The mediocrity principle is the notion in philosophy of science that there is nothing special about humans or the Earth. It is a Copernican principle, used either as an heuristic about Earth's position or a philosophical statement about the place of humanity. In a broader context, the mediocrity principle states that whenever one observes a phenomenon, it is likely that the observed occurrence is only one out of many occurrences; if one witnesses an extraordinary event, it should be assumed that the event occurs more than once, given the proper circumstances.

The mediocrity principle as applied to humanity's and Earth's existence is further boosted by: The traditional formulation of the Copernican mediocrity principle is usually played out in the following way: Ancients of the Middle East and west once thought that the Earth was at the center of the universe, but Copernicus proposed that the Sun was at the center. In the 1930s, RJ Trumpler found that the solar system was not at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy (as Jacobus Kapteyn claimed), but 56% of the way out to the rim of the galaxy's core. In the mid-twentieth century, George Gamow (et al.) showed that although it appears that our Galaxy is at the center of an expanding universe (in accordance with Hubble's law), every point in space experiences the same phenomenon.

And, at the end of the twentieth century, Geoff Marcy and colleagues discovered that extrasolar planets are quite common, putting to rest the idea that the Sun is unusual in having planets. In short, Copernican mediocrity is a series of astronomical findings that the Earth is a relatively ordinary planet orbiting a relatively ordinary star in a relatively ordinary galaxy which is one of countless others in a giant universe, possibly within an infinite multiverse.

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