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.
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!
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.
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.
