"The View From the Center of the Universe"

"The View From the Center of the Universe"

by Joel Primack and Nancy Adams

"I stand here on the Cosmic Uroboros, midway between the largest and smallest things in the universe. I can trace my lineage back fourteen billion years through generations of stars. My atoms were created in stars, blown out in stellar winds or massive explosions, and soared for millions of years through space to become part of a newly forming solar system — my solar system. And back before those creator stars, there was a time when the particles that at this very moment make up my body and brain were mixing in an amorphous cloud of dark matter and quarks. Intimately woven into me are billions of bits of information that had to be encoded and tested and preserved to create me. Billions of years of cosmic evolution have produced me."

"The history of the universe is in every one of us. Every particle in our bodies has a multibillion-year past, every cell and every bodily organ has a multimillion-year past, and many of our ways of thinking have multithousand-year pasts."

"Human beings are made of the rarest material in the universe: stardust. Except for hydrogen, which makes up about a tenth of your weight, the rest of your body is stardust."

"Most people tend to identify themselves with fairly narrow categories — a nationality, a race, a religion — which leads not only to conflicts but also to a stunting of imagination and potential. The wider our sense of identity, the more likely we will be able to experience our genuine connection to the universe. If a lost child who knew nothing of her background and had been raised by an indifferent family suddenly discovered that she was the direct descendant of an illustrious house traceable back many centuries, her sense of identity would expand momentously even before anything else changed. The discovery of our own cosmic genealogies may have a similar expansive effect. We humans are luminous, stardust beings."

"What is possible versus impossible depends entirely on what universe you're living in. Until you understand the universe you're living in, you cannot know what is possible."

"If we intend to navigate Earth's coming transition from inflation to stability successfully, with sanity and justice, we will need to inspire huge creativity, intense commitment, and immense stores of enthusiasm and raw hope. To guide and use this human energy will require every powerful tool that people have ever come up with, including religious truths, ancient mythology, science, and art, plus a detailed picture of reality."

- Joel Primack and Nancy Adams, http://www.thegreatstory.org/quotes-primack.html
Excerpts, “The View From the Center of the Universe”

Never, ever, feel yourself to be small, or insignificant...

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