Swimme
So we’re going to look at the big story of the universe, third story of the universe, and this image right here tells the whole story. It starts off on the left and goes to the right in terms of time. Now, right there, at the very beginning, the universe consists of elementary particles. And you notice how it’s expanding out as we go on. The elementary particles from that moment on are involved with all of the transformations in the ensuing 14 billion years. And what’s amazing to me is that the elementary particles of our bodies are right there. So we have a graph indicating the movement of the universe as a whole, but we have to realize that this is our story right here: the story of the elementary particles that we are composed of. So right away the universe spreads out and develops into galaxies a billion years later. The number of galaxies we’ve counted so far are 2 trillion. Now, every galaxy has around 100 billion stars. I’m not going to deluge you with numbers, but that’s a good number. There are 2 trillion galaxies, each one with 100 billion stars.
And here’s the next fact that I want you to move forward in life with. At the beginning, the universe was the size of an acorn—even smaller, even smaller. Now, this is not a fact that is maybe in doubt. All mathematical and observational cosmologists are quite convinced that the universe of 2 trillion galaxies was once the size of an acorn. Now, if that doesn’t boggle your mind—that something as small as an acorn gave birth to the entire Milky Way galaxy with its 200 billion stars, plus another 2 trillion galaxies—you see, that… oh, I can throw the words out and then we get a sense of, okay, yeah, that’s what happened. But we need to feel our way into that. We need to be astonished. Like I say, we need to have our minds boggled. Because what we’ve learned has amazing implications for how we are to live our lives.
Now, so the first transformation in the universe is elementary particles into the galaxies of stars. The next one is when we have rocky planets. Rocky planets come out of stars that explode. So we have the stars themselves build up the elements. And then when they gather again after the explosion, we have rocky planets. So where is the site of interactions between molecules that give birth over time to life? Life, which goes all the way around the planet—but hold it. In general, we regard the dirt and rocks as lifeless, right? The dirt, not soil, the dirt and rocks gave birth to life. This is, I say, the second major transformation. But this, too, should cause us a moment of reflection. How is it that a planet that’s molten rock gives birth to all these amazing lifeforms? That’s the second major transformation.
And now Earth has entered the third major transformation. We’re in the midst of it. The transformation began with the emergence of humans. And this image here is to depict the way in which, once we emerged in Africa, we spread out in all directions. And then, very, very, very rapidly, we encircled the Earth. And now we have, with our own development, we have created a thin envelope of thought around the planet called the noösphere. So this is, in a very brief summary, the third story of the universe. The universe began 14 billion years ago as primordial plasma. It developed through stars and galaxies into—at least on one planet—the emergence of the noösphere, the thinking layer of Earth.
Now, in this story, then, humanity has a cosmic meaning and mission. The cosmic meaning and mission is to develop a planetary mind that guides Earth’s evolution. Now, I’ve probably irritated some of you, but that’s why I need to be clear on this. I am not saying that humanity is more valuable or important than other species of life. Not in the least. What I am saying is that humanity has brought something new to the evolution of Earth. And this change is characterized by some scientists in a way that’s quite helpful. Anatomically, we are just another primate species. But in terms of our mentality, we are like a new phylum of life. That’s the way the evolutionary biologist will put it: a new phylum of life. The last time a phylum appeared in Earth’s evolution was 500 million years ago. So what these scientists are saying: if we want to understand humanity, we have to have some kind of idea of how our significance matches 500 million years of Earth’s evolution.
One way to get a feel for this is to go back and reflect on our time in caves. Now, some humans lived in caves, for sure, but I’m not talking about those caves. I’m talking about the caves that were deep in the Earth and that had nothing to do with habitat. These were places we visited over and over again. And why? The question you have to ask is: why would we do that? Now, I asked the question from a personal standpoint, because I suffered from claustrophobia. I could not go on my back, with a rock wall like two feet away from me, and climb, you know, a half a mile into the Earth. It would be impossible. Why? What was happening? What was so thrilling that they kept doing this over and over again?
And what we know is that they sat there and stared at straight and curvy lines on the rock walls. Now, I say straight and curvy lines because I’m trying to emphasize the strangeness of it. We stared at straight and curvy lines until they exploded as a galloping horse. Now, we need to understand how different this was. One of the reasons—this is an interpretation, of course—but one of the reasons they went to caves that were far, far away from horses was so that they could really bask in the thrill of having the power to make present a horse that was not physically there. This capacity of humans to do this is called by modern-day psychologists conscious recall of a personal event. The capacity of mind is called the reproductive imagination. We could reproduce in our imagination a former event.
Now, as a way of indicating how different this was, I came up with this little story here. Okay, imagine this wildebeest has just escaped being eaten by some lions, alright? So you have to imagine him kind of hurt and limping. And he goes back to the herd, alright? And the thing is, he has figured out a way to avoid being captured by lions. And he’s—I’m imagining—he’s just dying to tell his friends, “I’ve got it! I’ve got the way to do it! I’ve got the insight!” But he can’t tell them. His friends look at him and go, “Some bad stuff has happened to him, but, you know, I don’t know what’s going on here.” And so they don’t benefit from his insight. That’s the difference: we do.
So we have the power, starting with squiggly lines on a rock wall, to embed our best insights in forms that endure through the centuries, so that we have an accumulating knowledge; we have an ongoing developing mind. This is what enabled humans to explode in their power. Here we have the story of the humans leaving Africa, and they got stopped by the ocean. They couldn’t get to Australia. So every one of them started developing different boat styles on the different islands of Indonesia, until finally, finally they came up with the form—not this one, I just use this as an image—they came up with a form that enabled them to go over to Australia. Who invented that? The answer is: the collective did.
Now, scientists have not settled on a deep understanding yet of what the noösphere really is—the noösphere, this knowing sphere around the planet. The conservative view among scientists is that the noösphere consists of computer systems that are linked up with data banks. But a more radical proposal is on the table, and it’s this: that maybe, maybe, the deepening relationships among humans is bringing forth a planetary mind.
And the way to—it’s uncomfortable for a lot of people to think about; being part of a larger organism. Alright? So I wanted to give you a way of beginning to think about that with the James Webb Space Telescope. Here it is. Amazing. This is a radical move beyond what we’ve had before with telescopes. Hubble Telescope—fantastic. It’s in an orbit 300 miles above the surface of the Earth. The Webb Telescope is a million miles above the surface of the Earth with a sensitivity a hundred times that of Hubble. We are starting an exploration of the universe that will be unlike anything before. We will learn more things than ever before. We’re certain we will learn about how the galaxies were formed right after the birth of the universe. Expectations are very high that this telescope will enable us to be the generation that empirically verifies the presence of life throughout the Milky Way galaxy. We will see.
But the amazing thing is this. We asked the question: who built the Webb Telescope? Who built it? Well, the quick answer is: the engineers. And that’s true. Engineers from fourteen different countries coordinated their thinking and built the telescope. But they drew upon the collective as well. For instance, Isaac Newton: he invented the equations of gravity. Scientists studied them, found out: wow, theoretically, there are these strange points in the Earth–Sun system where the gravitational forces balance out. That means, theoretically, if we put a body there, it would just stay right there. Well, three centuries later, we’ve gone there. We’ve put the Webb Telescope at L2, the equilibrium point, 94 million miles from the Sun. And this is, what—how to understand this?
We send messages from our brain to the muscles around our eyeballs in order to determine what to look at. Well, the same thing is going on with the Webb. Technicians at NASA are sending electronic signals to the sensitive instruments of Webb. Webb is the eye, humanity is the mind. We have this spectacular example of what is possible when humans unite around a common aim. In this case, it was the aim to know. But we have other aims: the aim to cure, the aim to help, the aim to educate. As we learn to unite around the deep primordial aims of humanity, we will empower the noösphere to transform an alien planet into a vibrant Earth community. Whew! I got nine seconds, eight. Well, like my granddaughter says: that’s it!