Avi, Your Numbers Brought Darkness, Then They Brought Light

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Avi Loeb, you got me into a pensive, slumping pause. I read your article regarding the loneliness that’s instinctual as we inhabit such a minuscule planet among the cosmos. You address the conversation surrounding your astrophysical community’s position on whether we’re alone out there or how we’d find out otherwise. You mention your recent research. You want to inspire — and explain your point of view. I’m not one to opine on any of this.

Besides, none of this was what woke me in the middle of the night, had me lying in the dark, thinking.

It was your numbers.

“[The] remarkable uniformity of the cosmic microwave background, left over from the Big-Bang, implies that there is no edge to the cosmos at least out to a distance 4,000 times bigger than our cosmic horizon.”

Say what?

You threw this out to make a point, which you did. For me, the farther out in space and time you went, the more I shrank into nothingness. It wasn’t a futile nothingness. It was a simple reality. I really am that tiny and that much of a flicker.

Of course, that’s not true. I’m orders of magnitude smaller and briefer.

I love astronomy, although I know relatively nothing about it — is that an oxymoron? I’ve seen numbers like yours before, but yours seemed grander, more intimidating, and less life-affirming despite your message to the contrary. You were telling us that with numbers so large, it’s common sense to imagine more life is out there.

This cosmic grandeur you spoke of led me into a room, asked me to sit, opened the curtains, and there, through the window, I tried to make sense of the expanse of it, to grab onto the meaning of human life, of Earth, of infinite numbers and subatomic sizes, and as long as I was being honest with myself, it was impossible. But that didn’t stop me.

The first thing I did was make myself feel worse. I set up a comparison of objects to show me relative sizes. Seeing is a well-worn path to understanding.

I found that if Earth was a basketball, then Mt. Everest would be as high as the thickness of a sticky note. This would make me the size of smallpox.

The sun, then, would be 9/10th the height of the Statue of Liberty. So, the Statue of Liberty is standing there next to the basketball whose tallest mountain is a flat sticky note, and we humans living on it are smallpox — or better, teeny-weenypox.

Then the real numbers came. Huge numbers I couldn’t take the time to translate into objects. There aren’t objects big enough I could use to analogize anyway. And that’s such an understatement.

From a NASA site — if our sun was a grain of sand, then our solar system would fit into the palm of our hand. Our galaxy, The Milky Way, with its hundreds of billions of stars, would reach across North America. And while you and I are contemplating all this, our little solar system just finished its orbit around the Milky Way, which began 240 million years ago.

Just like we say each December, “I can’t believe our orbit around the sun went so fast,” so is our solar system saying, “By golly, the last time I was here, the dinosaurs were just starting to sprout.”

As with everything in astronomy, what’s huge eventually seems small, for it’s estimated there might be 100–200 billion galaxies out there of varying sizes.

Sitting there in a mathematical stupefaction, I needed only one thing to keep myself from falling into existential chaos — to know I have meaning. This seemed like a bit of a luxury as I perused Hubble and Webb telescope photos of colliding galaxies.

It’s hard to pit the extravagance of the idea of human importance against numbers so austere. The fact that we’re a creature who’s complex enough to invent words for “extravagance” and “importance” seems small-fry nonetheless.

But then I realized, no, it’s the exact opposite.

We’re as complex as any other entity out there. Relative to many things, we’re far more so. Does that make us special? I’m not the one to answer that, but I think it makes us as meaningful as anything else. Just because we’re not the size of a galaxy, let alone a hundred billion of them, doesn’t mean we’re nothing.

In fact, if I say my life is insignificant compared to the enormity of time and space, aren’t I comparing my unique spot in time/space to all the other spots combined? That doesn’t seem like a level playing field. Nobody would pay money to watch that competition.

I know that to compare is to be human, but it doesn’t make sense to compare spots, just like it doesn’t truly make sense to compare people. It might make hierarchical sense, and evolution loved it, but not existential sense. Each spot is as legit as the next, whether it’s me today, a child 200 years from now, a cup of water back when Earth was a microbial world, or a volume of gas from Galaxy #64 Billion.

Just as my life doesn't take away from that cup of microbes, neither does a star, long extinguished, take away from mine.

When I was a kid, my family used to go to a local observatory to look at the night sky through a telescope that pointed out an opening in the domed ceiling. I remember thinking the sky was beautiful, mysterious, and noble. Later, I would watch the night sky at my grandparents’ lake house, lying on the dock. I’d take in the enormity while the crickets chirped near my body in their simplicity. Two entities — huge long-lasting stars, tiny short-lived insects. Then me in-between.

There’s a big difference between me and those insects and stars. I’m the only one who can behold the grandeur of either. Insects are fascinating. Stars are mind-boggling. It’s sad that they know nothing of this. It’s beautiful that I do.

When I look at it like this, I see time and space don’t speak to the beauty of any spot in the Universe — they only locate it.

I’m left with my precious spot on this basketball at this moment. Who would I rather be right now? Me? A cricket? A volume of gas from a nebula 7000 light years away?

Rather than directing my attention to comparisons between tiny and huge, the invitation always stands to take up residence in myself completely and with attention. As Mary Oliver says —

“When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real . . . I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.”