I’ve long held the opinion that one can know everything there is to know about a person by what he Googles in his leisure time.
As for me, my searches usually pertain to religion, quantum mechanics and cosmological queries — and not necessarily in that order.
And while each holds potentially endless hours of Wikipedia articles and StumbleUpon madness, I can’t escape the recurring similarities between the three topics.
Each of these are attempts to reconcile the human condition, which usually comes up as “why are we here?” or “where did we come from?” These questions are, historically and realistically, problematic for a species divided among itself.
But whether trying to discern our origins though religion or science, there remains a timeless and unavoidable truth:
Everything is related and interdependent.
Carl Sagan, the great cosmological prophet of the previous generation, once described our species as merely “star stuff harvesting starlight.”
The basis for his statement begins in the beginning, about 15 billion years ago. It started with a bang, and now roughly 100 billion galaxies exist, each containing 100 billion stars.
That’s an elementary explanation, but it’ll do.
So, if modern cosmology is correct in its foundational theory, everything that was to ever exist was present in some form or another at the very moment our universe came into being.
Compressed into an inexplicably small size with nearly infinite density, this primordial bunch of matter contained all that is, was and will be — including you and me.
It’s a strange concept, but if matter is never created or destroyed, we were all present in the beginning — even if only as dense particles.
Going a bit further, the Buddhist poet Thich Nhat Hanh articulates the notion of codependence in nearly all his books. It goes something like this: Right now you’re looking a piece of paper, but you should see a cloud instead. The paper is dependent on the cloud to exist, and thus a chain of codependence is established linking all things in nature.
In terms of genetics, The Human Genome Project revealed our species shares 98 percent of its DNA with chimpanzees. It also showed that we share 60 percent with a fruit fly and 50 percent with a banana. Perhaps most relevant of all is that all humans are genetically 99.9 percent the same.
In other words, we’re inseparable from one other and our universe.
Things get complicated with this realization.
We are, as a product of our social environment, convinced of our individuality and independence.
We dress, embrace fads and form views based on the erroneous notion that we are singular beings, only related to man and environment as much as we desire to be.
This theory is true for both secular and religious culture.
Religious beliefs, much like political views, are a binder. They
function as common ground and serve as a local unifying tool.
This explains the tendency for our species to form local social groups, while trying to subordinate and conquer alternative groups.
Call it a survival technique, or call it human nature — either way it’s a trait we should have outgrown.
In our current evolutionary state, we’re capable of great things.
As Sagan once put it, “Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive and flourish is owed not just to ourselves but also to that cosmos ancient and vast from which we spring.”
We have the ability to wipe out our species and erase our discovered knowledge — and we’ve tried.
But even with these powers of annihilation, we also have the ability to communicate across the globe in an instant, study the history of our species and look deeper into the cosmos than ever before.
While the answers of our origins may lie somewhere across the universe, let us not forget the miracle of life present within each of us.
Whether its looking up to the cosmos, under a microscope or inward to a spiritual guide, we’re all looking for the same thing.
Andrew Robertson is a 23-year-old English writing and culture senior from Baton Rouge. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_arobertson.
 
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Contact Andrew Robertson at [email protected]