We’re children equally of the Earth and the sky. In our tenure on this planet we’ve accumulated dangerous evolutionary baggage: propensities for aggression and ritual, submission to leaders, hostility to outsiders—all of which puts our survival in some doubt. But we’ve also acquired compassion for others, love for our children, a desire to learn from history and experience, and a great, soaring, passionate intelligence—the clear tools for our continued survival and prosperity. Which aspects of our nature will prevail is uncertain, particularly when our visions and prospects are bound to one small part of the small planet Earth. But up there, in the cosmos, an inescapable perspective awaits. National boundaries are not evident when we view the Earth from space. Fanatic ethnic or religious or national identifications are a little difficult to support when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent, fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars.
Among a hundred billion galaxies and a billion trillion stars, life and intelligence should have arisen on many worlds.
There may be civilizations that achieve technology and then promptly use it to destroy themselves. And perhaps there are also beings who learned to live with their technology and themselves; beings who endure and become citizens of the cosmos.
I saw East Africa and thought: a few million years ago, we humans took our first steps there. Our brains grew and changed. The old parts began to be guided by the new parts. And this made us human, with compassion and foresight and reason. But instead we listened to that reptilian voice within us, counseling fear, territoriality, aggression. We accepted the products of science, we rejected its methods.
Every thinking person fears nuclear war and every technological nation plans for it. Everyone knows it’s madness and every country has an excuse.
The global balance of terror pioneered by the United States and the Soviet Union holds hostage all the citizens of the Earth. Each side persistently probes the limits of the other’s tolerance—like the Cuban missile crisis, the testing of anti-satellite weapons, the Vietnam and Afghanistan wars. The hostile military establishments are locked in some ghastly mutual embrace. Each needs the other. But the balance of terror is a delicate balance with very little margin for miscalculation.
What account would we give of our stewardship of the planet Earth? We have heard the rationales offered by the superpowers. We know who speaks for the nations. But who speaks for the human species? Who speaks for Earth?
Our global civilization is clearly on the edge of failure in the most important task it faces: preserving the lives and well-being of its citizens and the future habitability of the planet. But if we’re willing to live with the growing likelihood of nuclear war, shouldn’t we also be willing to explore vigorously every possible means to prevent nuclear war? Shouldn’t we consider, in every nation, major changes in the traditional ways of doing things? A fundamental restructuring of economic, political, social, and religious institutions? We’ve reached a point where there can be no more special interests or special cases.
A new consciousness is developing which sees the Earth as a single organism, and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet.
It’s probably here that the word “cosmopolitan” realized its true meaning of a citizen—not just of a nation, but of the cosmos. To be a citizen of the cosmos!
History is full of people who—out of fear, or ignorance, or the lust for power—have destroyed treasures of immeasurable value which truly belong to all of us. We must not let it happen again.
Star stuff, the ash of stellar alchemy, had emerged into consciousness. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.
We are one species. We are star stuff, harvesting starlight.
It is the birthright of every child to encounter the cosmos anew in every culture and every age.
We depend on free inquiry and free access to knowledge.
These are some of the things that hydrogen atoms do, given 15 billion years of cosmic evolution. It has the sound of epic myth. But it’s simply a description of the evolution of the cosmos as revealed by science in our time. And we—we who embody the local eyes and ears and thoughts and feelings of the cosmos—we’ve begun, at last, to wonder about our origins. Star stuff contemplating the stars—organized collections of 10 billion-billion-billion atoms contemplating the evolution of matter, tracing that long path by which it arrived at consciousness here on the planet Earth, and perhaps, throughout the cosmos.
Our obligation to survive and flourish is owed not just to ourselves, but also to that cosmos—ancient and vast—from which we spring.
It is as if there were a god who said to us: “I set before you two ways. You can use your technology to destroy yourselves, or to carry you to the planets and the stars. It’s up to you.”
