As I indicated in a previous blog post, I’ve been reading Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s book, “Astrophysics for People in a Hurry” the past few days. If you haven’t read that book, I should mention that I highly recommend it. I just finished reading it yesterday and was struck by certain realizations about how our place in the universe is both awesome and precarious. More than that is the realization of how our ego creates realities, imagined and perceived, about how the world revolves around ourselves. which is as laughable about our nature as previous beliefs about the Earth being the center of the universe.
Dr. Tyson reflects on this cosmic perspective in the book’s final chapter, and eloquently describes this rather circumspect viewpoint in the following passage:
When I pause and reflect on our expanding universe, with its galaxies hurtling away from one another, embedded within the ever-stretching, four-dimensional fabric of space and time, sometimes I forget that uncounted people walk this Earth without food or shelter, and that children are disproportionately represented among them.
When I pore over the data that establish the mysterious presence of dark matter and dark energy throughout the universe, sometimes I forget that everyday — every twenty-four-hour rotation of Earth — people kill and get killed in the name of someone else’s conception of God, and that some people who do not kill in the name of God, kill in the name of needs or wants of political dogma.
When I track the orbits of asteroids, comets, and planets, each one a pirouetting dancer in a cosmic ballet, choreographed by the forces of gravity, sometimes I forget that too many people act in wanton disregard for the delicate interplay of Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, and land, with consequences that our children and our children’s children will witness and pay for with their health and well-being.
And sometimes I forget that powerful people rarely do all they can to help those who cannot help themselves.
I occasionally forget those things because, however big the world is — in our hearts, our minds, and our digital maps — the universe is even bigger.
— Neil DeGrasse Tyson, “Astrophysics for People in a Hurry”
He goes on to explain how we, as a society should consider ourselves lucky that we can have the resources and luxury of time to continue to explore the wonders of the universe. But at the same time, the cosmic perspective compels us to strive to be humble, and to open our minds to extraordinary ideas and our eyes to the universe as a cold, lonely, and dangerous place that forces us to assess the value of humans to one another.
Personally, it is a wake-up call to the noble notion of life’s purpose, and how our own lives have the opportunity to enrich everyone else’s. Our time on earth is but a blink in the eye of cosmic time, yet if applied in proper perspective, can bring such fruits as joy, meaning, and connectedness. We cannot, and we don’t have to, make a ‘dent in the universe’. We just need re-calibrate our expectations.
Finally, Dr. Tyson implores us to continue exploring what’s yet to discover about the universe, reminding us that …
The day our knowledge of the cosmos ceases to expand, we risk regressing to the childish view that the universe figuratively and literally revolves around us.
— Neil DeGrasse Tyson, “Astrophysics for People in a Hurry”