Pictures in the Sky

Pictures in the Sky

I have wondered about the possibility of life elsewhere. What would it be? Of what would it be made?

If we were randomly inserted into the Cosmos, the chance that we would find ourselves on or near a planet would be less than one in a billion trillion trillion, a one followed by 33 zeroes. In everyday life such odds are called compelling. Worlds are really precious.

Form an intergalactic vantage point we would see, strewn like sea froth on the waves of space, innumerable faint, wispy tendrils of light. These are the galaxies. Some are solitary wanderers; most inhabit communal clusters, huddling together, drifting endlessly in the great cosmic dark. Before us is the Cosmos on the grandest scale we know. We are in the realm of the nebulae, eight billion light-years from Earth, halfway to the edge of the known universe.

Like the Sun and the Moon, stars always rise in the east and set in the west, taking the whole night to cross the sky if they pass overhead. There are different constellations in different seasons. The same constellations always rise at the beginning of autumn, say. It never happens that a new constellation suddenly rises out of the east. There is an order, a predictability, a permanence about the stars. In a way, they are almost comforting.

If the constellations had been named in the 20th century, I suppose we would see bicycles and refrigerators in the sky, rock-and-roll stars and perhaps even mushroom clouds – a new set of human hopes and fears placed among the stars. Image © Elena

Occasionally our ancestors would see a very bright star with a tail, glimpsed for just a moment, hurtling across the sky. They called it a falling star, but it is not a good name: the old stars are still there after the falling star falls. In some seasons there are many falling stars; in others very few. There is a kind of regularity here as well.

There are constellations. They are like pictures in the sky. These pictures are not, of course, really in the night sky; we put them there ourselves. We were hunter folk, and we saw hunters and dogs, bears and young women, all manner of thing of interest to us.

When 17th Century European sailors first saw the southern skies, they put objects of 17th century interest in the heavens: toucans and peacocks, telescopes and microscopes, compasses and the sterns of ships.