- Final Thoughts -

We each get to look out at the great big world through the tiny little window of our own experience.  We can easily discern that there is quite a bit more to the world than what is immediately visible through that window, and understandably want some kind of explanation for all this…whatever this is.  There sure is a lot of it.  We often feel, staring out at it all through our little windows, that we should try to figure out what’s going here. Where did it all come from, where is it all going, and what’s it all for anyway?  These sound like religious questions.  And if you are prepared to accept the word of desert hermits who died more than 2000 years ago, they are religious questions - which have been fully and completely answered for your ontological convenience.  But what do you do if the answers provided for your edification do not satisfactorily describe the view you see from your particular window? 

It is now permissible for us to contemplate the views that are unique to each and every one of us, and try to understand and explain these personal experiences of the world in language that is meaningful and useful to us as individuals.  And many of us are quite willing to then share these new descriptions with legions of other people who may be having some difficulty describing or understanding their own view.  But this can be an uncomfortable exercise: if I tell you about my particular view, you will quite likely learn that, in addition to a different perspective, my window also has a lot of peculiar dirt on the inside surface - dirt whose existence I might have preferred to keep private (that strange and occluding impurity did, after all, come from me).  If I tell you what my experience of the world has lead me to believe about it, you will learn everything that is important about me.  I have thus lost all covering and appear naked before you.  My secrets and insecurities are exposed for your intrusive scrutiny; my liabilities and weaknesses are defenseless under the blade of your ridicule and scorn.  When we endeavor to sincerely describe how the world seems to us, we are actually saying, with unfettered honesty, “These are my most energizing desires and these are my most paralyzing fears.”  Most people are not comfortable with such vulnerable exposure; the unspoken motives of others are always suspect and it is unwise to blithely stick one’s head into an unfamiliar dragon’s jaws.  No wonder, then, that most of us simply accept the old books, comfortably inconspicuous with our intimate desires and fears safely covered by the one-size-fits-all uniforms of a communal belief.  Once you have accepted the anceint mark and colors of the local tribe, however, it is all too easy to become blind to the beauty of new and radical designs.

In ancient times, we saw the starry vault of the heavens as eternal and unchanging. Our early astronomers, only star-watchers in those days, identified the planets because they wandered against the background of the “fixed stars”.  And that fixed background could be relied upon never to evolve in any way, the way things do here on the dynamic earth.  We are living here, it might have been said, in the profanity of perpetual conflict and tumult; up there in the peaceful serenity of timeless night is the Domain of the Gods. 

Poets, priests, and charlatans (who are, after all, merely different incarnations of the same, pernicious beast) imagined a fantastic variety of narrative landscapes for that heavenly abode and the supernatural inhabitants dwelling therein.  Many of those ancient reckonings, conjured by the lonely hermit-exiles of remote and barren wastelands, persist in one form or another to the present day.  It seems that we humans have a congenital inclination to genealogy - we want to know where we came from - and so those dusty old stories, exploiting our innate need to belong to something, have acquired a kind of sclerotic permanence.  Subsequent generations might have tried to imagine different and visionary origins for ourselves and build new structures of spiritual thought, but instead we have simply heaped more bricks onto a select few pre-existing piles.  And these piles have became large and great; it is perhaps not surprising that these ancient immensities, these globe-girdling spiritual corporations, seem so much more significant, and so much less ridiculous, than they really are.

Expecting vision in the dark is, perhaps, expecting too much; good vision requires good light.  For most of our history we have not had the benefit of appropriate illumination.  But that situation is changing.  We now know a great deal about the heavens in which we situated our gods for so long, and have learned that space is not at all what we thought it was those many thousands of years.  We have seen far in good light.  The Endeavor of Science has started a new pile, a titanic mountain that offers vistas far far greater than those of the little hills from which previous systems of thought fearfully peeked.

Early astronomical images simply provided beautiful detail to our old “changeless” image of the cosmos. Pictures from a new generation of space-based telescopes (like Hubble, COBE, and WMAP), however, have changed our view of the world as much as any revolutionary development in human history.  We can now see, not just a few wandering worlds, but countless other objects that populate a universe infinitely more strange, immense and active, than was ever imagined by parochial nomads.  We can actually look back in time more than 10 billion years to the very early universe and witness the spectacular, cosmos-shaking processes that created the world.  A new Book of Genesis is being written, and that old story has moved from the Neolithic mentality of poems written in an ancient wasteland 2500 years ago, into the living heavens of the cosmic tableau.  We now know where we came from…and yet, the old stories continue to haunt us and we are still falling from that hidden, mythological country...

We are the Earth, a bewildered but ambitious little island in a stellar archipelago that spans a mere 8 billion miles in a celestial ocean vast beyond all comprehension.  We now look out from our terrestrial shore into the beckoning darkness that lies beyond the luminous breeze of our local solar wind, watching the twinkling signal fires of other distant islands, and wonder what untold wonders might dwell in the remote frontiers of that beautiful, forbidding night.

Is the sea of the heavens infinite, ever receding into greater and greater mystery forever?  Is what lies beyond each and every trillion-trillion light-years nothing more than the relentless repetition of another limitless expanse?  What possible purpose could such extravagant vastness serve?  If space is truly infinite and unbounded, then no Promethean effort can ever hope to achieve whatever prize might be waiting on that distant shore, and all our ambitions of discovery are only a quixotic delusion.

Or does the universe simply end, like a highway construction project that ran out of funding?  Is the horizon of the cosmos nothing more than a region of empty space beyond which there is not even empty space?  Is there a wall at the end of a finite and bounded cosmos?  And if not, what, in the presence of nothing whatsoever, would prevent one from proceeding further?  Would then the act of proceeding actually create new universe into which one might proceed?

If it is the vastness of it all that troubles us then perhaps the universe, in an effort to economize with limited resources, simply gets smaller towards the edge.  Rather like Zeno’s Paradox (or the hyperbolic space seen in Order and Chaos), in an infinite and bounded universe a journey from the center to halfway to the outer limit is actually to become half the size.  Move another half again closer to the edge and you and your atoms and every physical constant shrink to only 1/4 of their original magnitude - and then 1/8, and 1/16, and so on.  Such a universe is an inside-out version of the finite diameter but infinite radius weirdness of a black hole:  space and time collapse, not to a central point but to the entire peripheral boundary.  A celestial Odysseus would be ever-diminishing, inexorably shrinking into infinitesimal nothingness.

Some of our greatest minds have suggested that the universe might be round, spherical in a forth coordinate direction that we can’t see, and that sailing the heavens might be very much like an analogous journey on our finite but unbounded terrestrial ocean: if a maritime traveler ventures far enough in a straight line, he will eventually return to his point of embarkation. In such a universe, where the extraordinary gulf between zenith and nadir is merely inconceivably vast and not infinite, we might hope to one day ford the divide and somehow penetrate the great distances that imprison us.

In an extraordinary cosmic irony, it is we tiny, insignificant beings that give meaning to the stupefying infinitude of space: it is only by the vanishingly small that the incomprehensibly vast can be known.  And when the limit of our vision extends to the most distant antipodes of the universe, what magnificent prize will we discover?  There will only be ourselves looking out - the spectacles of far-sighted gods watching along a great circumferential beam of light - at ourselves...