Cosmic Perspective 9th Edition Pdf
Colette
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Yet the cosmic view comes with a hidden cost. When I travel thousands of miles to spend a few moments in the fast-moving shadow of the Moon during a total solar eclipse, sometimes I lose sight of Earth.
When I pause and reflect on our expanding universe, with its galaxies hurtling away from one another, embedded within the ever-stretching, four-dimensional fabric of space and time, sometimes I forget that uncounted people walk this Earth without food or shelter, and that children are disproportionately represented among them.
Consider an adult who tends to the traumas of a child: a broken toy, a scraped knee, a schoolyard bully. Adults know that kids have no clue what constitutes a genuine problem, because inexperience greatly limits their childhood perspective.
Back in February 2000, the newly rebuilt Hayden Planetarium featured a space show called Passport to the Universe, which took visitors on a virtual zoom from New York City to the edge of the cosmos. En route the audience saw Earth, then the solar system, then the 100 billion stars of the Milky Way galaxy shrink to barely visible dots on the planetarium dome.
Within a month of opening day, I received a letter from an Ivy League professor of psychology whose expertise was things that make people feel insignificant. I never knew one could specialize in such a field. The guy wanted to administer a before-and-after questionnaire to visitors, assessing the depth of their depression after viewing the show. Passport to the Universe, he wrote, elicited the most dramatic feelings of smallness he had ever experienced.
From that day on, I began to think of people not as the masters of space and time but as participants in a great cosmic chain of being, with a direct genetic link across species both living and extinct, extending back nearly 4 billion years to the earliest single-celled organisms on Earth.
Time to get cosmic. There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on any beach, more stars than seconds have passed since Earth formed, more stars than words and sounds ever uttered by all the humans who ever lived.
Yes, we are stardust. But we may not be of this Earth. Several separate lines of research, when considered together, have forced investigators to reassess who we think we are and where we think we came from.
Again and again across the centuries, cosmic discoveries have demoted our self-image. Earth was once assumed to be astronomically unique, until astronomers learned that Earth is just another planet orbiting the Sun. Then we presumed the Sun was unique, until we learned that the countless stars of the night sky are suns themselves. Then we presumed our galaxy, the Milky Way, was the entire known universe, until we established that the countless fuzzy things in the sky are other galaxies, dotting the landscape of our known universe.
Today, how easy it is to presume that one universe is all there is. Yet emerging theories of modern cosmology, as well as the continually reaffirmed improbability that anything is unique, require that we remain open to the latest assault on our plea for distinctiveness: multiple universes, otherwise known as the multiverse, in which ours is just one of countless bubbles bursting forth from the fabric of the cosmos.
At least once a week, if not once a day, we might each ponder what cosmic truths lie undiscovered before us, perhaps awaiting the arrival of a clever thinker, an ingenious experiment, or an innovative space mission to reveal them. We might further ponder how those discoveries may one day transform life on Earth.
Absent such curiosity, we are no different from the provincial farmer who expresses no need to venture beyond the county line, because his forty acres meet all his needs. Yet if all our predecessors had felt that way, the farmer would instead be a cave dweller, chasing down his dinner with a stick and a rock.
There is a small lake on the edge of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area that I have visited numerous times. Its shores are lined with pine, cedar, and spruce and remain almost entirely undeveloped save for a collection of several unassuming cabins grouped near its more accessible end. Set well back from the water, each cabin has a narrow trail that meanders down to its own little dock barely the length of a canoe. A mere couple of miles from the border with Canada, the region is unique in its offer of a glaciated landscape of endless lakes, fecund wildlife, and famously dark night skies. It is a special place to my family, a sacred place where I have found myself in possession of a far broader perspective than readily afforded by daily life in the city. Every summer, we make it a point to travel north for a week to paddle, hike, and most importantly relax. More often than not, this involves spending time on one of those little docks to simply gaze at the wonder around, immersing ourselves in the sights, sounds, and scents of the natural world.
On late moonless nights, the sky above the lake so far north has the potential to display the indescribable. As the waning twilight settles from civic to nautical to astronomical, the stars become so numerous as to obfuscate the easy recognition of familiar constellations. The Milky Way becomes so bright and variegated in detail that it becomes apparent why the ancient Greeks gave it that name. The ambient temperature has cooled to the point of requiring long sleeves even though it might be the height of summer, and the lake is so calm that its surface reflects countless points of starlight. Indeed, there have been nights so deeply dark that I have seen my own shadow cast on the dock by the starlight from above. I look up to the sky and notice how my perspective begins to shift away from daily concerns toward a quiet contentment.
Words are inadequate to express the sense that has often come over me standing out there under the raiment of the Cosmos. In the moment, my sense of self diminishes and my perception expands across a conceptual continuum of space so broad that for a moment time seems to stop. Looking overhead at the innumerable stars, an awareness dawns on me that the vast majority of those stars are likely to host planets of their own. On some of those planets must be life, potentially sentient life. This begs of the question of whether we as a species might think bigger. How many shores are to be found similar yet different than the one upon which I stand and gaze? How many opportunities for expanding our understanding of the Cosmos and our place within it remain to be encountered in that night sky? Whom is there to meet on those other shores hanging overhead in the night sky possibly looking down at us?
In 1977, the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft were launched in order to expand our knowledge of the Solar System and continue outward to interstellar space. Cognizant of this plan, then president Jimmy Carter wrote a statement carried by these twin emissaries on behalf of our species:
This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survey our time so that we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.
Such a message seems especially apropos of the cosmic perspective that invariably develops every summer as I stand upon that little dock under the multitude of stars and clearly detailed dust lanes of our home galaxy. It is here that I am connected to my place in the Cosmos.
The power of such wondrous nights under the stars in such a remote locale is the potential surfacing to conscious awareness, however finite in duration, of that cosmic perspective. We are each connected to every other part of the Cosmos. This awareness necessarily embodies scientific as well as spiritual elements. It is most powerful when experienced by the mind and simultaneously within the heart. This cosmic perspective helps me to step beyond the confines of my own needs and concerns to better recognize that we are all connected to one another and to the vastness of all that lies overhead. Importantly, it offers the potential to help us recognize the inherent beauty in the world around us, to fix what we have broken, and to set our sites beyond the limitations of societal ego toward an inevitable expansion across the Solar System and far beyond.
Standing on that little dock looking up from my tiny corner of the seemingly infinite cosmic shore, I have lost track of time. The arc of the Milky Way moves across the deep, dark night sky. The water is perfectly still, the air has become cold, and eventually the necessity for sleep becomes apparent. It is time to walk back up to the cabin. This is no great loss when this far north. A cosmic perspective is not overly difficult to maintain when I am faced day after day with the promise of natural splendor and time to think. Instead, what is difficult is learning to maintain such a perspective when returning to the pace of modern life.
It is our shared challenge to evolve as a species with a cosmic perspective. It is our responsibility to recognize our connections and our obligations. How are we to become, and remain, cognizant of our place in the Cosmos when the mundane events of the workaday life saturate our attention? For me, it begins with a night under the stars on the edge of the BWCA, and perchance good company with whom to discuss it.
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