Earth is just a place. But it's not even a normal place, as most of the cosmos is empty. Normal is the vast and immense void, cold and universal, the eternal night of space in comparison with which the stars, its planets, already appear as something painfully rare and precious. If we were dropped at random into the cosmos, the probability that we would appear on the planet or even in its vicinity would be less than a part of a billion, a billion, a billion.