The motif of Earth’s ultimate insignificance is launched at the novel’s opening, with a description of Earth’s place within the larger Galaxy. It exists “Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end” of the Galaxy, where “a small unregarded yellow sun” provides the heat and light necessary for life on “an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet” (5) that is the Earth. Earth is inconsequential, unimportant—even unfashionable—to the Galaxy as a whole. Furthermore, Earth’s people are unhappy, obsessed with money and consumerism, and not very sophisticated in general. When a woman has a revelation about how to help the people of Earth attain happiness, the Earth is shortly destroyed thereafter. Thus, “nearly two thousand years after one man [the Biblical Jesus] had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change” (5), the messenger is again annihilated. The Earth is destroyed in order to make way for an hyperspatial bypass—which, it turns out, has been rendered obsolete by new technology and will never be built anyway.

Therefore, contrary to what its inhabitants may believe, Earth is most certainly not the center of the known Universe. However, the Earth is simultaneously more and less important than initially expected.