Recently, I asked college graduates to estimate the age of the earth. They had no idea. One initially gave an answer of thousands of years and wondered if humans had been on earth all that time. I am not talking about people who take the Bible literally. Although they may function well in their daily lives, as far as I am concerned, they are disoriented. This is not to condemn anybody. No one can be too smart. I must admit that as I do my daily work, I think about this sort of thing constantly. I decided this was part of the reason I’m afraid of heights. Walking down a narrow ledge, I am dazzled by the view before me. I find it very useful to focus only on the next step, but it is hard. I always have to know where I fit in the scheme of things and am always frustrated by what I don’t know. I noticed long ago that there are two kinds of people. The vast majority only bother with their immediate problems, and a good many of these are probably overwhelmed by what I would consider mundane concerns. But only a few—perhaps 1% or less—wonder about the bigger picture. I call these people the ones who look up (and maybe bump into things in front of them). Not to say I am better than anyone else, but I am definitely in the second group. I’d like nothing better than to pull you into the second group. As I strongly believe some facts should be more commonly known, I humbly offer the following.

Here are a few orienting facts. The earth is about 4.5 billion years old. The sun is a bit older and its life expectancy is around another 5 billion years. The earth came to be about 9.3 billion years after the beginning of the Universe some 13.8 billion years ago. Gazing up at the sky—and this takes into account visible and non-visible forms of light—gives the distinct impression that every direction is essentially the same. The vast majority of large-scale objects, especially galaxies, are moving away from us and those that are furthest away are moving away the fastest approximately proportionate to their speed. So it looks like we have no preferential vantage point, being in the middle of an explosion that is often compared to being on the surface of a latex balloon int the process of expanding. Light that we see could be 1000 years old, which means the object that emitted the light did so 1000 years ago and is roughly 1000 light years away. One light year is equal to about 6 trillion miles. Gazing further and further out into space, we are looking at objects as they were. If an object is a billion light years away, its image is a billion years old. We have no idea how it looks now. So, looking out in any direction is equivalent to looking back in time—a sublime idea. What we perceive as ordinary matter constitutes only around 4% of the universe. The rest is in the form of dark energy pushing things apart and accounts for some 72% of our universe. Energy and matter are interconvertible. Dark matter accounts for another 13% of the universe. Dark means they are not detected directly, for example, by seeing them. Yet scientists know dark matter and dark energy are “there” by figuring things out. Roughly 96% of everything is invisible. Dark matter has to be there, even though it emits no light; otherwise, the Milky Way would fly apart. You know the Invisible Man is there even though you can’t see him because of what he does.

Nebulae are smudges of visible light seen in the heavens. There was an idea that some of these were clusters of stars or other galaxies. However, this was not proven explicitly until about 1929 when Edwin Hubble showed that these stars belonged to a separate galaxy much like ours, called Andromeda. Until then, less than 100 years ago, humankind had no definite proof that there were other galaxies with stars. This ranks as one of the greatest discoveries ever. Hubble also discovered that galaxies move away or recede at a velocity proportional to their distance. His name was given to an orbiting telescope satellite that gave a survey of the universe, the Hubble Dark Field. Thus, we know with certainty that there are over 100 billion galaxies. Many of these contain over 100 billion stars, of which our sun is only a mediocre example. Pictures of the Hubble Dark Field are readily available on the Internet and will literally blow your mind.

Many stars have planetary satellites right in our own Milky Way Galaxy and some may harbor life like ours. Like a lot of people, I used to look up at night on Long Island where I grew up, wondering who else might be wondering and looking up at me. We live along one arm of this beautiful, largely flat spiral of our Milky Way, rotating at high velocity around a gravitational center. The Milky Way is seen edge on in our sky, and this view was readily available to our ancestors before the invention of electric light. But we modern people can barely appreciate the Milky Way edge on at all due to our light-polluted environment. Our ancestors lived under the wonderful domed Temple of the Sky, and I like to think they had access to emotions that we do not. We live in artificial light. The bad news is Andromeda and our own Milky Way, two beautiful spiral sister galaxies in the Virgo galaxy cluster, are on a collision course. After much violence in 5 billion years or so, they will merge to become a far less elegant elliptical cloud.

How far humankind is capable of seeing is an essential question. You would think that since the universe is 13.8 billion years old, we would only be able to see 13.8 light years distant. Surprisingly, it is possible to see some 46 billion light years distant. Remember that we are looking at light as it was billions of light years ago and that the universe has been expanding. Thus, the ancient light we see is from objects that were tremendously closer at the time their light was emitted. But in no case is that light more than 13.8 billion years old. The objects that emitted this light are now up to 46 billion light years away. As more time passes and the universe ages, we can see older and older light from objects farther away. Some of these objects are so ancient and are now so far away, they are speeding away from us faster than the speed of light. That is allowed according to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity because the true distance hasn’t increased; only the size of space has increased. Just as a cone expands over its length the field of view expands, with length time and the total possible field of vision is what is termed a light cone. Forty-six billion light years is equal to 276 billion trillion miles.

That is not the size of the universe but only how far we can theoretically see. Outside that range, we can’t tell exactly what is going on because it isn’t possible to see that far. A supremely important question (for me in particular) is how far do we mortals see and what is the scope of our vision? I ask this in a state of amazement because as biological creatures, we humans should only be able to see what is approximately our size in our immediate environment.  After all things that affect our survival our usually in our own size range so that is what we are more adapted to sense.   Instead, our mental capacity makes it possible to see far, far beyond that. Only about 100 years ago, Einstein located humankind for the very first time in four-dimensional space-time geometry and revolutionized everything. We also know about things much smaller than those that can be seen by the human eye. In terms of magnitudes humans are capable of appreciating, our own size of about six feet or two meters falls pretty squarely in the midrange. Does our own middling size in our universe tell us more about us as observers or about the universe we inhabit? No one knows. I will not get into more speculative topics such as alternative universes because this is of no help in determining our address or orientation. The measure of a person is not his body mass index, but the scope of his vision, or as Einstein would have it, his world line.

Our earth is made of ordinary matter in at least its second iteration. The solar system has had to have come from a previous star, an exploded supernova. The vast plurality of matter in our universe consists of hydrogen, with a smaller smattering of helium. All the other elements of the periodic table (carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, etc.) had to have been forged within this star. Our earth coalesced out of this multi-element rich matter some 4.5 billion years ago. Judging by the content of meteorites, some amino and nucleic acid constituents of future life also already existed in the vicinity of our solar system and on our planet well before the life began. Water— all the water in the oceans and rivers—was deposited by repeated collisions with meteorites. The earth–moon system was made by a cataclysmic collision with a planet the size of Mars early in the earth’s history, creating a gravitational system that has changed little over the eons. The moon, while moving slowly away, seems hypnotized by the earth as it is close enough to only show us a single face and does not relative to us as we see only one face of the moon.  The moon makes tides and has given humankind the concept of a month. More importantly, it is responsible for the gravitational stability that allowed life to form.  For instance, the earth doesn’t wobble in a way that would affect the predictability of seasons.   Huge Jupiter is almost large enough to be a second star and protects the earth from being bombarded with asteroids and comets.  So in may ways the earth enjoys an especially privileged status. This Goldilocks effect, the unlikely confluence of highly unlikely perfect circumstances, makes life on earth possible. Planets rotate about the sun in an essentially flat system resembling a gravitationally flat spiral galaxy.

The first life on earth appeared some 3.6 billion years ago. Life gradually evolved from simple forms over billions of years. At first, life developed anaerobically as there was no free oxygen. No one knows for sure, but it is likely the very first step in the development of life had to do with separation. A soapy bilipid membrane separated the nascent life form from its immediate environment. Alternately, the formation of a unit of reproduction, perhaps a chain of nucleic acids, might have been the first step. Life in some form may have arisen many times on the earth, but the only surviving life known to us has to have been descended from the same single progenitor. We know this because all life shares the same genetic code. That is one of the most amazing scientific truths.

Some important steps along the evolutionary pathway of life (and please excuse me if I leave important ones out as there are very many) are: the separation of living forms from non-living ones via a membrane, DNA, RNA and protein synthesis and units of reproduction, nearly universal adaptation of binary mixing of reproductive units, namely sexual reproduction to enhance variation within species, formation of cells, organelles, chloroplasts, and their near mirror image mitochondria to make and burn chemical energy, the absorption into cells and co-aptation of originally parasitic organelles that were to become part of a cell, formation of cell nuclei, joining of like cells, later unlike cells in symbiotic and organismic units, development of tissues, later organs with specialized function, competition and richness of life to fill nearly every niche in which life is possible on the planet, and the development of the awake state and awareness. The predominance of mammals over reptiles appears to have occurred by accident, possibly due to a meteorite collision and massive extinction some 66 million years ago. A succession of seemingly accidental catastrophes and the evolution of life forms seem to have resulted in the ecology of the present day. The Hominin line evolved some 6–7 million years ago. Our present human form came to be roughly over the last 150,000 years, likely in Africa. There were other human forms with advanced self-awareness, such as Neanderthals, who probably mixed with the more slender Cro-Magnons or were wiped out by our human ancestors.

We know that humans who were anatomically identical to us were capable of advanced thought and had on their minds what our deepest thinkers do today, as of at least 50,000 years ago. We see it in their art, such as the Lascaux and Altamira cave paintings. These were produced by hunter gatherers who had deep respect for what sustained them. Roughly 10,000 years ago, humans raised crops and animals and established permanent settlements. After doing so, they developed religion and incurred certain epidemic infectious diseases from their animals and from other humans. The Adam and Eve story of Genesis refers not to Creation, other than to make the point that it all has to do with The Creator, but is an allegory referring to the transition from a hunter gatherer lifestyle to an agrarian lifestyle. Cultures and civilizations rose and fell. The art and ideas of these cultures resembles what we have in the present day. Why shouldn’t it? These civilizations consisted of anatomically identical human beings. Modern humans display a thin veneer of civilization and culture and have the advantage of an unprecedented record of ideas. We have come to discover that our forebears had similar cognitive abilities. They knew every plant and animal that aided their survival and navigated by asterisms and individual stars in the sky. In the record of the earth, human history is the blink of an eye, less than the last seconds of the eleventh hour of a day. We are late arrivals.

In previous offerings, I introduced the Dantean cosmology and earlier Egyptian concepts to emphasize how much the current view of the cosmos has changed, especially over the last hundred years. Yet it seems likely that some wise ancients must have had an inner appreciation of the vastness of their world, exceeding that of many educated folks today. It’s all a matter of looking up, not just looking down. So much has been written about a so-called core curriculum or a certain canon of knowledge to be imparted to young students. All college graduates should be familiar with Shakespeare and Dante. They should have a grasp of computation and math. They should be prepared to function in business and society. But they should also be able to demonstrate orientation in the time–space continuum before receiving that college degree. That is my opinion.

REBECCA:

I never told you about that letter Jane Crofut got from her
minister when she was sick. He wrote Jane a letter and on the envelope the address was like this: It said: Jane Crofut; The Crofut Farm; Grover’s Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire; United States of America.

GEORGE:
What’s funny about that?

REBECCA:
But listen, it’s not finished: the United States of America; Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the Mind of God–that’s what it said on the envelope.

GEORGE:
What do you know!
REBECCA:
And the postman brought it just the same.

-From Our Town by Thornton Wilder