“That which makes us specifically human does not signify our separation from nature; it is part of that self-same name. It’s a form that nature has taken here on our planet, in the minute play of its combinations, through the mutual influence and exchange of correlations and information between its parts. Who knows how many and which other extraordinary complexities exist, in forms that are perhaps impossible for us to imagine, in the endless spaces of the cosmos…… There is so much space up there that it is childish to think that there should be something uniquely special in a peripheral corner of an ordinary galaxy. Life on Earth gives only a small taste of what can happen in the universe. Our very soul itself is only one such small example.

We are a species that is naturally moved by curiosity, the only one left of a group of species (the genus Homo) made up of a dozen equally curious species. The other species in the group have already become extinct, such as the Neanderthals, quite recently, roughly thirty thousand years ago. It was a group of species that evolved in Africa, akin to the hierarchical and quarrelsome chimpanzees, and even more closely to the bonobos, the small, peaceful, cheerfully egalitarian and promiscuous type of chimps. A group of species that repeatedly travelled out of Africa to explore new worlds. They went far, as far as Patagonia, and even further, up to the moon.

It is not against nature to be curious, this trait is part of our nature.

One hundred thousand years ago our species left Africa, compelled perhaps by this very curiosity, learning to look ever further afield. Flying over Africa by night, I wondered if one of these distant ancestors setting out towards the wide open spaces of the North could have looked up into the sky and imagined a distant descendant flying up there pondering on the nature of things, and still driven by the very same curiosity.

I believe that our species will not last long. It does not seem to be made of the stuff that has allowed the turtle, for example, to continue to exist more or less unchanged for hundreds of millions of years, hundreds of times longer than our own existence. We belong to a short-lived genus of species. All our cousins are already extinct. What’s more, we cause damage. The brutal climate and environmental changes triggered by us are unlikely to spare us… For the Earth they may turn out to be a small irrelevant blip, but I do not think that we will outlive the effects unscathed, especially since public and political opinion prefers to ignore the dangers we are running by hiding our heads in the sand. We are perhaps the only species on Earth to be conscious of the inevitability of our individual mortality.

I fear that soon we shall also have to become the only species that will knowingly watch the coming of its own collective demise, or at least the demise of its civilization.

Just as we have some idea of how to deal with our individual mortality, likewise we will deal with the collapse of our civilization. It is not so different. And it’s certainly not the first time this has happened. The Maya and Cretans, amongst many others, have already experienced this. We are born and die as the stars are born and die, both individually and collectively. This is our reality. Life is precious to us because it is ephemeral. And like Lucretius wrote “our appetite for life is voracious, our thirst for life insatiable” (De rerum natura III, 1084). But immersed in this nature, which made us and which directs us, we are not homeless beings suspended between two worlds, parts of it that belong to nature only in part, with a longing for something else. No, we are at home.

Nature is our home, and in nature we are at home. The strange, multicolored and astonishing world we explore, in which space is granular, time does not exist, and things are nowhere, is not something that estranges us from our true selves, for this is only what our natural curiosity reveals to us about our dwelling place. About the stuff we are made of. We are made of the same stardust of which all things are made, and when we are immersed in suffering or when we experience intense joy, we are nothing other than what we can’t help being, a part of our world.

……

It is part of our nature to love and be honest. It is part of our nature to long to know more, and keep learning. Our knowledge of the world continues to grow.

There are frontiers of learning we wish to cross, driven by a burning desire for knowledge. They are at most minute insights into the fabric of space, the origins of the cosmos, the nature of time, in the phenomenon of black holes, and in the workings of our own thought processes. Here, on the edge of what we know, in contact with the ocean of the unknown, shines the mystery and the beauty of the world. And it is breathtaking.”

physicist