Perspective
Many of us – kids certainly, but adults too – spend far too much time looking down; down at our cell phones and our computers, that is. So much of our world is compressed into microchips these days. When was the last time you looked up at the stars, or saw the Milky Way? It’s harder and harder to do, not just because we live in areas where manmade light obscures the heavens, but because our busy lives don’t allow time for it. We’ve relegated the marvels of the universe to standby status.
I’ll never forget the nighttime vista when I visited Yosemite National Park. So many stars overhead in just a small section of sky, embedded in a dark, cottony matrix; so much starlight you almost needed sunscreen. The light shining in my eyes started on its journey thousands or even millions of years ago, speeding unimpeded through a vast expanse of cold and nothingness until it arrived at my retina. There are billions of stars in our galaxy alone, and billions of galaxies. Our tiny planet is just a miniscule blip in the cosmos, an inconsequential mote of sand buried in a Sahara Desert of unimaginable proportions.
Yet we explore. Forty-three years ago, Voyager 1 launched into the solar system, leaving its earthly confines behind. It is currently traveling at 38,000 miles per hour and is over 14 billion miles from earth – the most distant human-made object. It’s also the first manmade object to transit the heliopause – the mysterious boundary that defines the limit of our solar system – and enter the realm of interstellar space. It still communicates with us, its signals taking 20 hours to reach Earth. It will take a few more centuries to reach the inner part of the Oort cloud, the spherical shell of icy bodies centered around our sun that is thought to be the genesis of comets, and another 30,000 years to pass completely through it. How much longer will Voyager continue its lonely journey through the cold blackness of infinity?
As fast as Voyager 1 is traveling, we are moving even faster! The earth and everything on it hurtle through space at about 67,000 miles per hour, circumnavigating the sun. Simultaneously, the earth spins like a top. If you’re standing near the equator, your angular velocity is about 1,000 miles per hour, enabling you and the ground you are standing on to complete one rotation around the earth’s axis in about 24 hours – the definition of our “day.” Yet despite all of these gyrations and speedy excursions, our feet stay firmly planted on the ground, and we sleep soundly in our beds.
But don’t get too comfortable. Our star, Sol, is 4.6 billion years old and just entering middle-age. In another 5 billion years or so, our sun will consume all of its hydrogen fuel and turn into a red giant, expanding in size until the Earth is vaporized. Eventually our swollen sun will explode, sending a stream of elements out into the cosmos, providing the building blocks for new stars and perhaps other life forms. If humankind is very lucky, our descendants will have already navigated across the vastness of the galaxy, finding safe harbor in the security of other solar systems, long before this cosmic cataclysm occurs.
Of course, you and I will be long gone by then, but if we could time travel into the future, would we even recognize ourselves millions of years from now? As evolution marches on, will humans still need toes and fingers? Will we still have hair? Will all races and cultures have homogenized over the millennia to become a species with just one skin tone, just one language? Perhaps we will have retired our outdated flesh and blood bodies, having transferred our consciousnesses into more durable, android vessels.[1] Immortality, anyone?
But migrating to other stars, or predicting long-term changes in the human race, are almost beyond our comprehension – science fiction writers notwithstanding – because we rarely allow ourselves to think on such a grand scale. Our lives are rote and mundane, consumed by the daily grind. We walk the dog, commute to and from work, pick up kids from school and head to the grocery store. If we have some down time, we might treat ourselves to a one-pump vanilla latte with soy milk at the neighborhood coffee shop. Pressing issues at our jobs may occupy our thoughts, while we also have dinner to plan, laundry to do, taxes to file, appointments to make, homework to help with, etc. We may travel to visit friends, and even take a road trip or vacation every so often. But the reality is most of us will never even venture to the other side of our little planet during our short lifetimes. We live our lives in cozy bubbles defined by familiarity and necessity, rarely taking the time to appreciate the wonders, near and far, that abound aloft.
Perhaps that’s just the nature of our human condition. If we let ourselves really embrace our place in the cosmological hierarchy, we would have to acknowledge that by comparison, we are nothing, and nothing we do really matters, in the grand scheme of the universe. That could be a prescription for despair, or an overwhelming sense of emptiness. But could it not also be a blessing in disguise – “permission” of sorts to accept our mortal fate, our lowly status, and not take ourselves too seriously? Maybe it’s okay if your kid gets a B grade, or if junior didn’t make the water polo team. So what if you’re still driving that fifteen-year-old clunker? Maybe you missed out on that dream job or that big promotion. That’s not to say these things don’t matter. They affect our lives and of course are important on some level – but maybe we’ve lost some perspective.
Modern life forces us to reckon with the obstacles constantly being thrown in our path, making wonderment a luxury. We might find joy and keep mysteries in abeyance through spirituality, the transcendental magic of music, or even the smell of a flower. But we should also remember to look up every once in a while, to appreciate the sunbeams slicing through a gap in the clouds, or the ascendant moon reflecting the sun’s light from 93,000,000 miles away. Much farther away, we might see Orion the Hunter and the smudgy nebula in his sword, standing guard over the night sky, or Polaris – the north star used by our ancestors to guide them on their journeys – with a radius 46 times that of our sun, and 2,500 times more luminous. Beyond that, a cold pinprick of light might represent an instant in time just after the universe was born, a glimpse into the ultimate mystery.
The conundrum, of course, is how to balance our terrestrial lives with the incomprehensible wonders and mysteries of the cosmos. Looking away from our computers and our phones – making time to look up every so often – might at least give us some much needed and appreciated perspective. As the late Carl Sagan said: “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
© 2021 L. Wechsler. All rights reserved.
[1] Fans of the original Star Trek series will recognize this concept from the episodes “Return to Tomorrow” and “Spock’s Brain.”