Krista Tippett: Hello, again. Welcome back to our investigation of hope as a muscle. And in this session, we are going to wander again into the territory of mystery — but not mystery religiously defined, mystery as experienced and described by a scientist, an astrophysicist.

Our teacher today is Mario Livio, and I interviewed him a decade ago, but his perspective prepared the way for many interviews to come with different kinds of scientists in awe of how we keep outstripping our knowledge. Scientists themselves are amazed at what we’re learning to see and understand and how it continues to topple everything we thought we knew and open new questions to live into. And taking this in is not just about taking in scientific ideas. It is owning the fact that scientific discovery on behalf of us all also ends up reframing our cultural imagination. This cosmic perspective is also about who we are and our place in the cosmos and what is in the realm of the possible. This is another level of that move of letting settle in us what a wondrous time it is to be alive.

I think so often about how we are working with words and disciplines that did not exist when I was born — tectonic shift, neuroscience, social psychology, epigenetics, behavioral economics, restorative justice, microbiome, exoplanet. Mario Livio, for 24 years, he was an astrophysicist. He was an astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates the Hubble Space Telescope. And I would say that the Hubble telescope had this effect, actually, of bringing the beauty of the cosmos into a new clarity, into view, onto people’s desktops, into our homes. It imprinted the beauty and wonder of the cosmos in ordinary sight and imagination. And in the part of my conversation with Mario Livio that you’re going to hear in a minute, I was wondering with him about what he’s working on now that comes closest to rearranging his imagination, what he’s working on that might ultimately reframe some of the biggest human questions.

And he talked about what an incredible thing it had been to be part of 20th century physics, which was so confident that we were right on the cusp of having a theory of everything and understanding everything, and how it was only — I mean, until 1995, we did not know of a single planet outside the solar system that revolves around a sun-like star. And it was only in 1998, as the century ended, that we discovered — I mean, we knew that the universe was expanding, but we discovered that the expansion was speeding up, that it is propelled by something, and that was the discovery of what is now so evocatively called “dark matter” and “dark energy” — that these compose the vast majority of the universe. And these are unknown mysteries.

This, for me, is a whole new canvas for a muscular and exhilarating hope. It’s a big picture that we every once in a while get to zoom out to, to put our despair and our questions and our callings into a different kind of perspective — that we are the generation of our species that has mapped the genome, we are the first humans to see gravitational waves, to hear black holes colliding. And to nurture a little bit of that wonder anew, here’s some of my conversation with Mario Livio.

Mario Livio: One of the things that we have done, in science in general and in physics in particular, is we continuously push both farther and farther back in time and into areas that we didn’t know before. So for example, until, I don’t know, Copernicus, we thought that the Earth is the center of the universe. We then discovered that the Earth is not even at the center of the solar system. We then discovered that the solar system is not at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way galaxy — we are about two-thirds of the way out. Then astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that there are billions of galaxies like ours, and so on. And of course, also in terms of time, we now can talk about things that happened a fraction of a second after all space and time of the universe came into being.

Now, the interesting thing is that even though we keep pushing these boundaries and so on, we somehow always find new mysteries. You know, until 1998 we didn’t know that this dark energy exists. And now we know it’s the dominant form of energy of our universe. So somehow, whenever you think that you’ve reached some sort of a — that you cannot go beyond, “OK, this is all that there is to know” and so on, somehow we discover that there is yet something even more mysterious that hides behind all of that. And this is very interesting, because it also plays a very interesting role in terms of the human mind, because, you see, our physical existence has become more and more miniscule in all of this, but our minds somehow manage to get around all of this. You know, all of these things are discoveries that we made. So in that sense, we are very central to all of this. I mean, if we didn’t make these discoveries, we wouldn’t be talking about them.

Tippett: We are very central, even as everything we are discovering makes us smaller and smaller in the grand scheme of things.

Livio: Exactly — physically smaller, physically smaller and smaller, but our minds become more and more important in all of these things because our minds expand at the same rate — well, our knowledge if you like — expands at the same rate that everything I talked about in the universe. I mean, we will discover more and more things about life — about how the brain works, about how life originated — all these things. So this is really very, very fascinating, you know, how we are doing all of this, and just imagine what would happen if or when we discover intelligent life elsewhere. This will be a revolution that humankind has never experienced, actually.

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Tippett: In my most recent conversations with scientists who are working on that field of discovering habitable planets and looking for intelligent life, they all say that it is not a question of if, but of when. And that’s so fascinating to think about, and I’m also just so fascinated by what Mario Livio points out — that even as everything we’re discovering puts us into perspective, makes us smaller and smaller in the grand scheme of things, we are central to it all. Our minds become more important, because our minds expand even as science expands, whether we know it or not.

I spend a fair amount of time being excited about this aspect of the human enterprise and what it is preparing us to learn next that we can’t even imagine. And at the same time, I will confess that I spend time worrying whether these kinds of cosmic ponderings are distractions or mind games — that they actually allow me to take myself to a remove from the real pain and complication and difficulty and tragedy that is also part of the human experience here on Earth.

So I want to share with you a passage that I came across, thinking about this fact that for all of human history, for the whole history of our species, human beings have looked up at the night sky, and it has inspired these questions of who we are and where we came from and whether we’re here for a reason, and now to be the generation that learns quite literally that we are made of stardust. And I happened across this passage in a memoir by Patrisse Cullors, who’s one of the three founders of Black Lives Matter.

Her memoir is called When They Call You a Terrorist. And at the very beginning of her writing of this, she draws on this mobilizing, commonsense hope that come from her learning that the atoms and molecules in our bodies are traceable to the crucibles in the centers of stars that once exploded. Here’s what she writes: “The human beings legislated as not human beings, who watched their names, their goddesses and gods, the arc of their dances and beats of their songs, the majesty of their dreams, their very families snatched up and stolen, disassembled and discarded, and despite this built language and honored God and created movement and upheld love — what could they be but stardust, these people who refused to die, who refused to accept the idea that their lives did not matter, that their children’s lives did not matter.”

The invitation here is to let in a sense of the cosmic mystery and wonder of being alive right now and see how that transforms our sense of our very ordinary selves, how much space this realization opens up for imagination and possibility, and again, real transformation, not mere change.

I want to pair this in the Pause ritual with a spiritual discipline which is known as cultivating “radical amazement.” This is inspired by the great Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who inspired Martin Luther King, Jr. We will learn to cultivate radical amazement, which I think these cosmic discoveries inspire, and practice that in our days.

Bask in this, and I will see you again next time.