Towards a “Cosmic Perspective”
Author: John Hadden
I was listening to Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson on Fresh Air with Terry Grosse the other day. Dr. Tyson is an astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Natural History in New York. He’s also the host of the new “reboot” of Cosmos, Carl Sagan’s famous TV series about, well, the cosmos. Late in the interview, Tyson speaks of the “cosmic perspective”. He says:
“…you will never find people who truly grasp the cosmic perspective, such as the entire community of astrophysicists, leading nations into battle. No, that doesn’t happen. When you have a cosmic perspective, there’s this little speck called Earth and you say you’re going to do what? You’re on this side of a line in the sand and you want to kill people for what? Oh, to pull oil out of the – what? What? What? And you have this whole universe of resources and perspectives? So not enough people in this world, I think, carry a cosmic perspective with them. It could be life-changing.”
His comment really resonated with me—that having a cosmic perspective could be life-changing, and that if more people had it, the world would be a better, more peaceful place. As an amateur astronomer, I definitely recognize what Tyson is talking about.
I started digging into studying the stars probably 15 years ago. A bought a nice pair of binoculars and a star chart and started spending clear evenings out under the star learning my way around. First I learned the major constellations—the Big Dipper, Boötes, Hercules, Cygnus, Lyra, Orion, and many others. I learned the names of some of the brighter stars—Vega, Arcturus, Polaris, Deneb, Antares, Regulus, Betelgeuse. These became my road map and helped me orient myself to the sky and find were some of the more challenging “faint-fuzzy” objects lurked with my binoculars, and later, with my telescope. I studied the structure of our solar system and how the sun and planets move along the ecliptic as they seem to march across the sky. I learned that everything we can see with our naked eyes in the night sky lies within our Milky Way galaxy except for one object, the Andromeda galaxy, and that, when looking at Andromeda, I’m looking back in time at fossil light that left that fuzzy patch 2.3 million years ago. I learned how our solar system is oriented with respect to the rest of our galaxy, and that it takes some 230 million years for our star to complete one trip around the center of our galaxy. I learned how our galaxy is related to a local cluster of galaxies and how that local cluster is part of a the Virgo Super Cluster.
Gradually, as I was able to wrap my head around an immense geometry of planets, stars, and galaxies, it became abundantly clear that my little solar system, my little planet, and my little short life were vanishingly small and insignificant when compared to the “big picture”. And that was okay—reassuring in fact. I didn’t feel small at all, but quite large and connected in a very intimate way to the vastness that is our universe. It’s as if my day to day worries and concerns were laughably puny and insignificant. It was and is a good feeling.
All of this happened before I met Lee, and we started talking about the Gravity Rules Project. But the resonance of my own cosmic perspective with that of the Rules is pretty obvious. My interest in astronomy and astrophysics meshed perfectly with what Lee was thinking, and we’ve spent many hours talking about gravity, physics, physiology, psychology, and the best way to get his ideas out into the world. At the heart of our discussions has been the desire to help others achieve a bigger perspective—to offer people the tools to see the world in a broader way, one that cuts through the “manufactured” divisions that humans thrown up over the centuries in the form of political ideology and religious dogma. I am hopeful that the Gravity Rules Project will help achieve this goal, and that we all will grow a little bit bigger in the process!