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“When you look at the stars, what do you think about?”…
Asked by a friend more than 8 years ago as we lay down on the sands by the beach looking up a clear night sky.. It was only moments ago that i took the time to really think about it..
I wonder if we are alone, I wonder if there is someone else, billions of light years away, looking at our own star in his or her night sky, thinking the same thing. I wonder if there’s someone else bearing witness to our existence. Otherwise, the universe is just an awful lot of wasted space and we will truly be alone. And the only life that it will ever know, the only minds that would’ve asked that question about his existence, will have been right here, on this chunk of rock and water, floating around the outer edges of the universe.
I’ve read somewhere that when Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon and witnessed the earth rise over its horizon, he was able to fit the whole of the earth behind his thumb. All the wars, all the squabbling, all the politics, all our problems fitted in a tiny speck in the sky. Everything is different when viewed from that perspective.
When I look up the stars, I see all the hopes and the dreams of humankind, I see the future. For to spread out from this cradle of life that is earth, we would need a change in our way of thinking. We will need to overcome all the petty things that divide us as a species. We will need to be united behind a single vision that would enable us to direct all our resources into providing a better future for our children – one that is free from the threat of annihilation from a single impact or a series of geological events. One that would vastly increase the amount of resources and energy at our disposal. One that will enable us to live on.
When I look up the night sky, I see the echoes of the past. After all, the lights that we see are just photons that have left those stars thousands, millions or even billions of years ago. A symphony of lights played way before we were here and echoes of a song once played by an orchestra of lights that may not even exist today. In the distant future, our own sun itself will sing its last note and a white dwarf and its echoes will be all that will remain of the star that has once given birth to mankind.
And perhaps it is only right that we feel this deep spiritual feeling evoked by the sight of the night sky. Because every single atom in our body were once part of the beating hearts of the stars. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen.. These building blocks of life all came from the cores of dead stars that have fused, created and dispersed these elements across space. Elements from the fusion of deuterium, deuterium from the conversion of energy into mass, and energy from the expansion of the unexplained singularity.
All leading to the creation of life, of consciousness and of us.
Loneliness and hope…
Echoes of the distant past and our future…
Entropy and the evolution of life…
That’s what I see when I look up the stars.
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