we are made of star stuff —— 那些令人感动的台词

01 Standing Up in the Milky Way

To make this journey, we'll need imagination. But imagination alone is not enough, because the reality of nature is far more wondrous than anything we can imagine. This adventure is made possible by generations of searchers strictly adhering to a simple set of rules, test ideas by experiment and observation, build on those ideas that pass the test, reject the ones that fail, follow the evidence wherever it leads and question everything. Accept these terms, and the cosmos is yours.

You, me, everyone... we are made of star stuff.

All of recorded history occupies only the last 14 seconds, and every person you've ever heard of lived somewhere in there. All those kings and battles, migrations and inventions, wars and loves, everything in the history books happened here, in the last seconds of the Cosmic Calendar.

Who was I back then? I was just a 17-year-old kid from the Bronx with dreams of becoming a scientist, and somehow the world's most famous astronomer found time to invite me to Ithaca, in upstate New York, and spend a Saturday with him. I remember that snowy day like it was yesterday. He met me at the bus stop and showed me his laboratory at Cornell University. Carl reached behind his desk and inscribed this book for me. "For Neil, a future astronomer. Carl." At the end of the day, he drove me back to the bus station. The snow was falling harder. He wrote his phone number on a scrap of paper and he said, "If the bus can't get through, call me and spend the night at my home with my family." I already knew I wanted to become a scientist, but that afternoon, I learned from Carl the kind of person I wanted to become. He reached out to me and to countless others, inspiring so many of us to study, teach and do science.

02 Some of the Things That Molecules Do

The awesome power of evolution transformed the ravenous wolf into the faithful shepherd, who protects the herd and drives the wolf away.

Science works on the frontier between knowledge and ignorance. We're not afraid to admit what we don't know. There's no shame in that. The only shame is to pretend that we have all the answers.

03 When Knowledge Conquered Fear

Using nothing more than Newton's laws of gravitation, we astronomers can confidently predict that several billion years from now, our home galaxy, the Milky Way, will merge with our neighboring galaxy Andromeda. Because the distances between the stars are so great compared to their sizes, few if any stars in either galaxy will actually collide. Any life on the worlds of that far-off future should be safe, but they would be treated to an amazing, billion-year-long light show… a dance of a half a trillion stars… to music first heard on one little world by a man who had but one true friend.

04 A Sky Full of Ghosts

-Father... do you believe in ghosts? -Why, yes, my son! -You, you do? I would not have thought so. -Oh, no, not in the human kind of ghost. No... not at all. But look up, my boy, and see a sky full of them. -The stars, father? I do not follow. -Every star is a sun as big, as bright as our own. Just imagine how far away from us you'd have to move the sun to make it appear as small and faint as a star. The light from the stars travels very fast, faster than anything, but not infinitely fast. It takes time for their light to reach us. For the nearest ones, it takes years. For others, centuries. Some stars are so far away, it takes eons for their light to get to Earth. By the time the light from some stars gets here, they are already dead. For those stars, we see only their ghosts. We see their light, but their bodies perished long, long ago. John, I have seen further back in time than any man before me -- millions of years into the past.

If you somehow survived the perilous journey across the event horizon, you'd be able to look back out and see the entire future history of the universe unfold before your eyes.

He broke through the walls of heaven.

The ones that still shine their light upon us long after they're gone.

05 Hiding in The Light

His spectral lines revealed that the visible cosmos is all made of the same elements. The planets... The stars... The galaxies... We, ourselves, and all of life... The same star stuff.

06 Deeper, Deeper, Deeper Still

Every one of them a unique phrase of life's poetry, written in the atoms by eons of evolution.

07 The Clean Room

Today, scientists sound the alarm on other environmental dangers. Vested interests still hire their own scientists to confuse the issue. But in the end, nature will not be fooled.

08 Sisters of The Sun

I was to blame for not having pressed my point. I had given in to authority when I believed I was right. If you are sure of your facts, you should defend your position.

The words of the powerful may prevail in other spheres of human experience, but in science, the only thing that counts is the evidence and the logic of the argument itself.

Will the beings of a distant future, sailing past this wreck of a star, have any idea of the life and worlds that it once warmed?

When a massive star dies, it blows itself to smithereens. Its substance is propelled across the vastness to be stirred by starlight and gathered up by gravity. Stars to dust and dust to stars. In the cosmos, nothing is wasted.

09 The Lost Worlds of Planet Earth

Our sense of the stability of the Earth is an illusion due to the shortness of our lives.

The dinosaurs never saw that asteroid coming. What's our excuse?

All this beauty will have vanished and the Earth of our moment in time will take its place among the lost worlds. The great internal engine of plate tectonics is indifferent to life, as are the small changes in the Earth's orbit and tilt and the occasional collisions with little worlds on rogue orbits. These processes have no notion of what has been going on over billions of years on our planet's surface. They do not care.

10 The Electric Boy

Science is a harsh mistress.

Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature.

11 The Immortals

Every living thing is a masterpiece, written by nature and edited by evolution.

Space is so vast that it would take billions of years for a rock ejected from the Earth to collide with a planet circling another star.

They will gaze up and strain to find the blue dot in their skies. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of all our potential once was, how perilous our infancy, how humble our beginnings, how many rivers we had to cross... before we found our way.

12 The World Set Free

There are no scientific or technological obstacles to protecting our world and the precious life that it supports. It all depends on what we truly value and if we can summon the will to act.

We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

13 Unafraid of the Dark

It was as if we had been standing on the seashore at night, mistakenly believing that the froth on the waves was all there was to the ocean.

We call it "dark energy," but that name, like "dark matter," is merely a code word for our ignorance. It's okay not to know all the answers. It's better to admit our ignorance than to believe answers that might be wrong. Pretending to know everything closes the door to finding out what's really there.

That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there... on a mote of dust suspended... in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast, cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction... of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet... is a lonely speck in the great, enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the Pale Blue Dot, the only home we've ever known.

Learning the age of the Earth or the distance to the stars or how life evolves-- what difference does that make? Well, part of it depends on how big a universe you're willing to live in. Some of us like it small. That's fine. Understandable. But I like it big. And when I take all of this into my heart and my mind, I'm uplifted by it. And when I have that feeling, I want to know that it's real, that it's not just something happening inside my own head, because it matters what's true, and our imagination is nothing compared with Nature's awesome reality. I want to know what's in those dark places, and what happened before the Big Bang. I want to know what lies beyond the Cosmic Horizon, and how life began. Are there other places in the cosmos where matter and energy have become alive... and aware? I want to know my ancestors-- all of them. I want to be a good, strong link in the chain of generations. I want to protect my children and the children of ages to come. We, who embody the local eyes and ears and thoughts and feelings of the cosmos, we've begun to learn the story of our origins-- star stuff contemplating the evolution of matter, tracing that long path by which it arrived at consciousness. We and the other living things on this planet carry a legacy of cosmic evolution spanning billions of years. If we take that knowledge to heart, if we come to know and love Nature as it really is, then we will surely be remembered by our descendants as good, strong links in the chain of life. And our children will continue this sacred searching, seeing for us as we have seen for those who came before, discovering wonders yet undreamt of... in the cosmos.