About a week ago, my four-year-old cousin, Angel, was looking at the world map I have up in my room. When she discovered the tininess of Singapore compared to Russia, she was rather shocked.
“This must mean Russia is super big and we are tiny!” She exclaimed.
I explained to her that we are small but Singapore is a strong nation with capable people. I even told her that Earth is really small compared to other planets. However my explanation made her young mind even more curious.
“What happens when we have too many people? Are there other places we can move to?” Angel asked.
“Well, maybe. It’s probably too far to be getting there. It’s a big place out there” I replied, remembering that distances in space are measured in lights years for a reason. Everything is too far.
“So, we are really small?” She asked as she frowned.
I pondered over her question, “So, we are really small?” and I remembered the well-known Carl Sagan’s signature words “billions and billons”. Was this astronomer referring to the number of people? No. He was referring to the number of galaxies. Yes, galaxies. Galaxies are like fluids made of billions of suns all bound together by gravity with several planets orbiting around each of them. That makes more billions and billions of planets out there alone in just one galaxy. Then it hit me, not only are we small, we are insignificant as well.
Being a space enthusiast that I am, I thought of our place in the Milky Way galaxy and it’s place. The universe consists of colonies of great, lumbering, slowly spinning things. There are unstructured blobs, irregular galaxies, globular or elliptical galaxies and the graceful spiral galaxies born in giant or dwarf size. Here we are tucked away in a dark corner in the Milky Way where we are, in fact, hardly making a mark on the fabric of the cosmos. If a huge explosion were to happen and wipe away our existence, the cosmos would still be indifferent to us.
Those aren’t really ego-supporting facts, I know. We humans like to think that we are important, that we have a privileged position in the universe. Sadly the myth that stars and planets revolve around us has already been debunked centuries ago. We have been investigating the galaxies for less than a century; these studies extend our understanding to the farthest reaches of the universe, or the observable universe for now. In the past, we used to be bounded only by the Earth, the ocean, the sky and the moon. But today we have technology that help us see so much wonder there is to see up there.
Viewing ourselves as ‘small’ can be a rather put-down description, destabilising our self-image. After much dwelling and sky gazing, I realized that is not the right way to see things.
Sometimes, when I feel overwhelmed with the things going on in my life, it is immensely satisfying to look up at the sky. I would just take five or ten minutes at night to just gaze at the endless dark expanse stretching in every direction. I feel large and connected to something much bigger than life.
It does not matter how you interpret the cosmos’s beauty, whether you look at it with a God-dimension or simply just science and logic. Either way, you will still view the cosmos on the grandest of scales. Some may say that such kinship with the cosmos resonates with new age thinking, and there is nothing wrong about that. It’s all about what we find. If what we find resonates with whomever, go ahead and just take it. Just thinking about the enormity and beauty of our universe excites me. It makes me want to grab people in the streets and say ‘Do you know how beautiful things are out there?!”
As Carl Sagan said, “We are made of star stuff”, which is true as numerous studies by NASA has shown that the molecules in our bodies are traceable to the crucibles that were once the centers of high mass stars that exploded their chemically rich guts into the galaxy, enriching pristine gas clouds with the chemistry of life. That makes me smile and I actually feel quite large at the end of that. It’s not that we are better than the universe; we are part of the universe.
Our lives are small and fleeting in the scheme of things, and yet we get caught up in our events, seeing them as eternal and overwhelming. If we could only step back and see the bigger picture and thinking of our place in the cosmos. Alpha Centauri, the brightest star we know, wouldn’t care about your grades or how much money you have. Just thinking about bigger things out there, makes our problems seem insignificant and mindless.
In the recent hype about the newly found Earth-like planet, Kepler 22-b, which was announced on December 11, 2011. Kepler 22-b was big enough of a discovery that it was everywhere on the Internet. With our population crisis going on, we could use a vacant planet anytime. I truly hope that our species will go places and travel other worlds but sadly it seems that dream has died. If you consider that the last time that man travelled up to the moon was four decades ago, is dream for humans to reach Kepler 22-b, a planet 600 light years away, too out of this world? (pun intended).
But then again, I ask myself, in this world driven by hatred and greed where we cannot even put our own planetary home in order, are we ready to venture out into space? Are we ready to actually go around touching the beauty that we could only admire? I feel that we are still too vulnerable to be conquering planets; I fear we might just wreck it as we did to our Mother Earth.
However, I hope that generations and necessity will change humans because we are an adaptable species. By the time we ready, we would have changed. It will not be us who will go and travel to the ultimate frontier or Kepler 22-b. It will a specie very like us, our remote descendants, who are more confident, far seeing, capable and prudent, carrying more of our strengths and less of our weaknesses. What new wonders are there to be discovered in such vast space?
I would probably not live to the time where space exploration becomes the norm. Nevertheless, I’m pretty grateful to be basking in the majesty of the cosmos.
I replied to Angel, “We are much bigger, we are part of the universe”.
