Neil deGrass Tyson's cosmic perspective

From the YouTube page:

Join bestselling author and Director of the Hayden Planetarium, Neil deGrasse Tyson, for a conversation about life on Earth and in the cosmos with 60 Minutes’ Lesley Stahl. How can astrophysics help us understand ourselves and put our lives into perspective? Find out as deGrasse Tyson and Stahl delve into the biggest mysteries — on our own planet, and elsewhere. Recorded January 16, 2024, at The 92nd Street Y, New York.

Starting at 46:18 (from the automatically generated transcript):

scientific discovery does not come from Lone Geniuses
so you will
most of what's really important out there no one will ever make a movie about it
okay
there's a set of four astrophysicists
using recently Declassified nuclear data from the war effort in 1957
deduce the origin of chemical elements in the universe
as coming from stars that that fuse hydrogen to helium to carbon to nitrogen to oxygen in their core
in the crucibles that are their core
and those Stars Then exploded scattering that enrichment across the Galaxy
so that the next generation of stars
have the ingredients that can make planets
and those planets have the ingredients that can make life
it is the discovery that we are not just poetically but literally Stardust
we are not just simply alive in the universe
the universe is alive within us
and that to me is the greatest gift of modern astrophysics to civilization
it borders on the spiritual
so when I go out and look up
I don't think to myself
look how small I am in space and time
yes that's true
but look how big you are
you're made of the ingredients
the same ingredients that made those Stars
that's a sense of meaning and purpose that for me
knows no equal
that is the cosmic result that I live with and celebrate daily

A bit before that Tylon quotes Apollo 14 astronaut, Edgar Mitchell:

You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.”