Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization

by Neil deGrasse Tyson

This staggering diversity of life sprang forth from single-celled organisms four billion years ago. In this very moment a harmonic intersection of Earth’s land, sea, and air supports every one of them. We are all in this together. One genetic family on spaceship Earth.

But none of these parasites or diseases or creepy creatures show up in posters with Bible quotes. Smallpox, malaria, and the bubonic plague together have killed upwards of 1.5 billion people throughout time, worldwide. That toll far exceeds all deaths from all armed conflicts in the history of our species. Nature has killed more of us than we have of ourselves. These thoughts hardly ever (likely never) arise whenever we declare nature’s beauty.

You might think the emergent publish-or-perish culture of academia has increased pressure to generate frivolous papers, artificially boosting the researcher’s productivity. No. It’s driven by the sheer increase in the number of researchers and the productivity that comes from large collaborations.

November 13, 1833, the annual Leonid meteor shower was particularly memorable. Visible across all of North America, it delivered upwards of one hundred thousand “falling stars” per hour. That’s as many as thirty per second.

I came to resent labels of all kinds. What are they, if not intellectually lazy ways of asserting you know everything about a person you’ve never met?

The great tragedy of Science—the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

That’s why the methods and tools of science were invented in the first place—to remove human sensory frailties from the acquisition of data.

Which calls to mind the mostly true adage, “If an argument lasts longer than five minutes, then both sides are wrong.”

Oliver Sacks was a noted neurologist, pioneering entire subfields within his profession. He was also a best-selling author, describing the human brain as the “most incredible thing in the universe.” He led a remarkably varied life while suffering from a neurological affliction called prosopagnosia, more commonly known as “face blindness.” This condition contributed to his severe shyness since he couldn’t recognize faces, even if he recognized everything else about you. At times he would even not recognize his own face in the mirror.25 In 2012, after a lecture on hallucination at Cooper Union college in New York City, I asked him, “If you could go back in time, would you take a magic pill in your youth to cure your neurological disorder?” Without hesitation, he replied “No.” His entire professional interest in the human mind was inspired by the very disorders in his own brain. He wouldn’t have it any other way.

Those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.

As a species, how does our mind measure up? Most of us have embraced the notion that we use only 10 percent of our brain. This dates back more than a century, but was never true.27 It nonetheless persists because deep down it serves our longings. Psychics want it to be true so that they can claim untapped powers of mind await us all. Teachers want it to be true so they can motivate their underperforming students. The rest of us want it to be true because it gives us hope for ourselves. Brain scans reveal that we engage much more than 10 percent, but that some fraction of our brain never lights up at all, no matter the stimulus28—the neurological equivalent of cosmic dark matter.

Mathematically, if death gives meaning to life, then to live forever is to live a life with no meaning at all.

if you’re lucky to be born, your nonexistence before life bookends your nonexistence after death.