Embracing Our Cosmic Insignificance

Embracing Our Cosmic Insignificance 

Some find life too short because spanning an average of 67 years it seems too short to have any meaning. Other say it is too long and intentionally shorten their life story, but one thing is certain about living it eventually ends. The story of every fruit fly, king, janitor, beggar, computer guru, politician and so on doesn’t have a happy ending. We all perish and we perish only once.

This insignificance of life has bothered many of us, as our single and short life implies that it can be taken lightly. However, the fact that we are given just one life – no second chances, no secret shortcuts to endless options, no dress rehearsals – makes the lightness unbearable.

This lightness of being from the cosmic point of view proves to be liberating and a little less unbearable because it reminds us how fortunate we are for our existence. So let’s take several steps back and examine our current position. In doing so, we find what is perhaps best said by Daniel Dennett:

Every living thing is, from the cosmic perspective, incredibly lucky simply to be alive. Most, 90 percent and more, of all the organisms that have ever lived have died without viable offspring, but not a single one of your ancestors, going back to the dawn of life on Earth, suffered that normal misfortune.

You spring from an unbroken line of winners going back millions of generations, and those winners were, in every generation, the luckiest of the lucky, one out of a thousand or even a million. So however unlucky you may be on some occasion today, your presence on the planet testifies to the role luck has played in your past.

Carl Sagan also offers this cosmic perspective which helps us view our beloved Earth a “pale blue dot”. As soon as we adapt this vision, patriotism, nationalism and other dangerous words, which usually end in –ism or –ion, suddenly lose their importance. Instead, according to Carl Sagan, it highlights the importance of dealing more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the only home we’ve ever known.

Nei Degrasse Tyson, the Carl Sagan of today shares the same opinion. He argues that visiting Sagan’s cosmic vantage points renders the constant conflicts in the name of boundaries or religion immature, silly and egoistic. This is similar to an adult (a word to which we generously associate the labels matured and grown-up) who treats a child’s complaints about broken toys and bruised knees as small problems (however these accidents are all traumatic experience to a kid).

Astronomy is unfairly and unfortunately considered “useless” compared to other sciences. However it has the power to reform our character and behaviour towards each other and the world we live in. It has the power to expand our view.

Astronomy lowers the omnipresent egoistic sentiments related to social status, culture, race, language. Lessons learnt through astronomy are capable of maturing up the mindset of any individual, family, institution, corporation and country.

Anyone who relishes the cosmic outlook will have qualities that will make him or her a better policy maker.

Thus, a crash course in astronomy is needed at every level. The situation should inspire us to spend less time on our cell phones and social media sites. It should broaden our minds, reduce unattractive competitiveness over journal names with the number of pages one has published in comparison with his or her neighbor. As researchers we should develop our attitudes towards learning.

As human beings, we should humble us down so that we can live up to our scientific name – homo sapiens (wise man).

We don’t suggest replacing the Bible in the motel rooms with a picture of the universe and an arrow showing where we are. We think this picture should complete the offer. Thus we could truly develop this fraction of an iota of a crumb of a grain of the universe which we call home.

Steve Jobs, an undeniable innovative man, said once (and we see here how our mortality influences our thoughts): “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way that I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose”. Yes, Steve Jobs used his cosmic lessons selectively, but these words illustrate the fact that our unbearably light life can be full of lights for everyone.

Cosmic Insignificance. “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.” (William Shakespeare, King Lear). Illustration by Elena.

Termites

Termites

I don’t suppose you know much about termites, so I’ll remind you of the salient facts. They are among the most highly evolved of the social insects, and live in vast colonies throughout the tropics. They can’t stand cold weather, nor, oddly enough, can they endure direct sunlight. When they have to get from one place to another, they construct little covered roadways.

The termites seem to have some unknown and almost instantaneous means of communication, and though the individual termites are pretty helpless and dumb, a whole colony behaves like an intelligent animal.

Some writers have drawn comparisons between a termitary and a human body, which is also composed of individual living cells making up an entity much higher than the basic units.

These creatures are often called “white ants”, but that’s a completely incorrect name as they aren’t ants at all but quite a different species of insect.

Excuse this little lecture, but I get quite enthusiastic about termites myself. Did you know, for example, that they not only cultivate gardens but also keep cows – insect cows, of course – and milk the, Yes, the termites are sophisticated little devils, even though they do it all by instinct (supposedly).

To communicate with termites, we must do for them what von Frische had done with bees – he’d learned their language. But the language of the termites is much more complex than the system of communication that bees use, which as you probably know, is based on dancing.

Our technology enables us to listen to the termites talking among each other, but also permit us to speak to them. Actually that’s not as fantastic as it sounds, if you we use the word “speak” in its widest sense. We speak to a good many animals – not always with our voices, by any means. When you throw a stick for your dog and expect him to run and fetch it, that’s a form of speech - sign language. Thus we could work out some kind of code which the termites understand, though how efficient it will be at communicating ideas I didn’t know…

Have you ever wondered who will take over when we, the Humans, are finished? Remember that the termites, as individuals, have virtually no intelligence. But their colony as a whole is a very high type of organisms – and an immortal one, barring accidents. Their progress froze in its present instinctive pattern millions of years before Man was born, and by itself it can never escape from its present sterile perfection. It has reached a dead-end – because the termites have no tools, no effective way of controlling nature. But you cannot judge the termitary by human standards. What we can hope to do is to jolt its rigid, frozen culture – to knock it out of the groove in which it has stuck for so many millions of years. I will give it tools and new techniques, and before the next generation comes we’ll to see the termites beginning to invent things for themselves.

I do not believe that Man will survive, yet I hope some of the things he has discovered, will be preserved by the next tenants of the Earth. If the Man is to be a dead-end, another race should be given a helping hand. A supertermite, if it ever evolves, will have to remain for millions of years and reach a very high level of attainment.

Besides, Man has no rival on this planet and thus it may do him good to have one. It may be the Mankind’s salvation. (Not that I’m hostile to mankind. In fact, I’m sorry for it. I simply believe that humanity had shot its bolt, and I wish to save something from the wreckage. Perhaps there may be some kind of mutual understanding, since two cultures so utterly dissimilar as Man and Termite need have no cause for military conflict. But I couldn’t really believe this, and if a contest comes, I’m not certain who will win. For what use would man’s weapons be against an intelligent enemy who could lay waste all the wheat fields and all the rice crops in the world?

I think we should let the termites have their chance. I don’t see how they could make a worse job of it than we’ve done. Illustration : Megan Jorgensen.

Neutron Star

Neutron Star

Neutron star matter weighs about the same as an ordinary mountain per teaspoonful – so much that if you had a piece of neutron star and let it go (hum… you could hardly do otherwise), it might pass effortlessly through the Earth like a falling stone through air, carving a hole for itself completely through our planet and emerging out the other side – perhaps in China.

If a peace of neutron star matter were dropped from nearby space, with the Earth rotating beneath it as it fell, it would plunge repeatedly through, punching hundreds of thousands of holes before friction with the interior of our planet stopped the motion.

Let’s imagine: people there might be out for a stroll, minding their own business, when a tiny lump of neutron star plummets out of the ground, hovers for a moment, and then returns beneath the Earth, providing at least a diversion from the routine of the day.

Before it comes to rest at the center of the Earth, the inside of our planet might look briefly like a Swiss cheese until the subterranean flow of rock and metal healed the wounds.

Large lumps of neutron star matter are unknown on Earth. But small lumps are everywhere. The awesome power of the neutron star is lurking in the nucleus of every atom, hidden in every teacup and dormouse, every breath of air, every apple pie. The neutron star teaches us respect for the commonplace.

A star like the Sun will end its days, as we know, as a red giant and then a white dwarf. A collapsing star twice as massive as the Sun will become a supernova and then a neutron star. But a massive star, left, after its supernova phase, with, say, five times the Sun’s mass, has an even more remarkable fate reserved for it – its gravity will turn it into a black hole.

Thermonuclear reactions in the solar interior support the outer layers of the Sun and postpone for billions of years a catastrophic gravitational collapse.

For white dwarfs, the pressure of the electrons, stripped from their nuclei, holds the star up. For neutron stars, the pressure of the neutrons staves off gravity. But for an elderly star left after supernova explosions and other impetuosities with more than several times the Sun’s mass, there are no forces known that can prevent collapse.

The star shrinks incredibly, spins, reddens and disappears. A massive star will shrink until it is the size of a city, the crushing gravity acts irrevocably, and the star slips through a self-generated crack in the space-time continuum and vanishes from our universe.

What if every neutron star is an intelligent being? Image : © Megan Jorgensen.

On the New Stars

On the New Stars

Johannes Kepler published in 1606 a book called De stele Nova, “On the New Star”, in which he wonders if a supernova is the result of some random concatenation of atoms in the heavens. He presents what he says is “… not my own opinion, but my wife’s: Yesterday, when weary with writing, I was called to supper, and a salad I had asked for was set before me. “It seems then, “I said, “if pewter dishes, leaves of lettuce, grains of salt, drops of water, vinegar, oil and slices of eggs had been flying about in the air for all eternity, it might at last happen by chance that there would come a salad”. “Yes”, responded my lovely, “but not so nice as this one of mine”.

No supernova explosions have been observed in Milky Way Galaxy since the invention of the telescope. But supernovae are routinely observed in other galaxies.

David Helfand and Knox Long in the December 6, 1979, issue of the British journal Nature say (and we quote): “On 5 March, 1979, an extremely intense burst of hard X-rays and gamma rays was recorded by the nine interplanetary spacecraft of the burst sensor network, and localized by time-of-flight determinations to a position coincident with the supernova remnant N49 in the Large Magellanic Cloud” (the Large Magellanic Cloud, so called because the first inhabitant of the Northern Hemisphere to notice it was Magellan, is a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, 180,000 light-years distant. There is also, as you might expect, a Small Magellanic Cloud).

However, in the same issue of Nature, E. P. Mazets and colleagues of the Ioffe Institute, Leningrad – who observed this source with the gamma-ray burst detector aboard the Venera 11 and 12 spacecraft on their way to land on Venus – argue that what is being seen is a flaring pulsar only a few hundred light-years away.

David Helfand and Knox Long do not insist that the gamma-ray outburst is associated with the supernova remnant. In fact, they charitably considered many alternatives, including the surprising possibility that the source lay within the solar system: Perhaps it is the exhaust of an alien star-ship on its long voyage home!

Anyway a rousing of the stellar fires in “supernova remnant N49” is fact, as simple as we are sure there are such things as supernovae.

I'm quite sure that all the supernovae are exhausts many alien star-ships on its long voyage home. Image: © Megan Jorgensen.

Infinity

Infinity

When we talk about infinity, we are talking about a quantity greater than any number, no matter how large.

Just try to stand between two mirrors and you’ll see a large number of images of yourself, each the reflection of another. Well, you cannot see an infinity of images because the mirrors are not perfectly aligned and they are not perfectly flat. Besides light does not travel infinitely fast, and you are in the way. But if all the conditions are in place, your cat would be a perfect expression of Infinity.

If you consider your cat down beyond a single atom, you confront an infinity of the Very Very Large. And these infinities represent an unending regress that goes on not just Very Very Far, but Forever.

So what about the lives of the stars? The same is true for them, as hydrogen fusion cannot continue forever: in any given star, there is only so much hydrogen fuel in its hot interior. The fate of a star, the end of its life cycle, depends very much on its initial mass.

Billions of years from now, there will be a last perfect day in our Universe. This evolution is inexorable. Eventually the stars will vanish, the life will die and catastrophe of the most immense proportions imaginable will overtake the universe. And no God will be able to save it from its fate.

I have a terrible need… shall I say the word?… of religion. Then I go out at night and paint the stars (Vincent van Gogh). Image: © Megan Jorgensen.