I’m More Important Than I Think I Am
The politics of human arrogance
I recently attended a talk by Neil DeGrasse Tyson titled “Cosmic Perspective.”
If you’re not familiar, Dr. Tyson is an American astrophysicist, cosmologist, and author who has extensively researched the cosmos.
But his talk wasn’t really about the stars or the cosmos if we’re being honest.
It was about us. The humans.
Most people have heard that chimpanzees share about 99% of the same DNA as humans and are our closest relatives.
But you don’t need a Ph.D. to realize that 1% can make a huge difference.
The brightest and most intelligent chimpanzees in the world can do no more than a two- or three-year-old human can. Stack a few blocks. Chimpanzees can’t build rocket ships.
The dumbest 40-year-old human certainly can run mental circles around any chimpanzee that ever lived.
DeGrasse discussed the size of the universe. Asked us to imagine its vastness.
There are at least 200 sextillion stars in total. For math geeks, that’s 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. And that may be wildly underestimated since we can only view 4% of the stars from Earth, even with the most advanced equipment.
