OCTOBER 12, 2021 – Late yesterday I drove from the Red Cabin back to home in the cities. Full darkness descended as I entered the final leg of my journey—a busy highway linking suburbs of the eastern half of the Twin Cities. Swept into frenetic traffic, I stole a skyward glance and caught a glimpse of moon and Mercury. They seemed ignored, forgotten, irrelevant above humanity’s mighty rush. What a contrast, I thought, from their center-stage performance two evenings ago above the tranquil woods and water surrounding the Red Cabin. (See 10/10 post)
The hell-bent driver behind me rode my bumper as I tried not to tail-gate the too-slow vehicle ahead of me. Such is life in the fast lane, I thought. Upon entering a saner zone—and finding room in the right lane beyond a busy interchange, I thought about the astronomy book at the Red Cabin. It’s a wonderfully illustrated volume serving a feast of information in small portions, easy for a human to remember if not to grasp fully in the infinite, eternal scheme of things. How is it that for most of us, our frenetic but tiny minds can’t see or care about the big picture?
Then I wondered: How would our perspective change if instead of residing in a galaxy of 100 thousand million stars among the Local Group (54 galaxies), which lies within the Virgo Supercluster (I’m skipping a few intervening categories), which, in turn, is just one of 10 million superclusters in the observable universe, the sole occupants of the universe were . . . earth, our moon, our sun, its other seven planets, a comet or two, and a few thousand asteroids posing as stars? Pretending, for a moment, that such a stripped-down universe had no effect on gravitational forces, would we think differently about life and our place in space?
What would religionists say? I pondered, then concluded that they’d say nothing different. Theologians can spin it either way. If we were truly “it,” they’d say, “See how special we are? Among eight planets, one moon, one sun, the comet or two, and the bunch of space rocks, only on God’s green-blue earth does life exist.” With the way things are, the same high priests can say, “See how special we are? Billions upon billions of objects across infinite space, and only on God’s green-earth does life exist [as far as we know].”
In either case, we humans would go about our frenetic business. We’d still tail-gate to reach our immediate destinations 10 seconds sooner. We’d still slow down in the fast lane long enough to read a text about who said what to whom and “thumb” a text in reply. We’d still not notice whether the points of celestial light were a finite number of asteroids or an infinitesimal portion of nuclear fusion within an infinite cosmos.
A few miles later, my back-to-earth re-entry was complete, as I maneuvered slowly around the alley-side refuse and recycling containers and into our driveway.
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
