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The last of those, the Copernican, covers the last 1.1 billion years of history — long before mammals, let alone human beings, even existed.

He imagines “a Copernican swerve in how we interact with nature,” one in which we come to imagine ourselves not as nature’s masters or stewards, but once again as part of its patterns and rhythms.

Copernicus—or, rather, the “Copernican principle” that bears his name—tells us that we humans are nothing special.

In 1616 the famous Galileo Galilei, another Copernican, was ordered by the church to cease his scientific investigations.

So the multiverse is kind of a natural extrapolation of what we call the Copernican principle, which is that where we are and who we are and what we are shouldn’t be significant or aberrant.