Seoulscapade

What you are looking at on the left is the spiral galaxy M31 or Andromeda, which looks much like our galaxy, the Milky Way, only we’re a little smaller. It’s amazing that, as you gaze at this small image of the galaxy, you are looking at around 200 billion stars on a scale that the mind has trouble to grasp. Andromeda is bright enough to be seen with the naked eye and is the closest galaxy to us. Light takes about 2.9 million years to reach us from there. It’s the nearest large galaxy to us. However, it’s not the nearest galaxy. That credit goes to the Canis Major dwarf galaxy, which is puny with only about 1 billion suns.

Of course, there is life out there, anyone with common sense can recognize that. You only have to look at the history of earth to realize that given the right conditions it’s going to happen anywhere; and the right conditions are invariably present in galaxies all over the universe.

That’s mind blowing enough, but cosmologists believe that when our universe begin, which involved the unfolding of time and space and all forms of matter and energy, it was from a point a little bigger than the size of the dot at the end of this sentence. Quite frankly, I can’t get my head around that.

Nonetheless, it is generally agreed among most astronomers and physicists that the Universe was created around 13.7 billion years ago with this unfolding or “Big Bang.” It was not an explosion as the theory’s name suggests, just an expansion or inflation event. There is little known about it as everything we can see today with telescopes can only tell us about objects which have existed in the last 10 billion years. It difficult to go back further.

As for the shape of the universe, well, it’s unlikely to be spherical, even though that is perhaps the easiest thing to imagine. One of the latest theories suggests that the universe is funnel shaped, like a medieval horn; but most compelling and generally agreed upon is that the universe is flat and will continue to expand forever. Apart from that, its basic structure is supposedly like bubbles in a bubble bath with superclusters of galaxies existing on the surface of the bubbles and surround large voids containing virtually nothing.

The thing about how the cosmos is viewed is that it influences thinking in all other aspects of life. It has always been inextricably linked to philosophical and religious thought. The worldviews in earlier times were basically anthropocentric, a self-centred perspective that would not be corrected for thousands of years. But the history of cosmology over the last 600 years or so is one in which the self-centred or geocentric worldview of humanity, together with its philosophical and religious support base, has been slowly but surely dismantled.

The Ancient Greeks were the ones who first endeavoured to put together a comprehensive cosmological model based on geometry and science rather than mythology. In the 4th century BC, they conceived of a spherical universe with the stars fixed on the outer sphere and the sun and the planets in between. The earth, of course, sat fixed at the centre. This geocentric worldview was adopted by Christian thinkers hundreds of years later. Platos model of the universe became widely accepted until it was superseded by Aristotle’s model in the 13th century.

There is perhaps no better synthesis of all of the thought of the age than Dante’s encyclopedic Commedia, in which human beings are a part of a rigidly ordered and finely tuned spiritual chain of being. Human beings remain at the centre of the universe, their affairs of central importance and meaning in their lives locked in with the fundamentals of a grand divine scheme. Of course, it’s laughable now, but one can imagine how this cosy arrangement would have infused the lives of human beings with an enormous sense of self-satisfaction and security.

It was finally and grudgingly acknowledged in the 17th century that the astronomical conceptions of Copernicus and Galileo were correct and that it was in fact the sun and not the earth that sat at the centre of the universe. In other words, humankind was decentralized, and this resulted more relativistic thinking, which was helped along by such things as the discovery of new lands and peoples around the globe.

Whatever loss of face there was for humanity, it didn’t last long with Renaissance thinkers emphasizing the idea of humankind as the measure of all things and placing a new emphasis on the notion of the individual. So, human beings could still congratulate themselves for having a central position in scheme of things. Besides, people still believed that humanity actually mattered to God, not even a planetary shift could upset that arrangement. Humanity then could not have accepted the rug been pulled out from under that one. Its anthropocentric worldview was not fundamentally damaged, and the centuries old comforts of egocentric thinking and arrogance could continue.The great chain of being and the lofty position humanity enjoyed on it were finally toppled with the scientific advancements of the 18th and 19th centuries. The significance of humanity diminished further, even if Newton’s mechanical world was still conveniently populated with a God. The prevailing thought was to see everything in materialistic terms, as mechanical and bound by nature’s course. Charles Darwin then dealt the great chain of being a death blow with evidence that human beings had evolutionary origins like any other animal. The artificial, somewhat pompous heirarchy of being was finally disassembled. To add to an ever declining significance in the grand scheme of things, it was found that the earth existed within a massive galaxy of stars. Although, it was still thought that the sun was at the centre of it.

Naturally, philosophical movements concentrating on nature and consciousness and self and other existential issues were all the rage from the 19th century onwards. Knowledge itself was put under the spotlight. Soon it was realized that not only was the sun not at the centre of a galaxy but the galaxy itself was just one of many in a vast universe. In the 1920’s it was proven that the Earth and sun were no where near the centre of the Milky Way. Hubble then established that there were indeed distant galaxies comparable in size to our own Milky Way and that our universe was expanding. At last, humanity was starting to be well and truly put in its place, and God well and truly out of the picture.

But by this time humankind’s self-esteem was low after years of insult at the hands of scientific discovery. Of course, further discoveries concerning the universe haven’t made much of an impact on philosophical and religious thinking, because once you’re totally insignificant you can’t get any lower. Freud and those that followed him then assaulted the last bastion of human anthropocentric arrogance by decentralizing the mind itself. God couldn’t even lurk there. There was no longer an essence or soul or whatever one might want to call it. Not only that, what you might call an “I” or who we are was no longer guaranteed.

So, we arrive at a picture of the universe radically different to the one pictured in the 14th century. For all intents and purposes, it is safe to say that life on earth has no purpose and struggles in an existence that is essentially meaningless. As has already been said time and again, for more than 300 years, since the time of Isaac Newton, science has been understood by most educated people to have established that the universe is incomprehensibly vast and full of mostly empty space, with stars scattered at great distances. There is no center, no purpose, no location for God, and no obvious meaning for human beings.

This is nothing new, but when you think about the potential end to our universe it deepens the impact of a meaningless reality. How is the universe going to end? It is generally agreed that the universe will continue to expand, with dark energy making it expand faster and faster. Some say that it will expand forever. Whether it does or not, presumably a point will be reached when all light and energy has been extinguished, ordinary matter has disintegrated, and all life is non-existent. At that point everything will be left drifting in an incredibly cold and boundless darkness.

But, not to worry, it’s only nature’s way.

THE MEANING OF LIFE IS THAT THERE IS NO MEANING.