Star Stuff : Where is the Line Drawn of What is Human?

It is truly a funny thing the history of the Universe and, particularly, evolution. The long debate of The Other has its blurry lines of what is human. Seventy years ago Africans or any persons of dark skin were not considered human. Eighty years ago women really didn't count much either. Take the timeline back further to Ancient Greece, in which anyone who was not a Greek was not considered human. But we know that we are all the same. Richard Dawkins once noted that if you were to take two chimpanzees or two different groups in the same geographic region their DNA would be far more different from each other than a white homo sapien sapien's DNA would be from an Australian aborigine. We are identical with very very very minute differences, such as skin tone and hair color. "We are all Africans".

Dawkins also once questioned where the line of what is human drawn? Dawkins gives the example : if you were to bring an Australopithecus to church would they consider him or her to be on par with a homosexual? That is, would they deny this ancestor of ours admittance because he is not our kind of human? But this Australopithecus would certainly be human, and evolution shows this. Even if he or she were admitted, where is line drawn? What about chimps? They are our cousins on the long evolutionary line. They may not be of our lineage, but they are still family! How about an arboreal ape, who are certainly our long extinct ancestors? Do they count? If we jump back really far in time, what about a fish? We descended from fish. How about single cell bacteria? They started the whole process of life. Maybe we could just bring in a big bowl of nucleotides and amino acids which constitute the building blocks of DNA. Is that sacrilegious?

The human line between people of different races, genders, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation would be abolished overnight if aliens from another world come to destroy us. It would probably be something like Ronald Regan's dream of the human race uniting to destroy them. But if we found life on another planet would we call them family as well? One might argue : no, because they're not from earth and most certainly not part of our evolutionary chain. Carl Sagan mentions frequently that everything in the Universe is made up of "star stuff", and he means everything. We too are made up of star stuff, and so too would creatures on another planet. The evolutionary chain goes back much farther than the first accidental accumulation of nucleotides and amino acids, it goes back to about a few billion years after the Big Bang when dust particles started to condense together by gravity and form the first stars. The stars explode and give birth to new stars, and even planets. Stars are what makes elements heavier than hydrogen and helium.

If that is how far the evolutionary chains goes back, then can we call creatures on another planet brothers and sisters? Sure. But let's say humans wanted to start blowing up stars and planets with no life on them, let's say, hypothetically, to extract various materials and minerals. Can we call those stars and planets brothers and sisters? They make the stuffs of life and give it homes. They are made of the same stuffs we are made of. Don't they have a right to exist just like humans?

So where is the line drawn? It is most certainly is blurry line when trying to decide what is human. But in the spirit of Carl Sagan, we are all stars. As Joseph Campbell once said : "We are in the heavens!"

Your baby picture with your cosmic family :