Stardust
It's easy to think of ourselves as separated from everything, but this is not true. We are as much the universe as a neutron star or a black hole or a nebula. Even better, actually, we are its thinking and feeling part: the centre organs of the universe.
Kurzgesagt • Optimistic Nihilism
As physicist Paul Davies writes in The Goldilocks Enigma (Allen Lane, 2006): Somehow the universe has engineered, not just its own awareness, but also its own comprehension. Mindless, blundering atoms have conspired to make not just life, but understanding. The evolving cosmos has spawned beings who are able not merely to watch the show, but to unr
... See moreAlexander Green • Beyond Wealth
That is unquestionably the most astounding thing about us—that we are just a collection of inert components, the same stuff you would find in a pile of dirt. I’ve said it before in another book, but I believe it’s worth repeating: the only
Bill Bryson • The Body: A Guide for Occupants
thing? Here we are, in this incomprehensibly large universe, on this one tiny moon around this one incidental planet, and in all the time this entire scenario has existed, every component has been recycled over and over and over again into infinitely incredible configurations, and sometimes, those configurations are special enough to be able to see
... See moreBecky Chambers • A Psalm for the Wild-Built (Monk & Robot Book 1)
The teeming hordes of living things on Earth, not only in space but in time, are actually all one massive, single organism just as certainly as each one of us (in our own minds) seems to be a distinct human being throughout our limited lifetime... Each of us is, equally, an independent living human and also just one utterly minute, utterly brief un... See more
Maria Popova • Notes on Complexity: A Buddhist Scientist on the Murmuration of Being
When stars explode at death, all the matter that built up in their outer shells gets blown out into interstellar space. Carbon, oxygen, silicon, gold, and silver were all floating around as clouds of elements in space, then gravity pulled them together to form the planets. This is how the planet Earth formed with its ninety-two natural elements, al
... See moreMichael A. Singer • Living Untethered: Beyond the Human Predicament
It never ceases to stagger that some stroke of chance in the early history of the universe set into motion the Rube Goldberg machine of events that turned atoms born in the first stars into you — into this temporary clump of borrowed stardust that, for the brief interlude between not having existed and no longer existing, gets to have ideas and ice... See more
oceans, and mountains swirl and rise and sink. This rabbinic midrash reflects the same reality that science does: we are all, literally, composed of the entire earth, indeed, of stardust from supernovae millions of light-years away. The components of our bones, the cells of our blood, the air that we breathe—all that was used by others before us, a
... See moreRabbi Bradley Shavit DHL Artson • God of Becoming and Relationship: The Dynamic Nature of Process Theology
We learned that we're made of many little dead things, which make up bigger things that are not dead, for some reason, and that we're just another temporary stage in a history going back over a billion years.