More Than a Rock

53Big Thoughts

Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.

—Walt Whitman

We live in momentous times, though I don’t think that too many people ponder this fact in the course of daily life, which is a shame. We are in the midst of mass extinction of life on planet Earth, and by now have irrefutable evidence that many of the things we take for granted as characteristic of human experience are not sustainable for much longer, and will at some point in the foreseeable future need to change if we, and many other species, are to persist. In such times, it is hard for anyone familiar with scientific evidence to find peace of mind without investment of conscious intellectual effort, although I don’t think too many people try, which ...