Being a lifelong lay student of astronomy, I tuned into a live-feed YouTube channel to view new pictures from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The images were breathtaking in their clarity, more so than the Hubble Space Telescope, and even much more so than any terrestrial telescope. They punctuated the point of how large our universe actually is.
Even beyond the sheer astonishment of the range of colors depicted in the huge gas clouds in the so-called “empty” space between the stars was the sheer number of stars themselves shown in those depictions. Not to mention the millions of distant galaxies which are now more clearly visible, each containing billions or even trillions of their own stars. Who knows how many planets revolve around them? Uncountable at present.
We normally cannot even conceive of the massiveness of our universe. We mathematically know what the distance of a light-year is, a little over six and a quarter trillion miles, but it’s extremely difficult to even wrap our heads around a single trillion miles, let alone the massiveness of the entire visible universe, estimated to be 13.8 billion light years, give or take. And that’s in any direction that you look.
That’s the currently purported size of the visible universe at the present moment. It seems the astronomers are trying to peer all the way back to the Big Bang, which is beyond our observable event horizon.
Is there a number so high that God cannot even count? Of course not, but it does leave us, mere mortals, scratching our heads. Mostly in amazement.
Before the Big Bang? Hard to tell, because our notion of time is inextricably connected with space, as Einstein proved, and physicists tell us that any idea of time prior to the Big Bang time was moot because there was no space, hence no time. Was the concept of time a constant or is it mutable and fluid like space itself? That is, are we really peering back 13.8 billion of our terrestrial years into universal history?
I have no idea and will leave it up to the cosmologists and cosmogonists to figure that one out.
Still, the concept of sheer vastness and population of matter distributed throughout the known observable universe is so overwhelming, that one cannot help but sense the insignificance of our relatively tiny, but beautiful blue marble we call home.
It all begs the question as to what the point is of us being self-aware on this mote of dust suspended in the All.
It makes you think, to question. Not necessarily to expect all of the answers. But to at least extract enough meaning from our experiences to be able to formulate the better questions.
Let’s start with why are we here in the first place. We’ll start with the search for meaning.
Perhaps the meaning is to be better caretakers of our gorgeous little blue mote of dust. I’m no climate change activist by any stretch of the imagination; Mother Nature has been ebbing and flowing for millennia now, long before we evolved. No matter what, she will have her way. That being said, it’s true that we’ve not been doing her any favors in the industrialized world. I tend to favor the indigenous native culture’s viewpoints of living in harmony with the natural world, rather than the futile attempt to tame Her to our whims. Or perhaps in true scouting fashion, to leave it better than you found it…leave no trace, so the next guy can have an equally rewarding experience.
It seems, though, that societally we’ve forgotten about those things. In our haste to get more and more than the other guy, I constantly marvel at the “why’s,” and frequently question that, because you can’t take it with you, what’s the point of being so gluttonous that we work so hard to get enough money to buy the biggest tombstone in the cemetery.
That doesn’t mean that I think we should just float aimlessly through life, we should strive to be comfortable. But it doesn’t have to be at the expense of others. Common decency has seemed to go by the wayside, sadly.
We’re stuck here for now, so why not make the best of it? Be kind to one another, respect each other, respect our planet. Appreciate beauty. Of the two core emotions, select love, and not transactional love, either. Love, for its own sake.
Now, back to astronomy.
In true Musk-esque fashion, I believe we still need to be captains of our own destinies as a species. This world can disappear in a flash, quite literally. It is our nature to be curious and explore anyway. To understand…to seek meaning.
Some think there’s no point to leaving Earth, because of the horridly inhospitable conditions outside our atmosphere. We can get all dressed up but have no place to go. And even if we had a place to go, using current technology it would take us thousands of years to get there if we could even sustain a trip that long.
Some think that Musk is a fool. I think he’s a visionary. He knows you cannot get from A to Z without going through the other letters first.
It does not obviate the need to at least try. And it’s not a strict dichotomy, either. There’s no reason on this God’s green earth that we cannot tend to our home and reach for the stars simultaneously.
But for civilization to thrive and go beyond our atmosphere we need to be civilized, to begin with.
Technological advancements are growing exponentially, thus we need to develop a means to tame space itself, not be beholden to it. Some folks might already be there, but we en masse haven’t been privy to it yet.
The simple fact is as long as we’re constrained by time and space, we’ll not make progress. The fact is that it has already been done, organically rather than technologically, for thousands of years. By the mystics of old. But since it cannot be quantified as an objective experience, it does not pass the rigors of scientific scrutiny.
This is the crux of the question raised by Carl Sagan in his book Contact and in the subsequent Jodie Foster/Matthew McConaughey film by the same name. Sagan called to the forefront the idea that science and faith are not necessarily mutually exclusive. In the film, Foster represented science and McConaughey represented faith, and the story was a brilliant juxtaposition of the two.
See, this is the issue with the UFO phenomenon. We’re measuring something we cannot explain with our science, because it defies scientific explanation. Ask anyone who’s witnessed it and they’ll tell you “I know what I saw.” You will not be able to dissuade them. Someone who is deeply entrenched within the strict scientific method will dismiss it.
I have heard tales from several folks who’ve had quite unique experiences that they cannot explain, yet have told similar stories. Some are from the paranormal field of the spirit world, and some are from UFO contacts.
They both indicate a dimension outside of our measurable one. One claims beings (human) travel through biological means, and call it the spirit realm. The other faction claims the beings (other nonhuman intelligences), operate within the same dimensional realm that we call the spirit realm, but get there and travel at will via technological means.
Ghostly apparitions occur, many have witnessed them. President Coolidge’s wife, the first lady, as well as Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and President Theodore Roosevelt have all witnessed apparitions of Lincoln in the White House.
Likewise, in my research into the UFO/UAP phenomena I’ve heard hundreds of stories of experiences from folks.
We’ll get there one day, hopefully. Not if we don’t take stock, though, and love one another first. We don’t need the biggest tombstone in the cemetery.