My friend Milton
posted this picture of the Hubble Deep
Field Image the other day. The pretty little smudges are galaxies.
Click for larger image
In case you don’t know the story of this image,
it represents a “keyhole” view of the universe. The Hubble Space Telescope
focused on one small patch of the sky for about 10 days, pulling in ancient
light from across the universe. This image is only a speck in our sky. It’s
about the size of a dime when viewed from 75 feet away.
And this little speck is absolutely filled with
galaxies. About 1500 can be counted using an enlarged image. 1500 galaxies in a
single dot of our night sky.
The universe is so large that it causes my mind
to reboot whenever I try to think about it. You can’t really think about the
size of the universe in any accurate way, of course. It's far too big to
understand. But here’s a way you could try to think about it:
Our solar system exists on a spiral arm of the
Milky Way Galaxy. The Milky Way is about 100,000 light years across and contains
between 200 billion and 400 billion stars. There is a star that is relatively
close to us; Alpha Centauri is a mere 4.4 light years away. Given the size of
our galaxy, we’re practically on top of each other.
Click for larger image
Voyager 1, launched in the late 1970s, has only
recently left our solar system. The two Voyager spacecrafts are the fastest
things humans have ever made. Currently they travel at a speed of about 1
million miles a day, which is pretty damn fast. Still, it took a good-sized
chunk of your lifetime for the fastest thing we have to make it out of our own
solar system.
The Voyager mission does not include traveling
to Alpha Centauri, but if it did, it would take 70,000 years to get there at its
current speed. So says a combination of Wikipedia and my calculator.
Chew on that for a moment. Our two stars,
almost touching in the photo. Seventy Thousand Years.
When I consider the stars and the universe – or
more accurately when I consider my inability to consider them – I experience a
strange combination of physical, emotional, and spiritual reactions.
First I feel a kind of mild vertigo, the sort
of thing that you would expect to feel if you suddenly found yourself in the
middle of a shaky rope bridge over a deep canyon. Our world normally feels so
big and solid to me, and my place in this world seems entrenched and
well-established after 45 years of living. But suddenly, I am a speck of dust in
an instant of time so brief that it can’t be measured. My feet feel light, as if
I might float off our spinning planet any second. I want to throw myself on the
ground and grab two fistfuls of grass for good measure.
My mind reels. Everything seems to be
shrinking.
Then I feel a sorrowful panic. Christianity
has already shrunk in my lifetime from being the shining center of all truth and
purpose to something less than that. Even looking at things from the inside,
even willing to give the benefit of every doubt, Christianity seems like a
bumbling, prosaic movement which is, as often as not, violent,
anti-intellectual, and xenophobic.
But I love Christianity so much. Or at least I
love what it could be. I want to hug it. I want to throw my arms around the
beautiful language of salvation and redemption. I want to curl up in the warmth
of my faith community, the people I love so deeply in this world. Truly they are
like family to me. I feel I could get drunk on our ancient symbols, myths and
stories, the ones that speak in luscious tones vibrating through a million
voices across the centuries.
So first vertigo, then panic, then longing.
After that I generally calm down a bit. My tiny mind and delicate emotions
cannot bear even my small thoughts of the universe for more than a few minutes.
I relax. Sometimes a shrinking reality can be a comfort. My sins, the things
that I have done wrong and the ways that I cannot be what I should be, also
shrink. I feel I can forgive myself for them, small man that I am. Why the hell
not? Look at the size of the universe!
This forgiveness is the Grace that Christians
speak of. The main story of our faith tells us that we must be forgiven and can
be. Funny how it takes science to bring that reality to my guts.
For some reason, this experience always ends
with a crazy happiness that I cannot easily explain. I become giddy with the
knowledge that ultimate reality is so far beyond our grasp. This lets me off the
hook, to a certain extent. We’ll never know reality. We’ll never even map our
solar system, you and I. We’re small people, but we have grasped the idea of
existence. We know love, seek knowledge, and recognize goodness and evil.
Our saintly scientists, single-minded and
incredibly committed to the search for truth, draw down amazing pictures from
the ancient light in the sky. These pictures help me to know that it is okay to
be nothing more or less than what we are.
People. Human beings, strangely warped and
trying to understand that. Trying to worship what cannot be known, trying to
learn, trying to find our place in the Cosmos.
rlp
Learn about Voyager
