People Who Regard Themselves as Important as Baobab Trees
Chapter 17 of The Little Prince begins by correcting the preceding account of Earth’s lamplighters and multitudes. Wit sometimes requires exaggeration, the narrator says, and the previous description might have given readers unfamiliar with Earth the wrong impression. Although humanity is numerous, it occupies surprisingly little of Earth’s surface.
When the book was written in the 1940s, the population was about two billion. The narrator claims that if everyone stood closely together as at a rally, they could fit in a square roughly twenty miles on each side. Whether that arithmetic is exact should be checked, but the point is not to imagine that humanity fills the planet merely because its population sounds large.
Adults imagine that they occupy enormous space. More than that, they regard themselves as important as baobab trees. On the Little Prince’s planet, a baobab can split the tiny world apart unless it is uprooted in time. Human beings imagine that they possess comparable scale and importance on Earth.
The narrator tells adults, who love numbers, to calculate for themselves, while playfully asking the reader simply to trust him. The lecturer immediately interrupts: do not believe him. When a claim can be calculated or checked, neither an author’s authority nor plausible numbers should replace verification.
He Arrived on Earth and Saw No One
The Little Prince is astonished to see no one when he reaches Earth. The preceding chapter suggested a planet full of kings, vain men, drunkards, businessmen, and lamplighters, yet his first actual scene is an empty African desert. A landscape without humanity follows immediately after talk of humanity’s numbers and importance.
A pale ring, the color of moonlight, stirs on the sand, and the Little Prince greets it cautiously. It is a snake. The snake tells him that he is on Earth, in Africa. When the Little Prince asks whether no one lives on Earth, the snake replies that no one lives in the desert and that Earth is very large.
Experiencing Earth first in a place without people destabilizes an anthropocentric gaze. The planet is not a stage that begins to exist only when humans appear. A humanless desert is still Earth, as are countless relations among lives and materials that humans never notice.
Our maps privilege borders, cities, and roads, but Earth itself bears none of those lines. The desert encountered by the Little Prince is far older than human names and orders and may remain after humanity is gone. Looking for people makes him imagine a world in which people are absent.
The Little Prince Looks at the Stars While the Snake Is Silent
The Little Prince sits on a rock and looks up at the sky. He must be thinking of his distant planet and his rose. He asks whether the stars shine so that everyone may someday find their own star again. The snake says that the Little Prince’s planet is very far away.
When the Little Prince says Earth is somewhat strange, the snake answers briefly. Long silences interrupt their exchange. The snake speaks in riddles, and the Little Prince does not immediately understand. Yet few words do not mean that nothing is being said.
The snake’s silence contrasts with the human desire to explain. When people meet the unknown, they quickly fill the gap with myths, doctrines, and numbers. The snake does not interpret everything. Leaving what is unknown as unknown can itself be an intellectual posture.
The Little Prince is a small being from the cosmos, while the snake lives pressed against Earth’s soil. They meet in the desert as radically different beings. Their encounter overlays the cosmos and the soil, longing for return and the possibility of death.
One Can Be Lonely Among People Too
The Little Prince says the desert is lonely. The snake replies that one can also be lonely among people. There is not only the solitude caused by the absence of people; there is also the solitude felt when relationships fail and words do not reach one another amid a crowd.
Whether the population is two billion or eight billion, an increase in numbers does not automatically remove loneliness. Calculating that humanity could fit into one square and living in mutual understanding are entirely different matters. Physical proximity can make loneliness in a crowd still more vivid when each person remains enclosed within a private world.
Believing that one is as important as a baobab does not produce fulfilling relationships. The more one establishes oneself as a special center, the more others become background scenery serving that self, and people become isolated. The desire to be important can obstruct connection.
The snake’s brief sentence applies directly to modern cities. People and information abound, yet loneliness persists. What matters is not simply how many people are nearby but whether I encounter another as a world in their own right or as an instrument confirming my importance.
The Snake Speaks of Death and Return to the Soil
The snake says it is more powerful than a king’s finger. The Little Prince asks how a creature without limbs, unable even to travel, can be powerful. The snake replies that it can carry someone farther than a ship and return anyone it touches to the soil from which they came.
The snake’s thin body resembles a golden bracelet and appears small and fragile, yet its venom can end a human life. Power here is not identical with bodily size or occupied space. Before humans who believe that importance requires the scale of a baobab, a nearly spaceless snake displays the greatest power: death.
The statement that we come from soil and return to soil recurs in many religions and myths. The human body emerges from earth and matter, then reenters material circulation at death. The snake promises that it can return the Little Prince to his home planet, implying that this return may occur through death.
Death dismantles the special status human beings construct. Kings, businessmen, and vain men all return their bodies to the soil. The snake does not mention death to degrade humanity but to reveal the material conditions and finitude that we prefer to forget.
Stories of Return Created by Dividing Body and Soul
Humans could see that bodies return to the earth, but they found it difficult to accept that the “I” who thought, remembered, and loved might disappear completely. They therefore divided body from soul: the body returns to soil, while the soul travels to heaven or another world.
Stories in which a god shapes the human body from soil and breathes life into it, or in which a soul faces judgment or rebirth after death, appear in many forms across cultures. Humanity wished for consciousness and identity to remain preserved within a cosmic order.
The Little Prince’s release from a body too heavy to carry home overlaps with this ancient symbolism. The story need not be read as literal evidence of an afterlife. The important question is what images and languages human beings have created in order to understand death and separation.
The snake offers no doctrine to explain the gap. It leaves death and return as a riddle. Rather than filling that silence with one religion’s answer, the lecturer asks why we divided body and soul and whether we have actually verified the destination we describe.
A Universe Created for Humanity
In ancient religious worldviews, the cosmos is organized around humanity. God creates heaven and earth, sun and moon, plants and animals, then finally creates human beings. Humanity resembles the divine and receives authority over other lives. The whole world is described as a house made for us.
In this story the human body returns to soil, but the soul is specially preserved. Only humans receive moral judgment, salvation, and eternal life. A double-centered structure emerges: Earth at the center of the universe and humanity at the center of Earth.
This pattern is not unique to Christianity. Myths in which a heavenly being descends to make humanity or establish kingship, and in which a father in heaven watches people on earth, occur across cultures. The Dangun story, traditions of heavenly descent, and many creation myths repeat the link between sky and humanity.
The recurrence of similar stories does not prove that their contents are factual. It may instead show a shared human imagination that looks to the sky to explain origins and importance. Myth reveals human questions, but it does not automatically guarantee the answers given to them.
Questions Around the Fifth Century BCE Fractured Anthropocentrism
Surviving records show strong movements around the fifth century BCE that questioned established gods, authorities, and values across a broad region. India, Persia, Greece, and China were not sealed islands. Trade, war, travel, and translation moved ideas along with people.
Thinkers asked whether gods truly existed, whether a soul could actually be separated from a body, whether sacrifice produced blessings, and whether sin brought punishment in another life. The hierarchies, laws, and morals once treated as heavenly order might instead be human constructions.
The significance of this period is not that one new correct answer suddenly appeared. What mattered was the emergence of an attitude that made the self-evident questionable. Skepticism is not a personality that rejects everything but a method that returns unsupported certainty to the status of a question.
Materialism does not insult humanity either. It seeks to understand bodies and the world through material relations and refuses to begin explanation with invisible souls or gods. The snake’s language of returning to soil meets this material perspective.
Āstika and Nāstika Divided Indian Thought
In ancient India, traditions accepting the authority of the Vedas, the soul, and sacrificial order were called āstika, while streams that refused those authorities were called nāstika. Translating these terms simply as theism and atheism loses context, but they preserve a tension between those who presuppose that something “is” and those who question the presupposition.
Nāstika was never one doctrine. Some traditions accepted only matter, some skeptically questioned the possibility of knowledge, and others, including Jainism and early Buddhism, challenged sacrifice, hierarchy, and the eternal self.
The names matter less than the questions. Who verified the sacredness of the Vedas? Where is the soul? Is the authority of the sacrificial class a natural law? Can anyone truthfully claim knowledge of the world after death? Such questions shook the habit of presenting human orders as divine orders.
Intellectual history is often arranged through the victor’s categories. Later orthodox traditions labeled challengers nihilists or dangerous heretics. When their questions are recovered, however, we see not mere destruction but a movement of wisdom seeking release from unverified certainty.
Were the Sophists Merely Makers of Fallacies?
Greek Sophists are often remembered in later history as tricksters who distorted truth through wordplay. Yet the word originally referred to a wise person or teacher of wisdom. Sophists questioned inherited myths and absolute morals and explored how language and standpoint shape judgment.
Protagoras’s claim that humanity is the measure of all things need not be read merely as an old celebration of humanity at the cosmic center. It also exposes how what feels true and right can vary with the observer and situation. It demands grounds from anyone claiming an absolute standard.
Atomists such as Democritus and other natural philosophers tried to explain lightning, disease, and cosmic change through matter and natural principles rather than divine moods. They were not modern scientists, but they opened a path that valued observation and argument over invisible authority.
Established powers considered such questions dangerous. If the absoluteness of gods, laws, and classes could be doubted, the authority of those benefiting from them could also collapse. Remembering Sophists only as deceivers may be the victor’s way of pushing a questioning tradition to the margins.
To Believe Is to Say That One Does Not Yet Know
When a person says, “I believe God exists,” the sentence does not strictly mean that God’s existence has been verified and known. If something is established as fact, we ordinarily need not call it belief. Belief operates where confirmation is impossible or knowledge has not yet been reached.
Believing must therefore not be converted into knowing. People may be free to believe, but they have no right to impose that belief on everyone as objective fact. Believers themselves should distinguish experience and evidence from hope and inheritance.
Skepticism does not ridicule anyone for having faith. It asks, “Do I actually know this?” “On what evidence do I speak?” and “Could another explanation be possible?” The admission that one does not know is the beginning of inquiry, investigation, and conversation.
When we declare that we know what we do not know, thought stops. This applies not only to gods, souls, and rebirth but also to human importance. One may believe that humanity is the purpose of the universe, but presenting that belief as verified fact requires evidence.
Early Buddhist Questions and Later Additions of Certainty
Early Buddhism belongs among nāstika streams insofar as it challenged Vedic and sacrificial authority and the eternal, independent self. Rather than merely repeating a divinely revealed truth, Gautama Siddhartha urged people to examine in experience the conditions under which suffering arises and ceases.
Impermanence, non-self, and dependent arising disturb the picture of an eternal soul lodged inside the body. Beings arise and change according to causes and conditions, and no unchanging owner can be found within them. The path does not make us a more exceptional soul; it loosens attachment to exceptional substance.
Across history, however, Buddhism reabsorbed the vocabulary of older religion. Rebirth and karma were simplified into a ledger of sins in past lives and rewards or punishments in future lives. A tradition of questioning hardened once again into a system of belief.
The point is not to reduce every form of historical Buddhism to one verdict. It is to notice the contradiction of speaking about non-self while reinstalling an eternal traveler called “me,” or speaking of dependent arising while asserting that the universe records each individual action like an accountant.
A Network of Thought Connected Through Persia
If Greece and India are treated as entirely separate worlds, similar questions arising at similar times appear accidental. Yet between them stood the immense Persian empires and trade routes. Not only people and goods but religions, philosophies, institutions, and knowledge of nature traveled.
Persian thought cannot be reduced to one doctrine. What matters is that a vast region from India across the Iranian plateau to the Mediterranean was connected. Questions and arguments formed in one place could be translated into other languages through merchants, travelers, conquest, and marriage.
We learn ancient thought in boxes labeled Greek, Indian, and Persian philosophy, but actual ideas did not respect later national borders. Before assigning a thought to the sole genius of one civilization, we should see the dependent network in which many conditions met to produce something new.
This perspective also challenges the habit of making one civilization as important as a baobab. Once we abandon the simple claim that only the West was rational or only the East spiritual, we see a complex history in which different peoples exchanged questions and made wisdom together.
China’s Hundred Schools Questioned in the Same Era
In China around the fifth century BCE, the Hundred Schools debated vigorously amid warfare and social transformation. Confucian, Daoist, Mohist, Legalist, and other traditions offered competing accounts of humanity, society, politics, and nature.
It is difficult to declare China completely isolated from other regions. Exchange through Central Asia, the steppe, and western regions had long existed. Although every route of influence cannot be proven, we should keep open the possibility that questions traveled through human networks.
What these debates shared was a refusal merely to repeat the authority of heaven and tradition. Some emphasized humaneness, some an unforced way, and some law and institutions. Their answers differed, but each reconsidered orders made by human beings.
The label Axial Age is convenient, but if we turn its thinkers into saints to worship, questioning disappears again. Rather than memorize their conclusions, we should ask why people in that period doubted inherited answers and what conditions generated new thought.
The Renaissance and Scientific Revolution Dismantled the Center Again
Ancient skepticism and natural philosophy weakened or were absorbed into other forms as religious orthodoxies strengthened. In the West, the Renaissance and the scientific revolution revived ancient questions and observation, challenging the Church’s monopoly over descriptions of the cosmos.
Earth was not the center of the universe; the sun was one among innumerable stars; humanity was not a separately created species but one branch of a long evolutionary history. As instruments of observation widened, humanity’s physical position moved ever farther from the center.
Disease, lightning, and planetary motion came to be described through repeatable observation and testable laws rather than divine will alone. Science is not a religion possessing final answers to every question but a method that admits possible error and revises explanations.
This development does not destroy human dignity. It shows that we can abandon the fiction that humanity occupies the cosmic center and still reduce suffering and create knowledge. It relocates the ground of importance from cosmic privilege to relationship and responsibility.
Cosmic Dust Creates Value for Itself
From the perspective of science, Earth is a small planet in a vast universe, and humanity is life that appeared briefly upon it. We do not fill the cosmos like baobab trees. At death, the body returns, as the snake says, to material circulation.
This fact need not make life meaningless. Such despair is the reverse side of the ancient frame that value exists only if the cosmos or a god guarantees my specialness. When external assurance disappears, someone caught in that frame imagines that all value disappears with it.
Even if the universe was not made for me, I can love, learn, reduce suffering, and create value within relationships. Value is not a rank inscribed among the stars but meaning that living beings give and answer for in relation to one another. Saying that I matter becomes healthy only when it does not make other beings insignificant.
How to live does not descend from heaven as a completed answer. We must examine inherited myths, religions, and social frames, distinguish what we have verified from what we do not know, and ask what consequences our choices create for ourselves and other beings.
The fact that the universe does not guarantee human value in advance does not make life worthless. It means that we must create value through relationship and choice.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.