Mr. Tulip has stated that until science and non-religious people come up with a myth or story with the power to counteract the force of religious or supernatural paradigms, they will never make significant progress in that arena. Toward that end, NDT is on to something with The Cosmic Perspective. As a cosmologist, he focuses on astronomical scales. This could be improved by increasing the human connection to this perspective.
If the astronomical scale is too cold and brings feelings of insignificance, NDT also attempts to provide a human connection. Yes, the molecules in our bodies come from star dust. "We do not simply live in this universe. The universe lives within us." But he also mentions "No way around it: some of the water you just drank passed through the kidneys of Socrates, Genghis Khan, and Joan of Arc." This is one aspect of The Cosmic Perspective that should receive more emphasis. Perhaps making the time frame current would help. Consider the water in your morning coffee may have, for example, been
aerated in the waterfalls of Iguazu on the day you were born and may become part of a
cloud floating past Annapurna this spring.
"...I learned in biology class that more bacteria live and work in one centimeter of my colon than the number of people who have ever existed in the world."
NDT is very impressed with numbers. Yes there are more non-human cells in the body than human, but he missed a chance to discuss how the human body includes a
life sustaining symbiosis between human systems and non-human bacteria.
From that day on, I began to think of people not as the masters of space and time but as participants in a great cosmic chain of being, with a direct genetic link across species both living and extinct, extending back nearly four billion years to the earliest single-celled organisms on Earth.
This unbroken tree of life is another aspect of The Cosmic Perspective that should be emphasized. Again, more detail could be added and the timeline could be made more current. Any break in your ancestry - someone killed 100 years ago (or 50,000 years ago) prior to procreation - you would not exist. Similarly, consider the millions of descendents of victims of recent mass shootings who will never exist.
Once thought to be a higher level function, humans and animals are not the only life forms that communicate. Bacteria communicate on a global scale as
we discussed in The Global Brain many years ago. Trees in a forest
communicate through fungi and root systems.
The molecular water cycle, bacterial symbiosis, the unbroken chain of the tree of life, and communication networks all the way down to the bacterial level are some examples of radical interdependence that is rarely perceived in daily life. (Buddhists expand this concept to one of inter-being, where humans are so dependent on deep time and global processes that the concept of a discrete self becomes an illusion, but we don't need to go there. Yet.) These add a warmer human connection to stark considerations of 100 billion galaxies in a 14 billion year old visible universe.
The Cosmic Perspective is not a philosophy. It is a recitation of non-controversial facts providing an expanded perspective on how humans relate to deep space, deep time, and critical interdependence from molecular to cellular to global levels. As Mr. Tulip and NDT imply, if a compelling human-centric myth or story arises from all this, it may inspire improved human thought and behavior. This will take time; changing to a cosmic perspective, let's check progress in say 300 years.