I always hear people who are religious talking about the wonders of nature. They are normally talking about the things they're familiar with, such as mountain ranges, canyons, the beauty of a rugged coastline, or the majestic architecture of old, historic places. If they ever contemplate the sky, it is in a general way. They say, "The universe is so vast." But I often wonder at just what is in their minds when they say this. The human intellect has a hard time grasping the size of our world, and the solar system is several orders of magnitude larger than our planet. How can the human mind grasp such a concept as the far greater distances involved in what astronomers call "deep space objects"?
On clear, dark nights, when you can get into the countryside, you often will be able to see the Milky Way. If you look at it through a telescope, you'll see it is a swarm of stars, the nearby area of the galaxy our sun is a member of. That's the first part of the wonders of the universe we are part of. We can see millions of stars, all of them just as special and unique as our star, Sol, is. And there are dozens of billions of them in just our galaxy. Imagine the number of those stars that have planets! Based on the recent discoveries of nearby stars with planets, we can extrapolate and be pretty sure that the star formation process will normally produce the insignificant chunks of rock as leftovers known as planets. Most likely, there are billions of planets, each as varied as those we see in our solar system!
Just think about the variety we see here in Sol's neighborhood! Mercury, one of the most cratered objects we've ever seen. Venus, with its poisonous atmosphere, horrendous surface pressure and temperature. Mars, with its Olympus Mons - the extinct volcano that dwarfs all Earthly mountains and Valles Marineris, the canyon system that would stretch across the entire continental U.S. There's Jupiter, with more mass than all the other objects (other than the Sun, of course!) in the solar system combined; its moons are a wild collection of extremes, also. There's Io - the most volcanically active object in the system. And Europa, a place covered with ice, and a possible place for us to find extraterrestrial life. Then there's Saturn, with its huge system of rings, including the braided outer rings, which are being woven by tiny "shepard" moons. You'll also find Titan, a moon larger than Mercury, with a dense, opaque atmosphere (another possible candidtate for an alien biosphere!). Another moon of Saturn's is Mimas, which has an impact crater that takes up an entire quadrant of the moon's surface, making it look almost exactly like the "Death Star."
Of course, looking at everyday, run of the mill stars is about as interesting as watching the sand on the beach. There's an awful lot of it, and you really have to use your imagination to get any enjoyment from it. However, the real fun of looking at things in our galaxy comes from finding the unusual items. Items like the Great Nebula of Orion, or the center of the Eagle Nebula, enormous clouds of gas (nearly 100% hydrogen) and dust where new stars are forming. Or items at the other end of the lifespan of stars, the planetary nebulae, where stars are falling apart, or we see the remnants of stellar explosions, like the Crab Nebula. Other fascinating deep space items you can see are open star clusters, like the Pleiades or the Beehive cluster, multiple stars, like Alpha Centauri, and globular clusters - swarms of thousands of stars packed into a sperical area only a few dozen light years across.
Have you ever looked at some of the photos taken in astronomical research? The majority of the photos are not taken for their aesthetic qualities, yet they are most impressive and beautiful. There are many photos taken of many galaxies. One Hubble image stands out in my memory particularly - an image from the area of the Big Dipper, with hardly any individual stars, but literally thousands of galaxies, each one as vast and varied as our galaxy. Think of it! Nearly every tiny speck in the photo is of an ocean of stars as unimaginably vast as our own Milky Way! Each little smudge of light comes from a place with billions of stars, billions of planets, all as varied and beautiful and majestic as we can imagine.
What it makes me wonder over is how conceited and provincial it makes some people look. In particular, it appears the height of conceit for people to look at humanity and imagine that our doings could be of any interest to a universe-spanning entity. These people seem to think that our world (or our solar system, at most) is the only thing worth noticing in the universe. It's as if our solar system is suspended within a black sphere with pretty little lights affixed to the inside surface. While this may be true from our perspective (our technology can not give us a way to reach beyond our solar system - yet), it is not truly the case. Our star is just one ordinary speck in the galaxy, and our galaxy is no finer or even noticably different from many other galaxies - except for the fact that it is in the process of colliding with the minor galaxies we call the Magellanic Clouds. Which obviously has absolutely nothing to do with us.
So while we find ourselves living in a world of staggering beauty, in a solar system of impressive wonders, orbiting in a galaxy of colossal dimension and complexity, we can be sure of very few things really. One idea I think can be safely put away is the thought that all of it was created with humanity in mind. This thought is similar to the idea that on all the internet, there is one bit (computer lingo - binary digit) that is the key to the existence of the entire enterprise; once that bit ends its useful life, the whole internet will be shut down. Our universe is far too majestic and beautiful for the fate of humanity to be of any conceivable consequence in that large a context. It matters to us, naturally, and rightly so. But if humanity were to blow itself to complete oblivion tomorrow, why would even the Sun be affected? We have no reason to think it would. After all, we should always try to keep in our minds a proper sense of proportion!
