I started this blog out with a long-winded, James Micheneresque, ramble through the mists of history, tracing how our awareness of the fundamental truth that all things are intimately interconnected has waxed and waned over time. Enough said. Here is an executive summary.
There is a thread that links all of existence, including us, into a single whole.
We are, as Carl Sagan said 50 years ago, star stuff, made from the very atoms that were created in the death throes of stars over the last 15 billion years. At this elemental level we and the rest of the cosmos are completely integrated by the natural laws of the universe. Even at the level below reality we are enmeshed in the same web of improbability.
The deeper we look within ourselves, the closer we return to star stuff. Our trillion cell complexity evolved from a simple single-celled beastie who, in-turn, had evolved from naturally occurring organic chemical compounds, that combined from inorganic star dust. From dust we came.
Biologically, we are like the nested Russian Matryoshka Dolls, one inside another, in another, and so on. We stem from a single mother. She wasn’t Eve, unique and alone, but rather part of a human family with generations. But only our Mother’s line survived to the present day. Along the way to today, we picked up DNA from close cousins that now resides in us, signals from our remote past that appear in us as immunity to certain diseases and, for we carriers of Neanderthal fragments, the ability to digest milk.
All of humanity is a single family with a history that goes back to the formation of the universe.
It would be a tragedy for such an ancient pedigree to be extinguished. To dust we return.