dark universe

Yesterday, I went to the "Dark Universe" show at the Hayden Planetarium in the Museum of Natural History. In all honesty, I didn't have any expectations about the content, length, or the effect it would have on me, going in. It was a rainy Saturday, my alternative was to sit at home and read or watch TV (not a bad one at that), so I thought, why not make the most out of New York while I'm still here. So I hopped on the C train and went all the way up.

After a long wait first in the ticket sales line, then outside the Planetarium's entrance, we were finally seated towards the centre of the room. The lights went down and Neil deGrasse Tyson's voice initiated what would be quite a spectacular thirty minutes.

The science behind the entire thing was fascinating on its own, but what pushed me to writing this post was the larger picture that it allowed me to see.

I'll talk about two things: the relationship between past and present, and of how insignificant we are.

To put it in the simplest of terms, the stuff we see in the sky are from the past. Not the past as in yesterday, but the past as in billions of years ago. I don't know how that makes you feel, but it boggles my mind.

To think that we're able to see things that belong to a time way before any human walked the earth, and in certain instances, even before the Earth itself was around, just by looking up is a pretty incredible phenomenon. I actually think it's sort of magical.

We're used to thinking that the past is in the past because that's how it is. There is no current remnant of something that happened a second ago. If you cut your finger a second ago, the blood will be there, but you won't relive or re-see the actual cutting of yourself because that moment has passed. That's why we don't see flames and dust near the World Trade Center, grounds cracking in Istanbul from the earthquake in '99, or dinosaurs that are constantly dying when we look around today. We see remnants of all these events, like a memorial where the Twin Tours used to stand, families who still suffer from the loss of their loved ones from the earthquake, and species such as ourselves who were able to survive because dinosaurs didn't. However, we don't see actual physical evidences of any of these events themselves.

That's why I think the sky is so enchanting. It is only when we look up at the stars that we can, at any given current moment, see things that happened billions of years ago. Each star is a visible connection with the past. And that's why nature rules.


The second point I want to make is in regards to how insignificant, we, as humans are in the totality of all that exists. We all like to think of ourselves as the center of the Universe. Not necessarily in a narcissistic way, but rather because our lives are revolved around ourselves; the people we interact with are others, and the events that happen either happen to us, or we perceive them through our own lens. It's the same way in our interactions with outer space. Wherever you are on Earth, it seems like you are at the center of things, when in fact, there is no center to the universe.

We also like to think that we have a great understanding of the world in which we live, as well as an air of collective arrogance because of our ability to figure out the answer to things that were once unknown to us. Since we discovered that the Earth is not flat, what the composition of an atom is, or how Natural Selection works, we are eager to think that we can find answers to anything. Fortunately, that perception is false. All of our discoveries related to outer space, everything we know and discuss and teach each other, all that information makes up only five percent of the entire universe.

Let that sink in for a second.

We, the great species that is the homo sapiens sapiens, the rulers of the Earth, kings of the food chain, only know about 5% of the Universe. The remaining 95% is still a mystery. So you see, we are, for the most part, ignorant about our ignorance, which leaves us in a ludicrous state. The Earth is a tiny speck of dust in a large building filled with sand, and each of us are one in seven billion of that little speck of dust.

We are tiny.

And insignificant.

This is not a pessimistic existential view, but rather a truthful observation of our relative significance in this entirety that is the universe.

Maybe when another civilization living in Galaxy X discovers the Earth a hundred billion years from now, they will study it the way we study things that are relatively unknown to us. Maybe they'll discover that a bipedal species with relatively large brains once walked the Earth, maybe they won't. That is how significant we will be. Nobody will remember who won the war in Afghanistan, how many kids starved to death in Ethiopia, how many people we lost to AIDS, or how great China's economy was in the twenty first century.

These things don't matter.

They are just constructs we've made up to make the world a less liveable place for us all and to occupy ourselves with things that satisfy some of our egos and make most of us suffer during what little time we have to spend on this planet.

If we all just realized how insignificant we are, the world could be a much better place.

Instead of fighting for things that don't matter, we could work together to figure out ways to make this a more tolerable, more enjoyable place to live.

Because, in the end, we're all going to die and the Earth will be no one's to keep.