I love how science puts things in perspective:
The earth is a microbial planet, on which macroorganisms are recent additions—highly interesting and extremely complex in ways that most microbes aren’t, but in the final analysis relatively unimportant in a global context.
[…]
Microbial life on this planet would remain largely unchanged were all plant and animal life eliminated, but the elimination of microbial life itself would lead in very short order to a completely sterile planet.
— Carl Woese
(1998) PNAS 95:11043-11046
(first paragraph from private correspondence with Mark Wheelis)
And that’s merely biology. Think physics…