Translator: Queenie Lee
Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs Hello. (Audience) Hello. My name is Tom Chi, and ever since I was a young child, I was determined to understand
how the entire universe worked, and that fascination led me
to my first job, at age 15 - I did astrophysical research
with the Harvard-Smithsonian Observatory in active galactic nuclei. Now, years after being a scientist
and astrophysicist, I slowly kind of matured out of that
and entered the world of people. It actually turns out
that the world of people is way harder to understand
than the entire universe. But I stayed with it, and in the process
of being a technologist, an inventor, and an entrepreneur, I've learned a lot about people. What I'm going to talk to you today
is a little bit of what I've learned. Because as I learn about people, I get very interested
in the gaps that still remain for us as human beings
and us as a civilization, relative to the challenges
that are in front of us. And one of those gaps that I've seen
is around this concept, and the concept is a really simple one. It's the concept
that everything is connected. You've probably heard
this many, many times, in fact. It's an element of almost
every spiritual tradition of humankind throughout all of history. But whenever I hear people talk
and mention this phrase that "we are all connected," they do so in a way where it's something they wish
that they could believe was true, that it's something that's abstract; that it's esoteric; that it's a thing that is unprovable, but they just really wish
the universe was like that. And today I'm here to describe
that everything really is connected, and not in some abstract, esoteric way but in a very concrete, direct,
understandable way. And I am going to do that
with three different stories: a story of the heart, a story of the breath, and a story of the mind. So let's begin. So all of you in this audience today, your hearts are beating
right at this moment. And the reason that your hearts beat is because you need to move this molecule
through your blood called hemoglobin. And hemoglobin carries
this smaller molecule that's called heme B, which is what we see over here. Now, at the heart of heme B
is a single atom of iron, so in a way, at the heart of our heart
is this little iron atom. And this is actually really a central part
of the hemoglobin molecule because this is the thing
that allows us to bind oxygen and move that through
our circulatory system. But one thing that you may not know is that the only way that iron
is created in the universe, is through supernovas
and through supermassive stars. So the universe started
with basically no iron at all. Hydrogen. Helium - And only through the process
of these stars forming, exploding, forming and exploding, was iron able to be created that now courses
through each one of our veins. But the story doesn't really end there. Because - why do stars keep forming? Actually, after a supernova happens, it may be a long time before those gases
come back together to form a star. So in order to understand how this works, we need to understand
why stars would form. Even though there's a couple
different ways that stars form, one of the most robust is this process: galactic collisions. And these are images
from the Hubble Space Telescope, and they show through a series of panels -
which are actually different galaxies because this process takes,
like, a half billion to a billion years - different galaxies what the process
of a galactic collision would look like. So across the top, you get the galaxies
slowly coming together, and in the bottom three frames, you see them smashing into each other,
and their interstellar gases mixing, and in the process of doing that, they set on fire with new star formation
across the entire galaxy, and whatever remains after the collision. Now, even here
is not the end of the story. Because why in the world
would galaxies collide? This doesn't seem like a thing
that should just happen for no reason. So, to understand this, we're going to need
to scoot back way, way more. And here we're at the level
of seeing about 100,000 galaxies. So last slide, two galaxies. This slide, 100,000 galaxies. Every one of these dots here
is a galaxy that is in our supercluster. And we're that red dot over here,
where it says, "You are here." And these glowing lines are not galaxies. These glowing lines are the trajectories that these galaxies are going
to take through gravity over the coming billions of years in this beautiful gravitational dance
of all these galaxies swirling together in a gravitational structure
that we call Laniakea, which in Hawaiian means
the immeasurable heaven. And it's this process, the gravitational dance
of 100,000 galaxies swirling together, which drive the process
of galaxies colliding, which drive massive star formation, which drive the process
of creating the iron that courses through each one
of our veins with every heartbeat. And in this way, every one of our heartbeats is connected. Now we're going to move to a second story. And this story is about breath. Taking a deep breath
is one of the most simple ways to connect with our own bodies - a deeply grounded, calming breath. But taking a deep breath was not something
that was possible on this earth three billion years ago. On this slide, we have the composition
of the atmosphere of the earth during that time period. We had about the same amount of nitrogen, but we had almost no oxygen at all. So you would be taking a breath in vain
three billion years ago. And we actually had
a huge amount of carbon dioxide. And the net effect was
an almost inhabitable planet. The only organisms
that could exist that time were single-celled organisms inside of stromatolites
and other closed spaces. Now, luckily for us, one of those organisms
that was alive at this time was something called a cyanobacteria. That's a picture of it in the background. And this organism has the special trick
that we call "photosynthesis," the ability to go take energy from the sun and transform carbon dioxide into oxygen. And over the course of billions of years, so starting from two
and a half billion years ago, little by little these bacteria
spread across the planet and converted all
that carbon dioxide in the air into the oxygen that we now have. And it was a very slow process. First, they had to saturate the seas, then they had to saturate the oxygen
that the earth would absorb, and only then, finally, could oxygen begin to build up
in the atmosphere. So you see, just after
about 900 million years ago, oxygen starts to build up
in the atmosphere. And about 600 million years ago,
something really amazing happens. The ozone layer forms from the oxygen
that has been released in the atmosphere. And it sounds like a small deal, like we talked about the ozone
a couple decades ago, but it actually turns out
that before the ozone layer existed, earth was not really able
to sustain complex, multicellular life. We had single-celled organisms, we had a couple of simple,
multicellular organisms, but we didn't really
have anything like you or me. And shortly after the ozone layer
came into place, the earth was able to sustain
complex multicellular life. There was a Cambrian explosion
of life in the seas. And the first plants got onto land. In fact, there was actually
no life on land ahead of that. Another way to see this is, this is kind of a chart
of pretty much most of the animals that you guys are familiar with. And right at the bottom in time
is the formation of the ozone layer. Like nothing that you
are familiar with today could exist without the contributions
of these tiny organisms over those billions of years. And where are they now? Well actually, they never really left us. The direct descendants
of the cyanobacteria were eventually captured by plants. And they're now called chloroplasts. So this is a zoom-in of a plant leaf - and we probably
ate some of these guys today - where tons of little chloroplasts are still trapped -
contributing photosynthesis and making energy for the plants that continue to be the other half
of our lungs on earth. And in this way, our breaths
are very deeply united. Every out-breath is mirrored
by the in-breath of a plant, and their out-breath
is mirrored by our in-breath. I'm going to take a little aside here
for a moment with this story. Because imagine for a moment -
and this is a thought experiment - imagine you were one
of these little organisms two billions year ago. You might be born. You live a couple weeks. You die. And you kind of feel like,
well, nothing really changed. I mean, I had no purpose in this life. Like, the world I came to is exactly
the same as the world that I left. But what you wouldn't have understood
is that every breath that you took contributed to the possibility
of countless lives after you - lives that you would never see, lives that we are all a part of today. And it's worth thinking
that maybe the meaning of our lives are actually not even
within the scope of our understanding. Because it's true of every one
of these organisms, and it may also be true of us. Last story of connection
is the story of the mind. This is not "our minds are
all connected in some psychic way or some scientifically unexplainable way," I'm going to explain
the connection of the mind through the simple story
of this instrument. This is a piano. And I have actually a good
relationship with pianos. Thanks, mom. She gave me piano lessons very early. I think you have to if you're Asian. But - (Laughter) a beautiful thing
about this instrument is it is so nuanced
and so textured and so complex, and so much beauty can be created from it
that people can make an entire career, they can make an entire lifetime
out of playing this instrument. Professional musicians, concert pianists get to know this instrument
deeply, intimately. And through it, they're able
to create with sound in a way that just dazzles us,
and challenges us, and deepens us. But if you were to look into the mind
of a concert pianist, and you used all the modern
ways of imaging it, an interesting thing that you would see is how much of their brain
is actually dedicated to this instrument. The ability to coordinate ten fingers. The ability to work the pedal. The feeling of the sound. The understanding of music theory. All these things are represented as different patterns
and structures in the brain. And now that you have
that thought in your mind, recognize that this beautiful pattern
and structure of thought in the brain was not possible even just
a couple hundred years ago. Because the piano was not invented
until the year 1700. This beautiful pattern of thought
in the brain didn't exist 5,000 years ago. And in this way, the skill of the piano,
the relationship to the piano, the beauty that comes from it was not a thinkable thought until
very, very recently in human history. And the invention of the piano itself
was not an independent thought. It required a depth
of mechanical engineering. It required the history
of stringed instruments. It required so many patterns
and structures of thought that led to the possibility
of its invention and then the possibility
of the mastery of its play. And it leads me to a concept I'd like to share with you guys,
which I call "The Palette of Being." Because all of us are born into this life having available to us
the experiences of humanity that has come so far. We typically are only able
to paint with the patterns of thoughts and the ways of being that existed before. So if the piano and the way
of playing it is a way of being, this is a way of being that didn't exist
for people 5,000 years ago. It was a color in the Palette of Being
that you couldn't paint with. Nowadays if you are born,
you can actually learn the skill; you can learn to be a computer scientist, another color that was not available
just a couple hundred years ago. And our lives are really beautiful
for the following reason. We're born into this life. We have the ability
to go make this unique painting with the colors of being that are around us
at the point of our birth. But in the process of life, we also have the unique opportunity
to create a new color. And that might come
from the invention of a new thing. A self-driving car. A piano. A computer. It might come from the way that you express yourself
as a human being. It might come from a piece
of artwork that you create. Each one of these ways of being, these things that we
put out into the world through the creative process
of mixing together all the other things that existed
at the point that we were born, allow us to expand the Palette of Being
for all of society after us. And this leads me
to a very simple way to go frame everything that we've talked about today. Because I think a lot of us understand that we exist in this kind
of the marvelous universe, but we think about this universe
as we're this tiny, unimportant thing, there's this massive physical universe,
and inside of it, there's the biosphere, and inside of that, that's society, and inside of us, we're just one person
out of seven billion people, and how can we matter? And we think about this
as like a container relationship, where all the goodness comes
from the outside to the inside, and there's nothing really
special about us. But the Palette of Being
says the opposite. It says that the way
that we are in our lives, the way that we affect
our friends and our family, begin to change the way
that they are able to paint in the future, begins to change the way
that communities then affect society, the way that society could then affect
its relationship to the biosphere, and the way that the biosphere
could then affect the physical planet and the universe itself. And if it's a possible thing
for cyanobacteria to completely transform
the physical environment of our planet, it is absolutely a possible thing
for us to do the same thing. And it leads to a really
important question for the way that we're going to do that, the manner in which
we're going to do that. Because we've been given
this amazing gift of consciousness. And because of this gift, we have the ability to deeply
understand our connectedness, in the way we haven't seen other animals
having the opportunity to do so. And because we can deeply
understand our connectedness, we're the ones that have the decision on how we're going to go
use that knowledge, how we're going to go use it to build
our societies and to shape our lives. I think the reason
that all the spiritual traditions have got this concept
of "we are all connected inside of it" is because the societies
that actually deeply adopt this idea are the ones that over time deepen their level of consideration, deepen their level of expression, deepen their level
of understanding for each other. This is the reason that this idea
pops up over and over at the core of spiritual traditions. And I hope through this talk
you see that the reason that it appears at the core of science is it's actually something that is just
literally true of the physical universe at every single level of organization and every single manifestation
of matter, energy, and life. So I'd like us all to come together
with this knowledge and understand this truth about how the universe is, that because our hearts, our breath, and our mind are connected in this way, we need to challenge
ourselves to understand what it means to live from this truth. Thank you. (Applause)
As an ecologist and a biology teacher, I love this approach of everything being connected--the oxygen revolution and eventual formation of the ozone layer are some of the favorite things I like to teach. Now, as to whether or not he has specific skills that would benefit the IF. . . I cannot say. They are in need of a lot of technical skills, and also a lot of connections within industries. At least, that is the type of people I see joining at this stage.
In a related vein, I have an idea for a learning/teaching service that builds on this idea of connectedness, and that could be fueled by Iota, but the idea alone is not enough--I don't have the skills to build it it and would need to assemble a team with the technical skills to bring the vision to life. Just hiring good dreamers is not enough.
that's a very elaborate (and beautiful!) way of saying "everything is connected by cause and effect
Can someone explain to me what the hell people on the Iota Foundation do? There must be a thousand people on there. Do they contribute to Iota code, design, etc?
I'm sure he's a smart guy, but AFAIR, its more correct to say that any elements heavier than iron are created in supernovas, and that the majority of iron molecules are not created in supernovas but within stars as they burn normally. :P