depicting Winston Churchill, this cannot reductivly explain by saying particle collisions. You must invoke knowledge. When we look out into the universe for signs of life, we look for the physical effects of knowledge; light illuminating the skies of cities, or asteroids being redirected from their predicted path.

Resources are created by knowledge. To a caveman, uranium is just a funny rock with the possible benefit of giving you cancer, to us it's energy and abundance. Resources are not in short supply, knowledge is. The resources on asteroids were literally created by the person who came up with the idea they could be harvested. We have never once run out of resources, despite all the prophets who claim we will. Those who predicted mass famine couldn't predict the knowledge of the Harber-Bosch process, and thus the agricultural revolution. Those who said we're running out of energy couldn't predict the 1 million tons of thorium under Inner Mongolia that can power China's current energy demands for 60,000 years, nor that more sources of energy can be created. It is impossible to make predictions in any way concerning the future growth of knowledge, it is mere prophecy. The pessimistic fortune tellers of our day who scream the end is nigh.

Ultimately, the only thing which can save all biological life on Earth is us, almost every species to ever exist is extinct. Cows won't create the necessary knowledge to survive the expantion of the sun, redirect an asteroid, or cure disease. Humans can.

Humans are cosmically significant.