Every living thing on Earth bears traces of the big bang. As the Roman poet Lucretius wrote, “We are all sprung from celestial seed.” Every person on Earth is “gravitationally held on the same 12,742-kilometer-wide wet rock hurtling through space,” explains Bill Nye. “There’s no option to go it alone. We are all on this ride together.”16 The vastness of the universe puts our earthly concerns in proper context. It unites us by a common human spirit—one that has gazed up at the same night sky over the millennia, seeing for trillions of miles into the stars, looking thousands of years back in
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