Pondering Over the Punchbowl
Love Letters from Earth.

Dear Christy,

It's a beautiful night, this late summer night. The air is cool and dry, the wind calm, the sky impossibly clear. This is the sort of night on which a step outside, a heavenward glance, yields both delight and wonder. Few are the times in my life when the light from so many stars has reached my eyes. The entire sky seems aflame, and the cold, intervening blackness of space incinerated. Front and center on this mystical stage are a million million million suns - some like our own, most very different. And directly overhead, the usually tell-tale, tonight palpably present, phosphorescent band of ghostly light - the homefires burning in a banded land we barely know: Our own Milky Way galaxy.

The light also haunts. "The more we learn, the less we know" is a familiar adage, but never has it been more true than right now. Always now. For never have we known less of our universe - and in turn, our galaxy, our solar system, planet earth, the natural world, even our own flesh and blood - everything in everything's boundless totality - than is true of human knowledge today, at this moment. Such is the true nature of learning, the instinctual human act of questioning and discovery. And we are, by way of reference, a learned species, but the miniscule snapshot of wisdom's visage that I have been shown does little to comfort me, and much to rile the emotions of wonder, comprised as it is of fear in equal measure to hope, uncertainty in fair portion with trust. Tonight's sky delights, but as well it seems to weigh upon me, to thrust itself heavily earthward, through my upturned eyes and into my mind and my very soul, wherein it proceeds to scream word of its horrible vastness, its cruel disconcern for me or the values and parameters that make me human, that make life understandable, agreeable, and indeed, itself more human. More like us.

I am reading Stephen Hawking's classic treatise, "A Brief History of Time." If ever there were a science text written for the scientifically challenged, this is it. The magnum opus. Rigorous in its precision, challenging for its content - make no mistake - but vastly more understandable and comprehensive than anything I've chanced before to read on these topics. Hawking discusses Einstein and his famous equation, E=MC(2) - energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. Doesn't just discuss it - makes it understandable. I can now say that I actually get Einstein. This isn't just irrelevant quackery, but is truly profound beyond words. Quantum mechanics - what in the world is it? We've all heard of the concept. Hawking somehow manages to define and describe it in clear, engaging language, and I find myself turning the pages with surprising eagerness. Black holes, worm holes, the curvature of space-time, red dwarfs, brown dwarfs, gravity and anti-gravity, the Big Bang, the Big Crunch, and on and on. It's all here in this bestselling volume.

The most basic of universal truths serve to astound. For one, the universe itself is large beyond comprehension. Perhaps it's infinite, or maybe it's a sphere of nearly infinite proportions, that if one could travel far enough in any given direction one would eventually return to the starting point, just as on a finite sphere like Earth. Whichever the case, our powers of perception here are limited as always by our technology - the power and clarity of our telescopes. And may science and technology never cease in their paired quest to gather more knowledge. (That is, the quest and fate of knowing ever less; we must be willing to continue humbling ourselves until we are certain of knowing nothing at all.)

The distance between the sun and earth is obviously vast by human standards. However, this distance is humbled by the implied vastness of the universe on whole. Our sun is not the central, anchoring, seemingly chosen star of the universe, as was commonly believed just a short time ago. Our galaxy the Milky Way contains many, many suns, and ours with no significant position within it. We are one, an ordinary, among the many. (Whether or not this is true of life itself we have yet to learn.) How many? The answer is dumbfounding: One hundred billion! Read that again: 100,000,000,000. This is the approximate number of stars in our spiral galaxy, that ancient sliver of bisected light we see stretching in two dimensions across the clear night sky. One hundred billion is one million multiplied one hundred thousand times. How long does light require to travel across a space big enough to hold all of these suns? . . . Light - the fastest thing in the universe, traveling 186 thousand miles each and every second . . . Within the space of a human lifetime, perhaps? Or maybe a few hundred years?

The speed of light, mind you, is also our speed of discovery, for we can never know the current state of anything, regardless of its distance, but only what its light reveals of its past at the moment this light finally reaches our eyes. If a star at the opposite end of our galaxy suddenly explodes, we can't know about it until the light from that event reaches earth. In the meantime, that star appears to keep shining in our night sky. And its light really is there, still existing from our perspective, and is all we've ever had of that impossibly distant, fatal star, or ever will. The Milky Way on whole is no different. Poetically speaking, galaxies speak, touch, and know of themselves by way of light, perhaps in their way as neurons and nerve impulses allow us to know tangibly of Self. Touch your hand to a flame, and very soon you feel pain. But drop a rock on your foot, and you have to wait a second or two. The physical act precedes the brain's awareness of it by a factor of its distance from the brain. Similarly, one side of the Milky Way cannot have awareness of the opposite side of the Milky Way, nor have any influence on it, until light finally gets there . . . not a lifetime later, nor a millenium, but 100 million years later. (186,000 miles travelled every second for 100 million years!) This is how vast our Milky Way galaxy is. So vast that light, having left a star in a distant galactic corner at the time when dinosaurs still roamed the earth, has only just now reached the midpoint of its journey across it.

But maybe this is all comprehensible on some level. At least we can look up and behold our galaxy. We know it's real, even if we'll never experience anything more of it than the light that reaches our eyes, upwards of 100 million years after emmission from each of those 100 billion stars. Better to save our quizzical looks and our profound mental and emotional befuddlement for the big picture. The giant's eye view of space. For our galaxy is not alone. Far from it. Removed from our tempest-like cluster of suns, separated by great quantities of absolutely nothing - space at its most awe inspiring and fear-inducing - other galaxies spiral in orbit about themselves, one here, one there. How many altogether? Science doesn't know. Again, we are limited by our powers of observation, by the strength of our sky-peering scopes. But so far we have detected about 100 billion. One hundred billion galaxies, each comprised of perhaps 100 billion stars. (That is, 100 billion solar systems, untold numbers of planets, and just possibly, somewhere, life.) Some claim these galaxies are all moving away from one another, that our universe is expanding. If so, what might it be expanding into? Is space itself like an accordion that stretches, perhaps endlessly, to contain the volume of stuff that desires to fill its voids? Or, perhaps space truly is infinite and always has been. It could well be that the "stuff" of our universe - those twinkling stars, one for every grain of sand on every earthly ocean's shore - is in actual fact a comically puny lot by universal standards; the blackness of space has room for all of it and then some.

And yet here I am, finite, insignificant by such an outsized standard, craning up in wonder at it all, and sensing that my time is short. My hand is powerless to control the universe in any measurable way, but seems attached to my arm primarily for the purpose of scratching my silly head. Or perhaps more comforting would be to run away, back inside to the artificial light of Edison, and find a warm body to hug and hold and never let go for fear of the big bad universe coming to get me. Still I am drawn to the night sky, nightmares be damned. Perhaps it's pheromones to blame: the universe's seductive signal reaching me at the speed of light, and I am immolated like the uncautious moth by a camper's heartening blaze.

Through the semi-darkness of this starry eve I see that others have come for the show, and I am not alone. On the railing of our deck, the cat crouches furtively, its eyes glowing, fixated upon me. And in the bordering woods, several crickets sing their late summer song, somber it seems to me. Would they but know how brief their time on this earth, they might sing no more but give up the ghost on the spot, succumbing to despair at the triviality of their very being. The poor cat's prospects are not much better - thirteen fleeting years in which to live those nine little lives.

And what of me? How much longer do I have? Where did the time go, and what did it mean? What does it mean, and what will it? I wish, dear Christy, that you were here with me now. Perhaps you could shed some light on my dilemma. Maybe we could share some human warmth in this cold, vast, fantasmagorical portion of space-time, as the light of our mystery suns presides above our weary heads. We have each other for now, and may we not waste a moment! We have life, but more than this, we alone have awareness. We have human knowledge, and the more I learn the more I know that you matter more to me than all the stars combined.

A star explodes in some far-away galaxy, and the crickets just keep on chirping...