The Third Ten Million Years is a weekly Precipitate feature exploring the mysteries of life on a single planet, as seen through a single pair of eyes in a single body composed of the same fine material as the deserts of Mars.
Lately I have been in a reflective mood—not uncommon for me—and I’ve been pondering some big, unsolvable questions. This time my mood comes in the wake of a passing comment from a political figure that breezily discarded my work and passion as a “series of fantasies.”
This mood maintains a certain melancholy, as the public conversation about the future of our planet devolves into political hyperbole that serves no purpose but to make meaningful change difficult. Still, I’ve been trying to maintain a more philosophical understanding in the face of such conversation: humans are humans only, and despite our ability to really, really screw things up, we can also find a way to correct our path. And if we don’t change our path, well, what are we but dust?
In such times it is comforting to step back from the day to day and see the world with a wider perspective. Usually, I read to find reassurance from those who have come before. I read John Muir’s writing from his time in the Sierras: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” Such a sentiment may seem like trite new-age philosophy, but I think actually this might be totally radical. Such a view as Muir’s fundamentally alters the way one perceives the consequences of human behavior on the natural world. It makes such consequences not less important, but more integral and worthy of attention. We are part of the big picture, this idea claims, even if we think otherwise.
Ash Wednesday was last week. It’s my favorite day in the Christian calendar, as it affords me an excuse (though I don’t need one) to think of nature and human life in the biggest context imaginable. On Ash Wednesday, the Church reminds its faithful that humans are human only, that we exist in the world that we live in, that humans are one with the physical, natural world. This may not be how it is expressed from the pulpit, but I think it is a central part of the message: we come from dust, and to dust we shall return.
That last phrase comes from Genesis. In context, God is cursing Adam for breaking the rules, for listening to Eve and eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The larger story continues, but the curse is for me the meaning of the big book: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” God tells Adam: you are made of this place; you are just dust. A radical notion.
I love philosophy and religion and literature, and overlaying these things with science has proved the most fulfilling endeavor I have ever undertaken. Part of the appeal of the sciences in my life in recent years is to find the unlikely intersections in human thinking. Finding the overlap of what we think beautiful and meaningful, and how we can understand that beauty and meaning. Ash Wednesday is an example of the fruitfulness of this endeavor.
The curse laid on the first human by God in the Garden of Eden, it turns out, is perfectly accurate: what are we humans but the dust that makes up the entire universe? We are made of the history of everything that has ever or will ever be. We are stardust of the billions of years old supernovae of the universe. Which is a beautiful idea, one that is capable of providing relief from the tumult of the day to day. Amazingly, it just happens to be accurate.
Christopher Zumski Finke, Staff Blogger
[...] few weeks back, my column over at Precipitate, Everything we know is stardust, focused on that very fact. In it, I [...]