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  “We are stardust.”

  Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Watch a video of Tyson’s visit to UB.

By CHARLOTTE HSU

Published: April 1, 2010

Astrophysicist and TV personality Neil deGrasse Tyson charmed a crowd of thousands last night in Alumni Arena with wicked humor and a talk on the wonders of the universe that ended with this thought, founded on centuries of scientific discovery: “We are stardust.”

Tyson, host of the PBS series NOVA scienceNOW and director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, opened his Distinguished Speakers Series lecture by telling the audience, to waves of laughter, that he would not be discussing such topics as the end of the universe in 2012 or Pluto’s demotion from planet to “dirty iceball.” Instead, over the course of an hour, Tyson shared a list of 10 “out-of-this-world” tidbits of information on space and humanity that left many listeners silent with awe.

He began with item No. 10 on his list: “The universe has many stars.”

“The universe has a boatload of stars,” Tyson said. “How many? Let’s find out. Let’s work our way there, shall we? Let’s count our way there.”

The population of New York City has a population measured by multiples of 1 million—a one followed by six zeroes. The wealth of Bill Gates, the “patron saint of geeks,” is measured by the billion—a one with nine zeroes trailing, Tyson said. People say McDonald’s has sold 100 billion burgers, and if you laid those sandwiches side by side, they would form a ribbon of food that could wrap around the earth 52 times—with enough left over to build a stack that could “reach the moon and back,” Tyson said. That, Tyson said, is about the number of stars in the Milky Way, our galaxy.

He kept going. It would take 32,000 years to count to 1 trillion at the rate of one number per second. One trillion seconds ago, Tyson told the audience, “cavemen were drawing on cave walls.” A quadrillion—a one followed by 15 zeroes—is the number of sounds and words uttered by all humans who have ever lived, he said. The number of stars in the observable universe is measured by the sextillion—a one followed by 21 zeroes.

“So when you have people out there saying the sun is special, and we’re the only one, it’s like, excuse me, have you looked up lately? Can I buy you a telescope? Here’s some Hubble pictures,” Tyson said, displaying images from the Hubble Space Telescope on enormous screens set up next to the stage. “Check out our universe.”

Tyson continued with his list of things to know:

• No. 9: “The universe is bad for your ego.” Long ago, men imagined that Earth was the center of the universe, Tyson said. That was before scientists discovered that our planet was just one of several in a solar system, and that the sun that the planets orbited was just one star in a vast galaxy in a universe with billions of galaxies. Now, Tyson said, “We’ve got top people considering the possibility that we are just one of many universes, and we have got a word ready to invoke: the multiverse.” After viewing a planetarium show, one University of Pennsylvania researcher in social and cultural psychology wrote to Tyson, saying, “It was the most dramatic elicitor of feelings of smallness and insignificance that I have yet encountered.”

• No. 8: “The universe is like a time machine.” Because it takes time for light to travel, looking at faraway objects is like looking back into time. “We can look out to the signature of the big bang itself,” Tyson said. “That’s how we know about the history of the universe. We don’t just make this stuff up. We see it happen.”

• No. 7: “The universe is big, and molecules are small.” A cup of water holds more molecules than the number of cups of water in all the world’s oceans, Tyson told listeners. Every cup of water a person drinks contains molecules that have passed through the kidneys of Genghis Khan, Joan of Arc, Abraham Lincoln, Beethoven and Socrates. “We have a connectivity to each other that we don’t often reflect upon, and it happens because of how small molecules are,” Tyson said.

• No. 6: “The universe wants to kill you.” A butt-naked human being would be dead in seconds almost anywhere in the universe and on earth, Tyson said. If weather, predators or natural disasters do not take your life, something like a killer asteroid could. Not long ago, scientists raised concerns that one asteroid in particular—“Apophis,” named after the Egyptian god of darkness—could strike Earth this century, as many hurtling through space have in the past. “There’s Apophis,” Tyson said, showing the audience a picture of the asteroid. “We do have plans, unfunded, to deflect it. Did I say unfunded? Unfunded plans to deflect it.”

• No. 5: “Earth might not be the origin of life.” Mars had running water on its surface before Earth, Tyson said, “so it’s tantalizing to think maybe Mars had life before Earth…That life, if it got stuck in the nooks and crannies of rocks that got flung into space, you would have microbial stowaways moving through space.” It is possible, Tyson said, that life on Mars spawned life on Earth, making us all Martian descendants.

• No. 4: “Carbon is the foundation for life.” Carbon is the most “chemically fertile” element on the periodic table, capable of making the most kinds of molecules, Tyson said. And because “biology is the most complex chemistry we know,” it makes sense that carbon is the basis of life.

• No. 3: “Life is of the universe.” The most abundant elements in the human body are, in order, hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen. That list matches precisely with the list, in order of abundance, of chemically active elements in the universe.

• No. 2: “The universe is of life.” High-mass stars that “explode their guts across the galaxy” scatter, across the universe, the elements from which people and planets are made, Tyson said. These bursting stellar bodies are called “supernovae,” and “they are so bright that we can see them halfway across the galaxy,” he said.

Which brings us back to the beginning of this story, to Tyson’s last and No. 1 thought: “We are stardust.”

“The ingredients of the universe are traceable to us,” he told the audience. “The ingredients are traceable to the universe. And I’m left, then, with the most profound thought…the most profound gift to civilization that modern astrophysics has to offer. And that is the notion that, not only are we in this universe, the universe is in us.”