finn

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,

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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

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“We are stardust brought to life, then empowered by the universe to figure itself out—and we have only just begun.”

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

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

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