Name: Starry Messenger
Rating: 4.4 (426 reviews)
Author: Neil deGrasse Tyson

What’s in it for me? A cosmic perspective on life.

People are fed up with experts. That was the recent verdict of the British politician Michael Gove. What people want, he implied, is more feeling. Less weighing of the evidence and more gut instinct.

As a recipe for politics, that statement met with lots of opposition. As a description of what’s actually happening, though, it hit the nail on the head. We live in an age of hyperpartisanship and culture wars. Reasoned debate is out; emotive shouting matches are in.

The backlash against experts has generated its own backlash: a pro-expert faction that says we ought to short-circuit all our messy disagreements and delegate decision-making to cool-headed rationalists.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson doesn’t quite see it that way. Science can’t stand in for politics – functioning democratic societies have to debate their fundamental values at some point or other. But he does think science has a valuable contribution to make to those debates.

That contribution isn’t about coming up with answers – it’s about helping us frame our conversations in a more nuanced way. He calls it the cosmic perspective. It’s the view of life on Earth that emerges when we place our problems in a wider context.

As we’ll see in this Blink to Tyson’s Starry Messenger, this rational approach doesn’t just help us figure out what really matters – it can also stimulate a greater sense of unity.

Exploration challenges our assumptions about ourselves.

Cosmos is a big word. It encompasses every particle of matter in the universe – a vast number of galaxies in a system measuring ten billion light years in diameter. To look at life on Earth through that lens – call it the cosmic perspective – is a mind-boggling proposition. So let’s start a little smaller. We’ll come back to the stars. First, let’s rewind some 30,000 years.

Imagine a group of our distant, cave-dwelling ancestors huddled around a fire. Their “universe” is tiny. Their mental map encompasses no more than a dozen or so square miles around that cave. Beyond those frontiers lies the great unknown. Some may picture it as a vast nothingness; others see nothing but danger and death when they contemplate it.

One day, a couple of intrepid cave dwellers consult their elders. They want to see what lies beyond. The elders are wise – you don’t live long enough to become an elder without accumulating a little wisdom, after all. They weigh the matter, and ponder the risks and rewards. No, they say – there are more pressing issues. Exploration can wait. And so the group remains in its cave, working out its cave problems.

Now imagine the same scene playing out in a second cave. This time, however, the would-be pioneers win the argument. Perhaps these elders have greater foresight – or maybe they’re just less risk-averse. Either way, their go-ahead changes everything.

Sometimes, you have to leave the cave to solve your cave problems. There’s danger and death in the great unknown. But it also holds the promise of plants that cure sickness and useful materials to fashion new tools – and of new sources of food and water and shelter. Most important of all, though, there are new ways of thinking to be discovered. That’s an idea dear to many scientists, but it’s also a deeply human idea. As the American poet T. S. Eliot put it:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

In other words, exploration is as much about the journey as it is about the destination. When we strike out, we don’t just discover new worlds – we also learn to look at the world we already know in new ways. That, Neil deGrasse Tyson argues, is the cosmic perspective. To take that perspective is to widen our frames of reference. To recontextualize familiar ideas. To see the place from which we started in striking new ways. And it changes everything.

We had to go to the Moon to truly see the Earth.

Let’s leave our cave-dwelling ancestors behind and fast-forward to 1968.

Everywhere you looked that year, new political and cultural boundaries were being opened up. In the United States, civil rights activists were redefining what it meant to be an American citizen. In Prague and Paris, Mexico City and Tokyo, students dreamed up new utopias in seminar rooms – and fought the establishment on the streets. The Beatles came back from India with a sitar-laced sound that redefined Western pop music, while hippies turned to potent psychedelics to open the doors of perception.

The natural world defies our common-sense assumptions.

You’ve probably heard that you have to cook things longer if you happen to be making dinner on top of a mountain. Why, though? Well, simply put, it has to do with air pressure.

The boiling temperature of a liquid isn’t a universal constant: it varies according to how much air pressure is pushing down on that liquid’s surface.

Kernaussagen in Starry Messenger

Worum geht es in Starry Messenger?

Starry Messenger (2022) is about a way of looking at the world called the cosmic perspective. It’s the view that opens up when we think about human life in its largest possible context – that of the universe itself. This isn’t an exercise in making our worldly affairs seem small and trivial, though. It’s about unlocking insights that can help us live more happily and meaningfully on the cosmic anomaly we call Earth.

Über den Autor

Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist and best-selling author. He is the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History and the host of the Emmy-nominated podcast StarTalk. Tyson is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Public Welfare Medal from the National Academy of Sciences and the Distinguished Public Service Medal from NASA. His previous books included Astrophysics for People in a Hurry.