Exploring our biggest questions | Dispatches from The Well (Trailer)
Today, I was recording some interviews for this new show that I'm producing about man's search for meaning and purpose, in this possibly infinite, but definitely very vast cosmos.
It sounds to me like a classic midlife crisis.
Yes.
That is probably about right.
We're just one planet around one star in a Universe with hundreds of billions of galaxies.
I wanna sample all of the things and talk to all of the smartest people so I can perhaps get a slightly better sense of what we are here for.
Nobody knows the answers to all these questions, and nobody even knows how to answer them- you have to make it up as you go, and that's what inspired me to be a scientist.
Human beings, wherever they are, in whichever time we live, we have always been fascinated by these big questions: Who am I really? What am I doing here? What's the point of all of this?
It's amazing that everything we see has to work just right for us to be here. We are the debris of stars that lived and died billions of years ago.
We are the force of the Universe so that the universe can understand itself.
Yeah!
Whoa!
Life finds a way to exist in even the most inhospitable environment.
I find it easy to grasp the idea of it all.
Yeah.
Because I think of it a little bit of like a dream.
Meaning is not what you say, it's what you do.
Here I am, I looked like this person who's supposed to have it all together- and I didn't.
What you see, it's what you hear. It's the pains you have, it's the love you have, the fear, the passion- that's all consciousness.
You know, most of this is gonna be garbage. Most of this is gonna be wrong, and that's okay.
There's nothing ultimate about us. We are just in some intermediate step in evolution.
How are we, as human beings, more intellectually, compassionately, culturally evolved? How do we make ourselves both better individually and better as groups and as a species?
Somebody the other day asked what my next big adventure would be. So I said, "Dying." And then you wonder, is there a meaning? Is there a meaning we're here?
Is there?