Dreaming of the stars
The universe was not pregnant with life, nor the biosphere with man. Our number came up in the Monte Carlo game. Is it any wonder if, like a person who has just made a million at the casino, we feel strange and a little unreal?
Jacques Monod
The universe is vast. Deeply vast. Our Earth, which seems so big to us, would fit three times inside the famous red spot on Jupiter. And Jupiter’s quite a bit bigger than its red spot. I don’t need to illustrate this point— one needs only to look up at the night sky and realize that most of those little luminous dots are actually behemoths several hundred times than larger than our Sun, and that the distance between them would be hard to convey in mere objective language.
And then there’s the age. I’m only paraphrasing Michael Crichton here, but if the history of our planet so far were to be condensed into one twenty-four hour day, bacterial life wouldn’t evolve until quite a ways into the afternoon. The dinosaurs wouldn’t go exctinct until the last half hour. Mankind would arise less than a minute before midnight. And of course, our planet is young by universal standards.
If the universe is so big, and has existed for so long, shouldn’t scenarios like the one in our plannet be commonplace out of sheer statistical representation? (The mediocrity principle.) But there’s no evidence of contact with anyone else. It’s all silence. (This contradiction is known as the Fermi Paradox.)
The loneliness begs for the question: Just how likely was the evolution of life, really? The temperature was just right, the microbes struck a delicate balance and created a livable atmosphere. True to the nature of a chaotic system, if the slightest of deviations had ocurred we wouldn’t be here at all. But since outer space is so big and old, surely it’s not too unlikely for the same conditions to be replicated elsewhere, right? Is it just human pretention to think that we would be special?
Water and cellular respiration, carbon-based life—this is all that we know. Forgive me if I’m missing something something fundamental, but what’s not to say there could be life elsewhere based off some other compound or chemical? And that it could get lucky, too, and somehow produce a beating heart, a tangle of nerves and this befuddling thing we call self-awareness.
And yet, regardless of what the odds really are and how many other planets win the evolutionary lottery or not, look at us. From a soup of bacteria we’ve risen to intelligence. The glory of the empires that conquered and fell, the primal struggles and the idealism of civilization, the might of reason and the holism of irrationality. They all mean nothing unless contemplated, so please take a moment sometime and dwell on it, just a little.
It really is kind of remarkable to find ourselves here.
What a compelling (and conveniently expositional) first post to lay witness to! Rosa, you are quite the precocious young mind – one who I think could shed light upon a curious shadow to the scientifically uneducated me:
“Is it just human pretention to think that we would be special?”
As I have spoken (baffled) to many who consider human existence and the atmosphere in which we reside a flawless, biological symphony – one so sweeping as to inspire belief in the very gods themselves as part of its creation – I have always been doubtful that our and our planet’s existence was the result of a fortunate “first try” of coincidence – that is to say, I wonder if there weren’t instances in which all of the molecular puzzle pieces didn’t fall into place, and the “process of chance” in the universe didn’t simply continue on its way until it, well — got lucky! The Greeks say there was chaos before there was the shining arrow of order that was our universe – but I find the idea positively ludicrous that something couldn’t have at least tried to happen within that tempest beforehand!
You’re too sweet— and spot-on in your musings, to boot!
I’m not really intimate with the details of the pre-Cambrian eras, I’m sorry— but I know at least that simple prokaryotes existed for eons before they chanced to evolve into something more complex, but it’s only because simple organisms like these existed that the landscape of the planet is now livable to begin with. The earliest life forms created our atmosphere.
The sudden explosion of complex life in the Cambrian was a breakthrough (or lucky break?), but that’s not to say that life hasn’t been silently working all along. We’re a product of chanced circumstances, but nothing emerges from nothing. All these circumstances had an origin somewhere! Then things snowballed.
The world is perhaps a symphony, but it’s immeasureably chaotic. What we live now is all because of what’s been built upon events upon events upon events. It’s only really flawless if you can see some underlying order in it— as humans we have dubious capacity for that.
That aside though, I’m really excited to see what comics or compositions you’ll come up with! I’m anticipating while I bite my lower lip in delight.