“We are perishing for want of wonder, not want of wonders.” – G.K. Chesterton
Look up.
With your naked eye, you can see 2.5 million years into the past. The Andromeda Galaxy is 2.5 million light years away from us, so when we look at it in the night sky, we see it as it was millions of years ago. We see light from stars that died long ago. If someone on Andromeda could zoom in and see Earth, they’d see an Earth without humans—2.5 million years ago, the genus Homo was first emerging. Homo Sapiens wouldn’t be around for another 2 million years.
If we use the Hubble Telescope, our ability to see cosmic ghosts is far greater. In images like the Ultra Deep Field and its successor the Extreme Deep Field, we can see light that is over 13 billion years old, observing galaxies that are theorized to have been created only 450 million years after the Big Bang. Sometimes, I just stare at those images and let myself feel the wonder for a while, savoring it like people savor fine wine.
But your eyes have probably never seen 2.5 million years into the past. In fact, you’ve probably never really seen the stars as they appear from Earth. There’s too much light pollution, so much so that sometimes it seems like you could easily count the stars we can see. Find some dark sky and look up.
Especially in summer, you’ll see an enormous band of light stretching across the sky, so bright you’ll be surprised that it is so often hidden. That’s our galaxy, a collection of stars brought close together by the gravity of a supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s center. We can only see 0.000003% of it,[i] but still—that band of light stretching across the sky is an illustration of the laws of physics in epic proportions.
If you can, spot Orion—look for his belt, easily identifiable, three stars lined up in an even row. He has been a character in human stories for as long as we’ve been recording our observations. The Egyptians thought he was a betrayed man who had been immortalized by his wife in the night sky. The Europeans told a story of him being a great hunter and warrior. A Native American tribe thought he was the man who brought winter.[ii]
When I look up, I feel the clichéd insignificance, but I feel significance too, for I am a creature who can look at those white dots and understand at least a little bit of what I am seeing; I can hold with me the pictures my ancestors saw in the stars but carry with me also the knowledge that the light that I am seeing is often thousands–sometimes millions–of years old and comes from giant spheres of plasma, that it is travelling to me as a particle/wave that I don’t really understand at speeds I can’t imagine but that I am seeing it and processing it as a little white dot, twinkling ever so slightly…
As Carl Sagan observed, “The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.” And, due to incredible circumstantial fortune, this collection of matter has been granted the gift of observation. As Sagan said, “we are a way for the universe to know itself.”
This quote has always brought to my mind a memory of chimpanzee researcher Adrian Kortlandt. “Once,” he said, “I saw a chimpanzee gaze at a particularly beautiful sunset for a full 15 minutes, watching the changing colors, [and then] retire to the forest without picking a pawpaw for supper.”
So much of what we do is base, animalistic. We act to sustain ourselves—seeking nutrition and comfort and safety and progeny. But there is something holy to me in seeing the chimpanzee take a break from that to observe the majesty around him. As humans, our powers of observation are incredibly vast and expanding all the time.
We spend so much time looking at ourselves and the environments that we shape in order to sustain ourselves. We look straight ahead and side to side. We look down to make sure we don’t trip.
But the true meaning in my life has often come from the times in which I’ve looked up.
Ellie Schaack is a Trinity junior. Her column runs every other Monday.
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