Neil deGrasse Tyson Gives The Human Ego A Reality Check

I'm gonna leave you with a fast sequence here just to sort of tell you what some of the things that get in the way it's our ego we have ego of our biology here's a new tree of life maybe maybe you've seen it my favorite representation of the Tree of Life little stylized the beginning of life is in the center and time moves out in every direction most of us when we grew up there was the plant kingdom and the animal kingdom there's more divisions of it now we have protists and fungi bacteria is a tiny little section down there well we're we we must be up in the animals section let's zoom in oh there we are Homo sapiens okay get any book from 50 years ago 60 years ago humans are at the top of some diagram like we're some kind of model of biological evolution like we're in charge meanwhile there are more bacteria living and working in one centimeter of your lower colon than all human beings who have ever been born I know that's a really nasty thought nonetheless it is true and a reminder that we are not the ones in charge they are we are simply anaerobic dark homes where bacteria can bathe in fecal matter and don't get them upset because they will tell you who's in charge if you there's some earth ego too let me let me fix that for you for there's the planet Saturn there's a Hubble picture actually but we're actually orbiting Saturn right now and it's a really cool picture of Saturn it's a little different because the Sun is behind Saturn the Sun is eclipsed by Saturn in this picture so the Rays come of course the edge of this ball of Saturn which is Saturn is gaseous and that's why this is glowing edge it's gorgeous gorgeous so we are out beyond Saturn looking back towards the center of the solar system so wait a minute wait what I see something there oh oh my gosh four pixels there you go nope six pixels sorry it's Carl Sagan noted in his beautifully written and elle' cuted words regarding the pale blue dot everyone you've ever known has lived on that dog and it just happens to be in the way of another photo and some more ego space the universe there's this two things dark matter and dark energy we don't know what they are but they are most of the universe there it is everything we understand about this universe occupies 4% of what drives the universe 22% dark matter 74 we don't know what these things are but we can measure them and we know they're there if anything is humbling to the scientist it is the fact that our understanding of the world three more slides how about the whole universe but maybe it's not even one universe we had one planet earth is it no there's eight nine ten more planets our Sun is surely special no there's a hundred billion suns in the galaxy well it's galaxies surely special no there's a hundred billion galaxies in the universe well it's a it's our universe maybe not there's cogent theoretical questions that address the multiverse we don't know how to draw it but you'd be just one of these bubbles and the last of the demotions of our ego for me my favorite is the chemistry of it all let's look at the abundance of elements in the universe in order hydrogen helium oxygen sound effects for free here carbon nitrogen my favorite element over all next other ok so now we look at earth life on earth the number one atom in the human body is found in the water molecule h2o we got two H's for every o the number one atom in the human body is hydrogen the number two atom no it's not helium chemically inert you couldn't do anything with it even if you had it except inhale it and sound like Mickey Mouse but you're not interacting chemically with it next in the body oxygen in order next carbon we are carbon-based life next nitrogen next class other thank you these elements match one for one we are made of the most common ingredients in the cosmos this is an image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope at one of the most uninteresting parts of the stellar night sky there's like five stars in this picture sitting on our nose they're the ones with the spikes there's a bright one sort of middle right one in the lower section one in the upper left everything else is looking through the screen door out to the greater cosmos and every smudge in this picture is an entire galaxy filled it's with hundreds of billions of stars and in each one of these galaxies stars are forging the chemical elements that make up the universe and in fact make up life it's not good enough just to make the elements you have to somehow get rid of them and donate them to the rest of the galaxy that's precisely what the high mass stars do they explode scattering their enriched ingredients across the cosmos in every one of these galaxies and that's what gives us the understanding we've known this for seventy years that's what gives us the understanding of our relationship to the universe some people are humbled some are are feel small and I feel large when I look at this picture because I know I know about my chemical kinship with it all the fact that not only do we exist in this universe by virtue of the fact that stars manufacture the elements to begin with spread them share the love across the rotating galaxies we get to say not only are we in the universe the universe is in us and I know of no more profound even spiritual understanding of the universe than that

Channel: Find Qualia

Views: 53,512

Keywords: universe, cosmos, cosmic, nasa, neil degrasse tyson, science, scientst

Id: 5ZB0_4crR8E

Length: 7min 15sec (435 seconds)

Published: Mon May 11 2020