Translator: Tijana Mihajlović Reviewer: Mirjana Čutura
Hi, everyone.
I’m going to talk to you
about our search for meaning among the stars.
When I’m talking about meaning,
I’m not talking about how to find our day-to-day meaning,
or our hour-to-hour meaning,
or how we find meaning in endless days of school;
I’m talking about our meaning as humanity,
when it comes to the vastness of space,
when it comes to the Universe and our place in it,
and how we open ourselves up to figuring out what that meaning is.
Since I was a little girl, I have been in love with space.
When I was little and I would go into bookstores,
I would pick the book that had this picture of a star on it first,
and I was amazed by it,
and I’d flip through the book
and just look at these pictures and point them out.
And even for Christmas, I would always want the space book.
It was never I wanted the ice cream making machine;
I wanted the space book or the telescope.
And I was amazed by all of these things around us
that I had never thought of or could never dream up.
As I got older,
these questions became more from, “What is a star, or what is a nebula,
or what does a comet do?”
and it became more mature.
It became, “Where do I find meaning in all this?”
“How, as me, as a tiny little human being, how do I understand my place?”
One of the first things that brought this to my attention
was one of my favorite pictures of all time, when it comes to space.
It looks very simple, but it’s called the Hubble Deep Field,
and it was taken in 1996.
A team of scientists very nervously took the Hubble Space Telescope for 11 days;
it was very expensive,
and there were a lot of people who were waiting for the telescope.
They picked a point in space
right by the Big Dipper.
It was tiny, and to a human eye, it looked black,
it looked void of any sort of light.
And it looked void to the telescopes, too.
There was nothing that you could see.
So, they set it on long exposure for 11 days, and they waited,
and the picture that they got back blew their minds
and changed how scientists thought of the Universe from then on.
In this picture, every little, single point of light that you see
is not a star, it is not a solar system, it is not a planet; it is a galaxy.
It is a whole galaxy.
Our galaxy alone has over a billion stars in it,
and each one of these pinpoints in space is its own galaxy,
its own opportunity for life, and for planets, and for solar systems.
And for me as a young girl, it blew my mind
because look how small I was on this planet.
I go through every day thinking I am the center of my universe.
And this took me out of that perspective, of I am not the center of my universe;
I am a little human walking around on this planet.
As I did my research, I found something very striking,
that I have never looked at before or never connected the dots,
and it is that this generation or the couple of generations before us,
we are not the first ones to ask these questions.
In fact, humanity has been asking these questions
since the moment that we could ask them.
The Mayans built observatories to look at the stars,
and they developed calendars off of the stars.
The Chinese were able to navigate the world
by looking at the stars,
and they created the compass.
The Egyptians built pyramids
that every 3,000 years line up with the sky exactly.
And a lot of these are still mysteries to us.
Even in history and even in the stories that we tell,
this evidence of this question about our meaning and space comes to us.
In Isaiah, Lucifer fell from the sky like a star falling from heaven.
To find the baby Jesus, the Magi followed a star.
And even in our everyday world, where we look at horoscopes,
that is based on people who studied the stars
and asked the same question that I have been asking,
that many human beings ask every day,
and that is, “Why are we here?
What is our meaning supposed to be among the stars?”
I read an article by a man named Michael Griffin,
who was a physicist for NASA.
And he brought it more into today’s world than the Mayans or the Aztecs.
And he said, “A lot of times when we think about exploring space, today,
or our meaning in space,
we think about it on an economic level, we think about it on a global level.”
Exploring space can give countries power,
it can give us materials and minerals that can sustain the human race,
that can help us at an economic level.
But he claims that that’s not truly why we want to go into space,
that’s not truly why we ask these questions.
It’s because we want to look out into space
and see something, similarities to ourselves.
And that we want to give this gift to the next generation
of asking these questions.
And he says we kind of hide behind these standard,
“Oh, it’s for the economy,”
or, “Oh, it would be good to find minerals so that we could continue to live.”
That’s not the core question in all of this.
And so, my main source was called “The Big Picture” by Sean Carroll,
and he explored the Universe in a very scientific way.
It was a very dense book.
He explored a lot of different theories, a lot of different thought experiments,
such as the Ship of Theseus,
and he kind of broke it down atom by atom in time and space
and how that works in our everyday lives.
But there was a common thread through all of it.
And through that thread I was able to develop,
and through a lot of thinking, three steps or three ways
to be able to open ourselves up to meaning.
Now, I do not have the answer to what our meaning is.
I don’t think anyone thousands of years before me did,
or it may be thousands and thousands or millions of years
before anyone after me has that answer.
I’m not here to tell you what your meaning is,
but I am here to tell you how we can open up to meaning,
how, when we look out into the Universe, we can open ourselves up
to be able to expand our mind and to be able to ask these questions.
Now, the first is: realizing our own ignorance.
When I first presented this to my classmates
and I was talking them through the ideas that I had,
this was actually met with a lot of resistance.
And I was surprised.
I had a lot of people tell me, “We don’t need to know our own ignorance.
That has nothing to do with space.
That has nothing to do with our meaning
or why we need to figure out our meaning.”
And that just solidified the idea that this should be in this presentation.
Because we are tiny human beings, and Sean Carroll’s book puts it very well.
He said, “A person is a diminutive, ephemeral thing,
standing smaller in comparison with the Universe
than a single atom stands in comparison with the Earth.”
Think about how small that is, how small we are.
And we have to be able to realize that,
realize there are a lot of things that we don’t know,
that we know a great deal, but we certainly do not know everything.
In our everyday lives, when it comes to the Universe,
when it comes to space, we can’t know everything.
And a lot of people can be afraid to admit that,
afraid to admit that they do not know everything
or that there’s something that they don’t know.
But before you can learn,
you have to admit that you don’t know it.
You have to be able to say, “I don’t know this, but I want to learn.”
And it’s not a shameful thing not to know something.
And being able to admit
that we are a little bit ignorant – or a lot ignorant –
we are able to open ourselves up to learning new things.
Now, the second that goes along with this realization of ignorance is:
rigorous personal reflection.
Now, this might be the scariest of the three
because we don’t like to look at ourselves necessarily,
really look at ourselves, really look at our mindsets,
really look at how we think about the world,
really think about how we take information in from the world.
Sean Carroll again puts it very nicely.
And this quote is actually how I started developing
the second idea of personal reflection.
And he says, “The pressing, human questions we have about our lives
depend directly on our attitudes towards the Universe at a deeper level.
For many people, those attitudes are adopted
rather informally from their surrounding culture,
rather than arising out of rigorous personal reflection.”
Now, in our everyday lives, we’re very passive with information.
From the minute we are born, we are told how to think,
what to think, what is going to happen next; we’re very passive.
And that’s a very natural thing in today’s world;
you have so much going on and so much that you’re doing
that you just take in information.
And part of personally reflecting
is becoming active in the information that you’re getting,
in becoming aware of how you think of the world,
and how you internalize stuff,
and how a new idea incorporates itself into what you already know.
And this can open doors for us to be able to realize
how we connect with the world.
I always like to think of the example
of what people call an existential crisis, right?
When you go out under the stars at night,
and it’s clear, you can see the stars,
you’re sitting there and you are looking at the stars.
And you’re kind of hit by this overwhelming feeling
of, “Wow, I am so small.
Look at the Universe out there, look at how big it is.”
A lot of times that makes people uncomfortable.
Of course it makes you uncomfortable
because it pushes you to realize your humanity,
it pushes you to make you think about yourself
in a way that you don’t in everyday life.
I would encourage people
that instead of saying, “I don’t like this feeling”
and going back inside,
of staying there and thinking about it,
of trying to understand yourself and why you think that way
and how you kind of come to terms with that.
It’s a very hard thing to come to terms with.
Now, the third step is my favorite, and it’s: foster a sense of curiosity.
I have always been a curious person
and I’ve always asked why in everything that I do with my life.
And if anyone has ever been around a three-year-old,
you know that the first question that comes out of their mouth
every time is, “Why?”
“Why is this this? Why is that that?”
“Why is the sky blue?”
“Why do ladybugs fly?”
And as we get older, we lose that sense of curiosity, right?
We have jobs, we have school, we have homework.
Why am I going to ask a question about this random thing
when I have stats homework to do?
I don’t have time to think about it or ask questions.
And I find this really sad because when a child asks a question,
they can’t necessarily understand the answer that is given to them.
And they can’t necessarily go out and search for that answer
and understand what they find.
But as we grow older and as we become adults,
we have the ability to actually understand the answers
that are given to us
or go out and seek those answers.
We can’t as a child.
So, it’s sad when we lose our sense of curiosity
because now we have the ability to go out and answer those questions,
and we don’t take it.
One of my favorite quotes of all time is by a man named Carl Sagan,
and he says that, “We are made of star-stuff.
We are a way for the Universe to get to know itself.”
Your skin, the clothes that you are wearing,
the hair on your head, the benches that you sit on,
they were once in the middle of stars, they were in the middle of nebulas.
They were hot, and they were rolling around,
and they were creating all these things billions of years ago
and billions of miles away.
They were in the center of stars that made this Universe.
We are the incarnation of the Universe asking questions about ourselves.
We are atoms put together that are asking, “What is this world?
What is our meaning? What is the Universe?”
And we have an obligation to ask these questions.
We have an obligation to want to be curious,
to want to ask questions in our world, and not be afraid to do that.
Now, I was talking about obligation.
We have an obligation to the thousands of generations that came before us,
to our ancestors who asked these very questions,
our ancestors who are not able to get up off the ground
to answer these questions.
We can now reach for the stars.
We have inherited these questions
and now we have tools to be able to start answering them
or to attempt to answer them.
But we also have the obligation to give this gift to future generations:
to our children, to our children’s children,
to our great great grandkinds.
We have the obligation to give them these questions
and to give them the tools
so that they may continue this journey that has been inherited
since the moment that humans could ask these questions.
Because we, right now, can only reach for the stars,
but maybe one day they will be able to touch them.
I’d like to leave you with this quote, another one of my favorites by Carl Sagan,
and he says, “We embark on our journey to the stars
with the question first framed in our childhood of our species
and in each generation asked anew with undiminished wonder:
What are the stars?
Exploration is in our nature.
We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still.”
Thank you.
(Applause)
Hi, everyone.
I’m going to talk to you
about our search for meaning among the stars.
When I’m talking about meaning,
I’m not talking about how to find our day-to-day meaning,
or our hour-to-hour meaning,
or how we find meaning in endless days of school;
I’m talking about our meaning as humanity,
when it comes to the vastness of space,
when it comes to the Universe and our place in it,
and how we open ourselves up to figuring out what that meaning is.
Since I was a little girl, I have been in love with space.
When I was little and I would go into bookstores,
I would pick the book that had this picture of a star on it first,
and I was amazed by it,
and I’d flip through the book
and just look at these pictures and point them out.
And even for Christmas, I would always want the space book.
It was never I wanted the ice cream making machine;
I wanted the space book or the telescope.
And I was amazed by all of these things around us
that I had never thought of or could never dream up.
As I got older,
these questions became more from, “What is a star, or what is a nebula,
or what does a comet do?”
and it became more mature.
It became, “Where do I find meaning in all this?”
“How, as me, as a tiny little human being, how do I understand my place?”
One of the first things that brought this to my attention
was one of my favorite pictures of all time, when it comes to space.
It looks very simple, but it’s called the Hubble Deep Field,
and it was taken in 1996.
A team of scientists very nervously took the Hubble Space Telescope for 11 days;
it was very expensive,
and there were a lot of people who were waiting for the telescope.
They picked a point in space
right by the Big Dipper.
It was tiny, and to a human eye, it looked black,
it looked void of any sort of light.
And it looked void to the telescopes, too.
There was nothing that you could see.
So, they set it on long exposure for 11 days, and they waited,
and the picture that they got back blew their minds
and changed how scientists thought of the Universe from then on.
In this picture, every little, single point of light that you see
is not a star, it is not a solar system, it is not a planet; it is a galaxy.
It is a whole galaxy.
Our galaxy alone has over a billion stars in it,
and each one of these pinpoints in space is its own galaxy,
its own opportunity for life, and for planets, and for solar systems.
And for me as a young girl, it blew my mind
because look how small I was on this planet.
I go through every day thinking I am the center of my universe.
And this took me out of that perspective, of I am not the center of my universe;
I am a little human walking around on this planet.
As I did my research, I found something very striking,
that I have never looked at before or never connected the dots,
and it is that this generation or the couple of generations before us,
we are not the first ones to ask these questions.
In fact, humanity has been asking these questions
since the moment that we could ask them.
The Mayans built observatories to look at the stars,
and they developed calendars off of the stars.
The Chinese were able to navigate the world
by looking at the stars,
and they created the compass.
The Egyptians built pyramids
that every 3,000 years line up with the sky exactly.
And a lot of these are still mysteries to us.
Even in history and even in the stories that we tell,
this evidence of this question about our meaning and space comes to us.
In Isaiah, Lucifer fell from the sky like a star falling from heaven.
To find the baby Jesus, the Magi followed a star.
And even in our everyday world, where we look at horoscopes,
that is based on people who studied the stars
and asked the same question that I have been asking,
that many human beings ask every day,
and that is, “Why are we here?
What is our meaning supposed to be among the stars?”
I read an article by a man named Michael Griffin,
who was a physicist for NASA.
And he brought it more into today’s world than the Mayans or the Aztecs.
And he said, “A lot of times when we think about exploring space, today,
or our meaning in space,
we think about it on an economic level, we think about it on a global level.”
Exploring space can give countries power,
it can give us materials and minerals that can sustain the human race,
that can help us at an economic level.
But he claims that that’s not truly why we want to go into space,
that’s not truly why we ask these questions.
It’s because we want to look out into space
and see something, similarities to ourselves.
And that we want to give this gift to the next generation
of asking these questions.
And he says we kind of hide behind these standard,
“Oh, it’s for the economy,”
or, “Oh, it would be good to find minerals so that we could continue to live.”
That’s not the core question in all of this.
And so, my main source was called “The Big Picture” by Sean Carroll,
and he explored the Universe in a very scientific way.
It was a very dense book.
He explored a lot of different theories, a lot of different thought experiments,
such as the Ship of Theseus,
and he kind of broke it down atom by atom in time and space
and how that works in our everyday lives.
But there was a common thread through all of it.
And through that thread I was able to develop,
and through a lot of thinking, three steps or three ways
to be able to open ourselves up to meaning.
Now, I do not have the answer to what our meaning is.
I don’t think anyone thousands of years before me did,
or it may be thousands and thousands or millions of years
before anyone after me has that answer.
I’m not here to tell you what your meaning is,
but I am here to tell you how we can open up to meaning,
how, when we look out into the Universe, we can open ourselves up
to be able to expand our mind and to be able to ask these questions.
Now, the first is: realizing our own ignorance.
When I first presented this to my classmates
and I was talking them through the ideas that I had,
this was actually met with a lot of resistance.
And I was surprised.
I had a lot of people tell me, “We don’t need to know our own ignorance.
That has nothing to do with space.
That has nothing to do with our meaning
or why we need to figure out our meaning.”
And that just solidified the idea that this should be in this presentation.
Because we are tiny human beings, and Sean Carroll’s book puts it very well.
He said, “A person is a diminutive, ephemeral thing,
standing smaller in comparison with the Universe
than a single atom stands in comparison with the Earth.”
Think about how small that is, how small we are.
And we have to be able to realize that,
realize there are a lot of things that we don’t know,
that we know a great deal, but we certainly do not know everything.
In our everyday lives, when it comes to the Universe,
when it comes to space, we can’t know everything.
And a lot of people can be afraid to admit that,
afraid to admit that they do not know everything
or that there’s something that they don’t know.
But before you can learn,
you have to admit that you don’t know it.
You have to be able to say, “I don’t know this, but I want to learn.”
And it’s not a shameful thing not to know something.
And being able to admit
that we are a little bit ignorant – or a lot ignorant –
we are able to open ourselves up to learning new things.
Now, the second that goes along with this realization of ignorance is:
rigorous personal reflection.
Now, this might be the scariest of the three
because we don’t like to look at ourselves necessarily,
really look at ourselves, really look at our mindsets,
really look at how we think about the world,
really think about how we take information in from the world.
Sean Carroll again puts it very nicely.
And this quote is actually how I started developing
the second idea of personal reflection.
And he says, “The pressing, human questions we have about our lives
depend directly on our attitudes towards the Universe at a deeper level.
For many people, those attitudes are adopted
rather informally from their surrounding culture,
rather than arising out of rigorous personal reflection.”
Now, in our everyday lives, we’re very passive with information.
From the minute we are born, we are told how to think,
what to think, what is going to happen next; we’re very passive.
And that’s a very natural thing in today’s world;
you have so much going on and so much that you’re doing
that you just take in information.
And part of personally reflecting
is becoming active in the information that you’re getting,
in becoming aware of how you think of the world,
and how you internalize stuff,
and how a new idea incorporates itself into what you already know.
And this can open doors for us to be able to realize
how we connect with the world.
I always like to think of the example
of what people call an existential crisis, right?
When you go out under the stars at night,
and it’s clear, you can see the stars,
you’re sitting there and you are looking at the stars.
And you’re kind of hit by this overwhelming feeling
of, “Wow, I am so small.
Look at the Universe out there, look at how big it is.”
A lot of times that makes people uncomfortable.
Of course it makes you uncomfortable
because it pushes you to realize your humanity,
it pushes you to make you think about yourself
in a way that you don’t in everyday life.
I would encourage people
that instead of saying, “I don’t like this feeling”
and going back inside,
of staying there and thinking about it,
of trying to understand yourself and why you think that way
and how you kind of come to terms with that.
It’s a very hard thing to come to terms with.
Now, the third step is my favorite, and it’s: foster a sense of curiosity.
I have always been a curious person
and I’ve always asked why in everything that I do with my life.
And if anyone has ever been around a three-year-old,
you know that the first question that comes out of their mouth
every time is, “Why?”
“Why is this this? Why is that that?”
“Why is the sky blue?”
“Why do ladybugs fly?”
And as we get older, we lose that sense of curiosity, right?
We have jobs, we have school, we have homework.
Why am I going to ask a question about this random thing
when I have stats homework to do?
I don’t have time to think about it or ask questions.
And I find this really sad because when a child asks a question,
they can’t necessarily understand the answer that is given to them.
And they can’t necessarily go out and search for that answer
and understand what they find.
But as we grow older and as we become adults,
we have the ability to actually understand the answers
that are given to us
or go out and seek those answers.
We can’t as a child.
So, it’s sad when we lose our sense of curiosity
because now we have the ability to go out and answer those questions,
and we don’t take it.
One of my favorite quotes of all time is by a man named Carl Sagan,
and he says that, “We are made of star-stuff.
We are a way for the Universe to get to know itself.”
Your skin, the clothes that you are wearing,
the hair on your head, the benches that you sit on,
they were once in the middle of stars, they were in the middle of nebulas.
They were hot, and they were rolling around,
and they were creating all these things billions of years ago
and billions of miles away.
They were in the center of stars that made this Universe.
We are the incarnation of the Universe asking questions about ourselves.
We are atoms put together that are asking, “What is this world?
What is our meaning? What is the Universe?”
And we have an obligation to ask these questions.
We have an obligation to want to be curious,
to want to ask questions in our world, and not be afraid to do that.
Now, I was talking about obligation.
We have an obligation to the thousands of generations that came before us,
to our ancestors who asked these very questions,
our ancestors who are not able to get up off the ground
to answer these questions.
We can now reach for the stars.
We have inherited these questions
and now we have tools to be able to start answering them
or to attempt to answer them.
But we also have the obligation to give this gift to future generations:
to our children, to our children’s children,
to our great great grandkinds.
We have the obligation to give them these questions
and to give them the tools
so that they may continue this journey that has been inherited
since the moment that humans could ask these questions.
Because we, right now, can only reach for the stars,
but maybe one day they will be able to touch them.
I’d like to leave you with this quote, another one of my favorites by Carl Sagan,
and he says, “We embark on our journey to the stars
with the question first framed in our childhood of our species
and in each generation asked anew with undiminished wonder:
What are the stars?
Exploration is in our nature.
We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still.”
Thank you.
(Applause)
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