Earthlings

In my astronomy class we talked about the lives of stars today. Of course, we humans are so egocentric that any mention of this eternal, impartial cosmic phenomenon contains some sort of discussion about What Will Happen When The Sun Goes Out. God, we’re so egocentric that to even try to talk about stars’ lives without having the Sun discussion seems ridiculous, like there’s an elephant in the room.

But I digress. The term “goes out” is misleading, because actually the sun will probably turn into a red giant star, engulfing the first two planets of our solar system and turning the Earth into a barren, boiling wasteland long before it blows up and the party’s over.

We also learned about the birth of stars today. In the cloud of dust and gas that radiates from a supernova, sometimes a nebula coalesces, and sometimes within that nebula, a speck of dust swirls into the weight of its own gravity and slowly begins to heat – and another star is born. Like a phoenix, a new solar system rises from the ashes of an old one. Just like people, stars are born, stars die.

That idea, it seems, should give me some sort of comfort: the universe is cyclical, a ring of interlinked endings and beginnings, just like human life. But the point of this post is that oddly enough, it doesn’t. Because actually it’s not like human life at all. There are trillions of planets in the endless cold sky, and as far as we know not one of them has even the slightest basic similarity to this balmy cocoon we call Earth. I believe that there must be other life out there, but what if there isn’t? And what if we never find it in time? When I imagine the end of our solar system I can’t help but see it as a death from which there comes no rebirth. Because when you think of all the infinitely perfect chances that have allowed life on Earth to develop as it has – the impossible chance of there being wonderful sweet liquid water here; the insanely timed spark of protobiotic energy that somehow made a single carbon molecule suddenly decide to start flopping around trying to survive – it’s like, how could this ever happen again? How could this ever come again?

This is our one shot. Our solar system could die and reform a million times and none of these million future solar systems, each one lasting for billions of years, would ever support life again. To return to square one, to ground 0, and be faced with the impossible odds that another living planet could ever be created again: the prospect seems hopeless. Because all of those future solar systems would be nothing without life. What value does the emptiness have, if there is no human heart to wonder what lies within it?

During class today I brought my laptop and it proved to be extremely distracting; namely, I spent half the lecture reading the entire Wikipedia page for Iceland. Don’t ask me why. I sort of have a crush on the Icelandic language and the whim developed from there. But the point is, even one tiny treeless island in the frozen northern regions of our world can be the cradle for a complex and beautiful language, and one and a half thousand years of history, and a literature, and unique national sports and singer/songwriters who perform in Reykjavik cafés and a national healthcare system and a mythology full of trolls and elves who lurk beneath the glaciers and dubbed versions of every Disney movie ever made and the list goes on and on.

Why do the happenings of outer space enthrall us so, when an island can be an entire universe? Not that I don’t find astronomy interesting, just… a little bit terrifying. I don’t think I could ever devote my life to astronomy. Because without life, what’s the point? To cast your imagination into a vast and lifeless universe always and forever must bring about an existential crisis sometime.

Sometimes I imagine what went through God’s head while he created the universe. I used to believe in a very friendly, very sentient God when I was a little kid. My muddled adult faith doesn’t revisit that idea so much anymore, but sometimes I still do. I figure that belief in God is a willful submission to faith in something unproven; if you’re going to invest yourself in something that exists only in the imagination, why imagine it half-heartedly?

In this particular Bible of my head, God is very anthropomorphic indeed and specifically, he only has so big of an attention span. When God created the first atom he must have just spent millions of years basking in how brilliant that was, just watching electrons and neutrinos float about in a perfect clockwork like a kid admiring his Lego set, thinking, “Well, there it is, I created the Universe”. But then one day he got bored and suddenly – hey wait! What if there was this thing called gravity, and it allowed all these atoms to collapse in on each other, and when they got all excited and jittery because of that energy – heat! And once a few stars had formed, which must have seemed like the coolest thing ever and impossible to one-up, then God had another idea – what if these atoms can be combined into more than one substance? No, there can’t be more than one element… but what if there could? And then there was, and what a humdinger of an idea!

And thus I imagine how many eons of background must have gone into creating a universe so infinitesmal and detailed that these stars can create 117 elements, and these elements can combine on lovely little beads of fire or water floating through space, and that on these beads, Life can exist. When suddenly one day God got the idea for life, it must have been just the greatest idea ever but also about the umpteenth time he thought he wouldn’t be able to one-up himself.

J.R.R. Tolkien, who was a devout Catholic (ironic considering how often fantasy is black-listed by the conservative Church), believed that Man being created “in God’s own image” is merely a reference to the fact that we alone among all creatures make up and write stories. Just as God created the universe, we create universes of our own, and for that reason we are like God. So I think that’s the basis of how I imagine God: simply a great Cosmic Imagination. My God is only sentient because to imagine the beginnings of the universe, I must also imagine a sentient consciousness who witnesses it.

Sometimes it’s also fun to imagine how God must be different from us. For instance, color. When you project a beautiful HD image of a fiery rainbow nebula onto a projection screen, it’s funny to remember that it has nothing to do with the real thing. As far as I understand it, photography of objects in space is achieved through roundabout methods of capturing light that have little or nothing to do with the human eye. Color means nothing in the lightless vacuum of space.

I wonder what God would think if he paid enough attention to the world to notice these people called astronomers, who look at the beauty of these images and claim to love the cosmos. Hah! How could humans love what we will never understand as God does? A nebula’s heat, its sparkling diffusion of gas, and its inevitable turning gravity like a clock that never stops! And here we humans take it and transpose upon it simple, basically human ideas – ideas that mean nothing to the rest of the universe – in order to call it beautiful. Color. It’s so silly. We do not understand what’s beautiful about a nebula. A nebula is God’s child from another mother than Earth, a distant cousin to us only. Our eyes, our brilliant human eyes, are designed, specialized to see the colors of fjords and glaciers like the ones in Iceland. Not to process something as unreachable as a nebula.

No, I could never be an astronomer. I hope that one day we find life on other planets, but until then, it seems like an uphill battle to devote ourselves to anything other than the beautiful madness of life on our own. I guess can see how to a certain type of well-adjusted, unsentimental person, learning about star cycles and the death of our own Sun can be simple. To endure the emptiness, that’s one thing. But to love the emptiness – that’s something else altogether.