“The universe is unfinished, you know.”
My favourite thing about the NASA Webb telescope photographs is this line from the inaugural report: “Webb’s image covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground.” In other words, even given how thrilling a muchness is visible in that disco-glitter image of galactic cluster SMACS 0723 as it appeared thirteen billion (!) years ago, the understanding that it still represents an almost infinitessimally small portion of the vast heavens above us thrills me even more.
Being a brief speck in a vast multifaceted cosmos is not without its substantial philosophical and pragmatic allure. “The end of life on Earth” gains some asterisks in this context. (Asterisk one: of course life on Earth won’t end. Hell, I don’t even know if all human life will end, or just be dramatically cut down to size. The stakes of life on this planet are going to change drastically; and all of that, from our painfully brief-speck vantage point, will just be painful; and we don’t like pain, or even a loss of relative convenience. That’s all.)
The big asterisk sounds nihilistic but really isn’t, even if you phrase it with a Captain Picard cheshire grin: “who cares?” Say, for the sake of argument, that we’ve actually succeeded at ending the ability of our sole home in the universe to support the biological function of all of the multitudinous life on it. Say, ten thousand years from now, alien archaeologists stand on a blasted and blackened husk and wonder why there are so many water bottles here, but no ferns or mollusks. That would be a sad end for us, being a footnote in someone else’s archaeological journal — maybe a journal about the Great Filter theory and how it’s definitely true that by the time a sentient race has the technological forbearance to leave its planet, it either has or has not gained the intellectual maturity to not use those tools to destroy itself; and for us and many others throughout the cosmos, the answer was “has not.”
But then there’s the thirteen billion years of it all. Thirteen billion years. I was reading something recently about life on Earth eleven thousand years ago and it damn near did my head in. Writing a project about stretches of cosmic time colliding with the microscopic spurts of human time has me thinking about these kinds of things rather a lot — positioning myself, I guess, in a long, long, long measuring tape of the things that have happened on this planet during the era of beings like myself, and how we got from phallus temples to liquid bread to here.
And, as I’m sure you’ve seen stated a thousand ways in a thousand contexts by now, that measuring tape is a speck of dust against thirteen billion years. Like, our feeble brains can’t even build comprehensible models of temporal scaling like that. There aren’t a lot of ways you can describe it. Here’s a good one, from John McPhee: “Consider the Earth’s history as the old measure of the English yard, the distance from the king’s nose to the tip of his outstretched hand. One stroke of a nail file on his middle finger erases human history.”
Now, there’s no evidence of life in the SMACS 0723 photo, thousands of galaxies though it contains. No one is waving at us, that we can see. I assume, generously, that there’s plenty of life in that photo, or that plenty of life followed that moment thirteen billion years ago, and that like all life — like all things — it rose; it had its moment (relatively speaking) of struggle; and then died (or became something else). Inhale, exhale. In, out. The swelling, pushing, fucking of the universe, followed by the sighing, calming, resting.
We’ve never been alone out here and now we aren’t even alone in the shape or sweep of the entire parcel of our existence, however long it may last. The infinite cells of the Body Cosmic can not yet talk to one another nor know each other, but there is great comfort in seeing our neighbours and knowing them for ourselves. A king has his reign and then he dies. Inhale, exhale. In, out.