From quantum foam to the cosmos, everything is connected — and humans are giants on Earth.

Photo by Christian Liebel on Unsplash

My courses in physical and quantum chemistry during my undergraduate career contained topics that were both annoying (“this is nonsense”) and unnerving (“but the evidence is right there…”). Afterward, teaching wave-particle duality and the double-slit experiment to my AP Chemistry students was eye-opening, because I couldn’t deny it any longer:

The universe is very, very strange.

While exploring topics such as atomic and subatomic structure, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and the emergence of properties, my students would ask deep philosophical questions (likely without realizing that their scientific questions were also philosophical). Too many questions, I responded: “I’m/We’re not sure.”

I have spent the past 12 years trying to ‘figure out’ biology. We have so much set in stone (pun intended) that I don’t think students are typically pushed to process just how philosophical the paradigms of biology and life itself really are. And these paradigms were all, at some point, incredibly major discoveries — many only within the past 100 years or so. I can’t stress that perspective enough.

We are exploding with information, and we are truly evolving at breakneck speed.

The agricultural revolution was only 12 thousand years ago. In geological time, that was like yesterday (maybe this morning). It’s truly wild. But it’s not just a story we tell ourselves. None of this is ‘just a story’.

Many of us in the privileged white West grew up pushed to focus on material goods and careers and technology and all these creations of our minds. Yes, consciousness remains perhaps the greatest mystery.

But if we step back and realize that we are truly creations of the Earth, ours is a strange story indeed.

We can trace ourselves (even if we don’t find LUCA, the ‘last universal common ancestor’) back to the beginning of life on Earth. Earth created us. Then evolution did its thing.

In the United States, we live in a society that obsesses over materialism. Similarly, modern science has obsessed over reductionism, in attempts to reduce phenomena to explanations of matter.

Matter is energy. It might not be ‘real’ in the sense of there being physical boundaries. It is possible that nothing ‘physical’ truly exists.

It’s a strange illusion, for lack of a better word.

We are made of energy. So is Earth. As are its storms and earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. And humans are a geological force of their own right. So if we liken ourselves to geological processes, we talk about these events like Earth is ‘alive’. Maybe that’s not far off the mark. We are, at the core, energy. So, too, is Earth.

Maybe our definitions of ‘life’ are just as we choose to know it.

There is an intriguing hypothesis that complex life like us was inevitable. Biological processes greatly increase the entropy of the universe. That does not mean that we can jump to claiming that humans are the end of evolution, nor does it mean that Earth is the chosen planet for life. Rather, I see it as a call for humility.

We are in a tiny pocket of the universe, on a rock that is hurtling through space around a slowly dying star. We are, compared to the cosmos, tiny. But we are not insignificant. Here on Earth, we are giants.

There are other giants, like whales and giraffes and elephants. Still, each of us is a mobile ecosystem swarming with life. And the majority of the genes in our bodies are not our own: they belong to the microbiome. You are genetically more ‘them’ than you are ‘you’.

Inside cells are organelles, made of molecules, of atoms, of quarks, down to the alleged quantum foam. And here is something intriguing:

On the scale of smallest to largest distances in the observable universe, humans are slightly to the right of center.

Simply, the size of humans is much closer to that of the known universe overall than it is to the theorized smallest distance. I find this humbling.

And I question why ‘life’ would be constrained around the center of the scale. All life on Earth is connected back to LUCA. All the atoms in all of Earth trace back to the cores of stars. Trace it all back to the singularity of the Big Bang (if that is really how the universe began — and we are no longer sure…), and everything is connected.

We are all connected. I don’t think we appreciate that truth enough.

I think that is something truly breathtaking.