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The Cosmic Perspective

Universe: The 100th Essay

by Neil deGrasse Tyson

From Natural History Magazine, April 2007

Of all the sciences cultivated by mankind, Astronomy is acknowledged to be,

and undoubtedly is, the most sublime, the most interesting, and the most useful.
For, by knowledge derived from this science, not only the bulk of the Earth is
discovered . . . ; but our very faculties are enlarged with the grandeur of the
ideas it conveys, our minds exalted above [their] low contracted prejudices.

— James Ferguson, Astronomy Explained Upon Sir Isaac Newton’s

Principles, And Made Easy To Those Who Have Not Studied Mathematics
(1757)

Long before anyone knew that the universe had a beginning, before we knew that the nearest
large galaxy lies two and a half million light-years from Earth, before we knew how stars work or
whether atoms exist, James Ferguson's enthusiastic introduction to his favorite science rang true.
Yet his words, apart from their eighteenth-century flourish, could have been written yesterday.

But who gets to think that way? Who gets to celebrate this cosmic view of life? Not the
migrant farmworker. Not the sweatshop worker. Certainly not the homeless person rummaging
through the trash for food. You need the luxury of time not spent on mere survival. You need to
live in a nation whose government values the search to understand humanity's place in the universe.
You need a society in which intellectual pursuit can take you to the frontiers of discovery, and in
which news of your discoveries can be routinely disseminated. By those measures, most citizens of
industrialized nations do quite well.

Yet the cosmic view comes with a hidden cost. When I travel thousands of miles to spend a
few moments in the fast-moving shadow of the Moon during a total solar eclipse, sometimes I lose
sight of Earth.

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 every day—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 their nation's needs or wants.

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 outsize atlases—the universe is even bigger. A depressing thought to some, but a liberating
thought to me.

Consider an adult who tends to the traumas of a child: a broken toy, a scraped knee, a
schoolyard bully. Adults know that kids have no clue what constitutes a genuine problem, because
inexperience greatly limits their childhood perspective.

As grown-ups, dare we admit to ourselves that we, too, have a collective immaturity of view?
Dare we admit that our thoughts and behaviors spring from a belief that the world revolves around
us? Apparently not. And the evidence abounds. Part the curtains of society's racial, ethnic, religious,
national, and cultural conflicts, and you find the human ego turning the knobs and pulling the
levers.

Now imagine a world in which everyone, but especially people with power and influence,
holds an expanded view of our place in the cosmos. With that perspective, our problems would
shrink—or never arise at all—and we could celebrate our earthly differences while shunning the
behavior of our predecessors who slaughtered each other because of them.

Back in February 2000, the newly rebuilt Hayden Planetarium featured a space show called
"Passport to the Universe," which took visitors on a virtual zoom from New York City to the edge
of the cosmos. En route the audience saw Earth, then the solar system, then the 100 billion stars of
the Milky Way galaxy shrink to barely visible dots on the planetarium dome.

Within a month of opening day, I received a letter from an Ivy League professor of psychology
whose expertise was things that make people feel insignificant. I never knew one could specialize in
such a field. The guy wanted to administer a before-and-after questionnaire to visitors, assessing the
depth of their depression after viewing the show. "Passport to the Universe," he wrote, elicited the
most dramatic feelings of smallness he had ever experienced.

How could that be? Every time I see the space show (and others we've produced), I feel alive
and spirited and connected. I also feel large, knowing that the goings-on within the three-pound
human brain are what enabled us to figure out our place in the universe.

Allow me to suggest that it's the professor, not I, who has misread nature. His ego was too big
to begin with, inflated by delusions of significance and fed by cultural assumptions that human
beings are more important than everything else in the universe.

In all fairness to the fellow, powerful forces in society leave most of us susceptible. As was I .
. . until the day I learned in biology class that more bacteria live and work in one centimeter of my
colon than the number of people who have ever existed in the world. That kind of information
makes you think twice about who—or what—is actually in charge.

From that day on, I began to think of people not as the masters of space and time but as
participants in a great cosmic chain of being, with a direct genetic link across species both living
and extinct, extending back nearly 4 billion years to the earliest single-celled organisms on Earth.

I know what you're thinking: we're smarter than bacteria.

No doubt about it, we're smarter than every other living creature that ever walked, crawled, or
slithered on Earth. But how smart is that? We cook our food. We compose poetry and music. We
do art and science. We're good at math. Even if you're bad at math, you're probably much better at
do art and science. We're good at math. Even if you're bad at math, you're probably much better at
it than the smartest chimpanzee, whose genetic identity varies in only trifling ways from ours. Try
as they might, primatologists will never get a chimpanzee to learn the multiplication table or do
long division.

If small genetic differences between us and our fellow apes account for our vast difference in
intelligence, maybe that difference in intelligence is not so vast after all.

Imagine a life-form whose brainpower is to ours as ours is to a chimpanzee's. To such a

species our highest mental achievements would be trivial. Their toddlers, instead of learning their
ABCs on Sesame Street, would learn multivariable calculus on Boolean Boulevard. Our most
complex theorems, our deepest philosophies, the cherished works of our most creative artists, would
be projects their schoolkids bring home for Mom and Dad to display on the refrigerator door. These
creatures would study Stephen Hawking (who occupies the same endowed professorship once held
by Newton at the University of Cambridge) because he's slightly more clever than other humans,
owing to his ability to do theoretical astrophysics and other rudimentary calculations in his head.

If a huge genetic gap separated us from our closest relative in the animal kingdom, we could
justifiably celebrate our brilliance. We might be entitled to walk around thinking we're distant and
distinct from our fellow creatures. But no such gap exists. Instead, we are one with the rest of
nature, fitting neither above nor below, but within.

Need more ego softeners? Simple comparisons of quantity, size, and scale do the job well.

Take water. It's simple, common, and vital. There are more molecules of water in an eight-
ounce cup of the stuff than there are cups of water in all the world's oceans. Every cup that passes
through a single person and eventually rejoins the world’s water supply holds enough molecules to
mix 1,500 of them into every other cup of water in the world. No way around it: some of the water
you just drank passed through the kidneys of Socrates, Genghis Khan, and Joan of Arc.

How about air? Also vital. A single breathful draws in more air molecules than there are
breathfuls of air in Earth's entire atmosphere. That means some of the air you just breathed passed
through the lungs of Napoleon, Beethoven, Lincoln, and Billy the Kid.

Time to get cosmic. There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on any beach,
more stars than seconds have passed since Earth formed, more stars than words and sounds ever
uttered by all the humans who ever lived.

Want a sweeping view of the past? Our unfolding cosmic perspective takes you there. Light
takes time to reach Earth's observatories from the depths of space, and so you see objects and
phenomena not as they are but as they once were. That means the universe acts like a giant time
machine: the farther away you look, the further back in time you see—back almost to the beginning
of time itself. Within that horizon of reckoning, cosmic evolution unfolds continuously, in full view.

Want to know what we're made of? Again, the cosmic perspective offers a bigger answer than
you might expect. The chemical elements of the universe are forged in the fires of high-mass stars
that end their lives in stupendous explosions, enriching their host galaxies with the chemical arsenal
of life as we know it. The result? The four most common chemically active elements in the
universe—hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen—are the four most common elements of life on
Earth. We are not simply in the universe. The universe is in us.

Yes, we are stardust. But we may not be of this Earth. Several separate lines of research, when
considered together, have forced investigators to reassess who we think we are and where we think
we came from.
 First, computer simulations show that when a large asteroid strikes a planet, the surrounding
areas can recoil from the impact energy, catapulting rocks into space. From there, they can travel to
—and land on—other planetary surfaces. Second, microorganisms can be hardy. Some survive the
extremes of temperature, pressure, and radiation inherent in space travel. If the rocky flotsam from
an impact hails from a planet with life, microscopic fauna could have stowed away in the rocks'
nooks and crannies. Third, recent evidence suggests that shortly after the formation of our solar
system, Mars was wet, and perhaps fertile, even before Earth was.

Those findings mean it's conceivable that life began on Mars and later seeded life on Earth, a
process known as panspermia. So all earthlings might—just might—be descendants of Martians.

Again and again across the centuries, cosmic discoveries have demoted our self-image. Earth
was once assumed to be astronomically unique, until astronomers learned that Earth is just another
planet orbiting the Sun. Then we presumed the Sun was unique, until we learned that the countless
stars of the night sky are suns themselves. Then we presumed our galaxy, the Milky Way, was the
entire known universe, until we established that the countless fuzzy things in the sky are other
galaxies, dotting the landscape of our known universe.

Today, how easy it is to presume that one universe is all there is. Yet emerging theories of
modern cosmology, as well as the continually reaffirmed improbability that anything is unique,
require that we remain open to the latest assault on our plea for distinctiveness: multiple universes,
otherwise known as the "multiverse," in which ours is just one of countless bubbles bursting forth
from the fabric of the cosmos.

The cosmic perspective flows from fundamental knowledge. But it's more than just what you
know. It's also about having the wisdom and insight to apply that knowledge to assessing our place
in the universe. And its attributes are clear:

The cosmic perspective comes from the frontiers of science, yet it is not solely the provenance
of the scientist. It belongs to everyone.

The cosmic perspective is humble.

The cosmic perspective is spiritual—even redemptive—but not religious.

The cosmic perspective enables us to grasp, in the same thought, the large and the small.

The cosmic perspective opens our minds to extraordinary ideas but does not leave them so open
that our brains spill out, making us susceptible to believing anything we're told.

The cosmic perspective opens our eyes to the universe, not as a benevolent cradle designed to
nurture life but as a cold, lonely, hazardous place.

The cosmic perspective shows Earth to be a mote, but a precious mote and, for the moment,
the only home we have.

The cosmic perspective finds beauty in the images of planets, moons, stars, and nebulae but
also celebrates the laws of physics that shape them.

The cosmic perspective enables us to see beyond our circumstances, allowing us to transcend
the primal search for food, shelter, and sex.

The cosmic perspective reminds us that in space, where there is no air, a flag will not wave—
an indication that perhaps flag waving and space exploration do not mix.

The cosmic perspective not only embraces our genetic kinship with all life on Earth but also
values our chemical kinship with any yet-to-be discovered life in the universe, as well as our
atomic kinship with the universe itself.
 At least once a week, if not once a day, we might each ponder what cosmic truths lie
undiscovered before us, perhaps awaiting the arrival of a clever thinker, an ingenious experiment, or
an innovative space mission to reveal them. We might further ponder how those discoveries may
one day transform life on Earth.

Absent such curiosity, we are no different from the provincial farmer who expresses no need to
venture beyond the county line, because his forty acres meet all his needs. Yet if all our
predecessors had felt that way, the farmer would instead be a cave dweller, chasing down his dinner
with a stick and a rock.

During our brief stay on planet Earth, we owe ourselves and our descendants the opportunity to
explore—in part because it's fun to do. But there's a far nobler reason. 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. In that bleak world, arms-bearing, resource-hungry people and
nations would be prone to act on their "low contracted prejudices." And that would be the last gasp
of human enlightenment—until the rise of a visionary new culture that could once again embrace
the cosmic perspective.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is the Frederick P. Rose Director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium
at the American Museum of Natural History. His most recent book, Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic
Quandaries (W.W. Norton, 2007), is a collection of his favorite Natural History essays from the past dozen
years.

Copyright © 2009 Neil deGrasse Tyson