When I am up here I usually am talking about rising seas or climate change.

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1 1 It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, The 1 st line from Charles Dickens, Tale of Two Cities. It continues: it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us Even those of us that have not read it, use it to describe 2 different perspectives. When I am up here I usually am talking about rising seas or climate change. Today I will share some thoughts about the larger view of our place in the universe. PLUS, I WANT TO Contrast two perspectives, somewhat like the best of times, the worst of times Need to thank Mary Cadwell and Lynn Burns for changing things around. Also Louise Malusis who was supposed to be here today, and took my scheduled date next Sunday. Living Dying Death and then What a good segue from today I suspect. PEI, Yale, Congress Can you list reasons to be really hopeful and positive about the future? HANDS Can you think of reasons to be pessimistic, to be worried? Given some time, I suspect you and I could come up with longer lists for BOTH Technology Knowledge through the internet Democracy Medical breakthroughs Children, Grandchildren War & other violence Poverty & Inequity Disease Financial chaos Climate Change

2 2 Glass Half Empty Glass Half Full Perspective and viewpoint are critical. Key to our happiness, our motivation, to our purpose. Albert Einstein Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions. Do you remember Carl Sagan 1996 age 62 [like Neil Degrasse Tyson] True inspiration. A combination of science, wonder, awe, and learning. I came across a passage Sagan wrote in the year he died. If we keep on with business as usual, the Earth will be warmed more every year; drought and floods will be endemic; many more cities, provinces, and whole nations will be submerged beneath the waves -- unless heroic worldwide engineering countermeasures are taken. In the longer run, still more dire consequences may follow, including the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet, and the inundation of almost all the coastal cities on the planet. SAGAN SAW THE DIRE PROBLEM 20 YEARS AGO But from elsewhere in his writing, I found the message that really inspires me. We live in an extraordinary age. These are times of stunning changes in social organization, economic well-being, moral and ethical precepts, philosophical and religious perspectives, and human self-knowledge, as well as in our understanding of that vast universe in which we are imbedded like a grain of sand in a cosmic ocean. As long as there have been human beings, we have posed the deep and fundamental

3 3 questions, which evoke wonder and stir us into at least a tentative and trembling awareness, questions on the origins of consciousness; life on our planet; the beginnings of the Earth; the formation of the Sun; the possibility of intelligent beings somewhere up there in the depths of the sky; as well as, the grandest inquiry of all - on the advent, nature and ultimate destiny of the universe. For all but the last instant of human history these issues have been the exclusive province of philosophers and poets, shamans and theologians. The diverse and mutually contradictory answers offered demonstrate that few of the proposed solutions have been correct. But today, as a result of knowledge painfully extracted from nature, through generations of careful thinking, observing, and experimenting, we are on the verge of glimpsing at least preliminary answers to many of these questions....if we do not destroy ourselves, most of us will be around for the answers. Had we been born fifty years earlier, we could have wondered, pondered, speculated about these issues, but we could have done nothing about them. Had we been born fifty years later, the answers would, I think, already have been in. Our children will have been taught the answers before most of them will have had the opportunity to even formulate the questions. By far the most exciting, satisfying and exhilarating time to be alive is the time in which we pass from ignorance to knowledge on these fundamental issues; the age where we begin in wonder and end in understanding. In all of the four-billion-year history of the human family, there is only one generation privileged to live through that unique transitional moment: that generation is ours. Think about it. THAT is us! The most exciting time to be alive. More than a single generation. Cosmos. DNA. Earth.

4 4 Those may each be slightly different subjects and generations, but we are smack in the middle of those times of enlightenment. Different but the same as the Renaissance That speaks to me. Because I am so deeply involved in studying climate change and how to communicate it clearly, there are times I get bummed, SAD, even a bit depressed. RESTATE SAGAN. What that says to me.this is the Human Purpose or at least our grand opportunity. We may be an accident. Or at least a freak event. The experiment of the Cosmos My takeaway is that even the most dire path about climate change could be the real test that teaches humanity a better way. It will not be easy. History has had dark periods before. Each generation hopes the future will be rosy. That is what we do. But it is entirely possible, that the seriousness of the coming climate catastrophe could force humanity to abandon its petty, stupid views and agendas and find a better way to govern. Albert Einstein again. Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. SAGAN We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers. To put this in a more spiritual perspective about the evolution of us, Earth and the Cosmos, I strongly recommend Michael Dowd s Thank God for Evolution. Michael spoke here at UUFBR about 6-8 years ago. He describes the story of the universe, evolution, and human spirituality in a truly wonderful way.

5 5 As a final reading this morning I want to read an essay that appeared in WIRED MAGAZINE, by Danny Hillis THE BIG PICTURE from Who is Danny Hillis. In just over a page, he covers the entire span of life on Earth, actually starting far before life, and takes us to the verge of the future in a way that I find very provocative, putting our journey in a much larger timescale. Published in Wired Magazine 1997 Copyright Open access at: The Big Picture By Danny Hillis Let's put all this hype about change and transformation in perspective. It's underhyped. A few billion years ago, the Earth was a big, sterile rock covered with puddles of chemical soup. Gradually, little drops of oil - random chemical combinations - formed in these puddles, and some happened to absorb nutrients from the outside, causing them to grow. They eventually split into smaller drops of roughly the same composition. The "cells" that did a better job of attracting chemicals and dividing survived and split into future generations. These cells evolved an information processing mechanism, a way of recording for posterity their recipes for success. The mechanism they evolved - the genetic code of DNA - is still in use today. With DNA came an evolutionary advantage: knowledge, as genetic recipes, could accumulate from generation to generation. As cells became more sophisticated, they started to communicate, exchanging chemical messages. Synergistic communities developed that survived or failed together; if the community was successful, all the individuals were favored by evolution. This step took another billion years - bringing life to the stage of multicellular communities, in which cells are no longer out for themselves:

6 6 digestive cells depend on skin and muscle cells, and vice versa. These communities became so close that they collaborated in writing the whole recipe of the community on one string of DNA. The most interesting evolution shifted from the cellular level to the community level. Next, these communities of cells, these organisms, began to abstract information and build special structures - neural structures - that did nothing but process information within the community. After communities of cells built up a data processing apparatus (the neuron), they developed structures for sensing, recording, and understanding information - eyes, ears, and brains. With neurons, learning happened within the time span of a single organism. An organism could learn not to eat a fruit that repeatedly made it sick. Lessons no longer had to be absorbed through evolution, through the diminished fitness of millions of individuals over many millennia. Then these learning individuals started working out the quirks of communicating with each other. The most sophisticated version is human language, whereby complex ideas in one brain generate ideas in another. This lets us function as a community, and in some sense as a single organism. And so we - humanity - have repeated the process of connection, communication, and construction of specialized structures to process our communal information. We're replicating the levels of chemicals and multicellular organisms, abstracting out our methods of sensing, recording, and understanding information. Language was only the first step. Telephony, computers, and CD-ROMs are all specialized mechanisms we've built to bind us together. Now evolution takes place in microseconds. The first steps in the story of evolution took a billion years. The next step - nervous systems and brains - took a few hundred million years. The next steps, including the development of language, took less than a million years. And the most recent steps seem to be taking only a few decades. The process is feeding on itself and becoming autocatalytic. And now we are beginning to depend on computers to help us evolve new computers that let us produce things of much greater complexity. Yet we don't quite understand the process - it's getting ahead of us. We're now using programs to make much faster computers so the process can run much faster.

7 7 That's what's so confusing - technologies are feeding back on themselves; we're taking off. We're at that point analogous to when single-celled organisms were turning into multicelled organisms. We are amoebas and we can't figure out what the hell this thing is that we're creating. I cannot believe that we are at the end of this story - we are not evolution's ultimate product. There's something coming after us, and I imagine it is something wonderful. But we may never be able to comprehend it, any more than a caterpillar can comprehend turning into a butterfly. I find Danny Hillis s piece to be brilliant and of course provocative. It does provide another perspective from which I view the journey of the human experience, and whether to view this as the best of times, or the worst of times.