We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.
Most people are never going to die
because they're never going to be born.
The potential people who could've been here in my place, but who will
in fact never see the light of day, outnumber the sandgrains of Sahara.
Certainly those unborn ghosts inculde greater poets than Keats,
scientists greater than Newton.
We know this because the set of possible people allowed
by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people.
In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I,
in our ordinariness, that are here.
We priviledged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds,
how dare we whine about our inevitable return
to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred.
I know that the molecules in my body are traceable to phenomenon in the cosmos.
And that-, it's our 15 pounds of gray matter that figured this out!
There's a kinship with the cosmos that resonates deeply
with new age thinking.
But I'm not apolegetic about that, it's what we find.
If whatever we find resonates with whoever,
Go ahead, take it.
And when I reflect on oout kinship with the cosmos,
when I do the calculation that shows that a 15 ton meteorite
that we have in the Rose center for earth and space,
it's an iron meteorite,
when I do a calculation that shows that if you take all the iron
in the hemoglobin of the people in the tristate area of New York City,
you can recover that much iron out of their blood
and realize that the iron from that meteorite and the iron from your blood
has common origin in the core of a star.
Tell me what part of my brain is lighting up
because that excites me,
that makes me want to grab people in the street
and say "HAVE YOU HEARD THIS?!"
That it's not simply, as Carl Sagan said 'we are starstuff',
but there's a more poetic, and I think more accurate way to say it.
It's quite literally true that we are stardust,
in the highest exalted way we can use that phrase.
And so I feel, and I use words, I bask in the majesty of the cosmos.
I use words, compose sentences that sound like the senteces I hear
out of people who've had revelations of Jesus.
Who- who- who- who go to, ah-um,
who go on their- their pilgrimages to uh, to Mecca.
Now it's also commonly imagined that atheists think
there is nothing beyond human life and human understanding.
The truth is that atheists are free to admit
that there is much about the universe that we don't understand.
I mean it is obvious that we don't understand the universe.
But is even more obvious that neither the Bible nor the Qur'an
reflects our best understanding.
It is often imagined that atheists are in principle
closed to spiritual experience.
But the truth is that atheists- there is nothing that prevents an atheist
from experiencing self-transcending love, or ecstasy,
or rapture, or awe.
In fact there is nothing that prevents an atheist from
going into a cave for a year, or a decade
and practicing meditation like a proper mystic,
what atheists don't tend to do is make unjustified,
and unjustifia- unjustifiable claims about the cosmos on the basis of those experiences.
Recognize that the very molecules that make up your body,
the atoms that contruct the molecules are traceable
to the crucibles that were once the centers high-mass stars,
that exploded their chemically-enriched guts into the galaxy,
enriching pristine gas clouds with the chemistry of life.
So that we're all connected, to each other, biologically,
to the Earth, chemically, and to the rest of the universe, atomically.
That's kind of cool.
That makes me smile.
And I actually feel quite large at the end of that.
It's not the we are better than the universe, we're part of the universe.
We're in the universe, and the universe is in us.