I’ve just changed the background theme of my blogspace to "outer space", which I find rather apt, given the title of this webpage.
Up until now this blog has been mostly about my running ‘milestones’, and pictures taken while on holiday. A strange mix, which would be stranger still if I added a third dimension… outer space.
Is there anything much one can say about outer space? Surely not! After all, outer space consists literally of… nothing. It’s a void, and that in itself is a difficult concept to understand. We are used to there always being something around us. We feel uneasy in pitch darkness, which is the closest we normally ever get to experiencing "nothing". Though, even then, we are far removed from nothingness. There’s the air we’re breathing, which has a temperature, that we also feel. There could be a background sound. Even if it’s relatively silent there’s our own heartbeat and the sound of our breathing. In particular, there is always us, thinking, aware.
Outer space is different, because it’s a vacuum. However, one can’t say, even then, that there’s nothing there, since there’s the radiation that arrives from myriads of galaxies. I wonder, is there anywhere in the universe where there is really nothing at all? An astrophysicist might be able to answer that. I can only hazard a guess – I don’t think there is. To begin with there’s the background noise from the big bang, which is present throughout the universe. There could be exotic particles running around, that our scientists may not even have discovered yet. Besides which, if we’re discussing ‘anywhere’, it means that it’s a given space, a given volume. You could place a ruler there, which proves that the space itself exists.
I sometimes try to imagine what it would feel like to find oneself in deep outer space. Consider a living entity that could get by in a vacuum, that has a lifespan of millions of years, and can travel at close to the speed of light. Call it Tonio. Ideally Tonio should be able to hibernate, since a trip lasting millions of years could be pretty boring… Once there, Tonio would wake up, and find himself with no sensory stimulation whatsoever. No matter, no energy (light, sound, radiation, anything), just a void that is pitch dark and utterly, completely silent. As far as Tonio is concerned, in that situation, the entire universe consists of himself and his own memories, and nothing else. If that were the first moment of awareness of his life, he would think he was the only thing that existed.
Come to think of it, it’s a situation that closely resembles the story of humanity, before we became aware that there is a whole universe out there, and not just our tribe/ our land/ our planet. Since our brains evolved in such a situation, our default world perspective is the here and now. We have to figuratively ‘pinch’ ourselves to remember that all humanity’s world-wide trials and tribulations throughout history took place on a piece of rock orbiting a smallish star in a galaxy consisting of a hundred billion stars, which galaxy is only one of hundreds of billions of other galaxies. And the entire history of humanity has yet lasted less than a thousandth of the history of life on our planet, and one ten-thousandth of the history of the universe. It’s a humbling thought.
Such an unimaginably huge amount of matter and energy, and such unimaginably long timeframes, leading to fundamental questions, with ever-elusive answers, that so often come to my mind. How come there’s anything at all? What’s the point of our striving so hard in our lives? What are we trying to achieve? Are we really just automatons that serve to propagate the genes that we carry? Difficult questions, for which I may never find satisfactory answers. Maybe…
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