On Immensity

The night sky is still a great mystery; though not in the sense that it is something beyond the ken of our knowledge or incomprehensibly magical.

Paracelsus gives a very astute simile what a ‘mystery’ is: the mystery of an oak tree, he says for instance, is the acorn. In that humble little acorn that can fit in the palm of a child’s hand lies the potential life of a towering oak. Given the right conditions and stimuli, the acorn can sprout forth into an intricately complex form able to live on for centuries and ultimately multiply into a dense forest. In effect, the seed is no less than a ‘condensed tree’, an entire ecosystem in potentia.

Similarly, the night sky is a granary of worlds: each star is a sun, a seed of potential life, a plain reminder of the vast immensity in which we constantly live.

Near colliding Galaxies NGC2207 and IC2163, seen through the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope

During the daytime it is easy to imagine that we lead a secluded existence; that all there is to see lies here, on this Earth. The blinding majesty of the sun obscures all other celestial bodies from sight. But then comes the night, and initiation into the mystery of immensity.

The stars are there for all to see. One only has to turn their eyes to the heavens and behold them –yet even in our age of science, deluged by information easily accessible to everyone, not all will comprehend their mystery. Even those who do so to an extent will often misconstrue its true meaning.

Modern astronomy rightly tells us that Earth, our precious little home-planet, is but a small world in the vastness of our solar system, insignificant in size next to the giants Jupiter and Saturn in our celestial neighborhood. There are countless solar systems in our Milky Way galaxy, so vast in number that the science of our age can only estimate them in the billions without complete certainty. And beyond our galaxy lie other galaxies of equally unfathomable multitude and immense size which our scientists so nobly strive to map using deep space telescopes and well-educated theoretical paradigms.

Where does all this leave us?

The more these scientific findings are popularized and given to a wider public of laymen, the more the misconception of man’s insignificance in the cosmos grows.

“We are nothing in the greater scale of the universe", say those who take pride in their reasoning skills, “we are less observable than a grain of sand on an endless beach! What matter our deepest sorrows, our brightest achievements? What’s the point of our highest civilization or the repercussions of our lowest depravity?”

Thus, they become nihilists without even realizing it. It is no wonder why antidepressants have grown into such a booming industry worldwide, and particularly in countries where significant advances in the astronomical and cosmological sciences are made.

Of course, by no means is this through any fault of science. The fault lies rather in man’s distorted materialistic thinking and the (sometimes) unconscious deification of scientific discovery by the rashness of the layman.

Science does not have all the answers because it does not ask all the questions. It investigates very specific aspects of reality –and that from an exclusively tangible, measurable and therefore material point of view. Laudable and fascinating as this is, it has its limitations. For instance, there is no mathematical formula or experiment that an accurately observe and measure how much in love someone is with another person. Does this mean we should reject falling in love as quackery? Or should we reduce it to the observable chemical reactions that take place inside the human brain? Wouldn’t life be all the more bleak if instead of ‘I love you’ we passionately proclaimed to one another ‘my neurotransmitters are positively bursting with dopamine and serotonin; let’s engage in the reproductive rituals of our species!’

With that in mind, the mystery of the night sky can reveal to us our true place in the cosmos. Truly, it is an awe-inspiring one in all that profound immensity of suns and planets, moons and comets we have our very own place. We are an integral part of this immense whole and it is a part of us. We partake in the same unity. We are formed by atoms of the same continuum. An inhabited world around Alpha Centauri is equally fascinating and full of wonders as life on Earth.

One may well believe in a Creator God whose providence placed us here, in the midst of this majestic immensity, or in a purely mechanical universe of serial coincidences: in either case there is a reason for our existence –and a crucial one at that.

There is nothing useless or insignificant in Nature. Everything has its purpose and its manifold manifestations even though they may not always be apparent to our rational mind. The extent of our knowledge of the cosmos, after all, is far from being perfect or complete.

Every night the stars shine down upon us all, indiscriminately on the good and the evil alike, conveying the same message of initiation to all: we are a molecule comprising the immensity of all and therefore we are all -a microcosm inside a macrocosm, just as our cellular makeup is the microcosm and our visible bodies are the macrocosm.

We are important. What we do matters. Every single little thing, all that is in our power to do, has to be done. No, we do not make the universe tick; but we are part of what makes the universe tick. Without us (in whatever shape, form or place) it would be like a broken down mechanism missing a tooth in one of its gears.

How do I know that? Because if we weren’t necessary in the first place we wouldn’t be here and you wouldn’t be reading this.