So God is off the hook. No more questions, no more arguments.
Thanks to Sruti’s book, The Hidden Value of Not Knowing, I realize that I cannot approach God with logic and reason in the same way like I always did. This revelation sure has drawn me out from the dark recesses of my underground spiritual maze. But I am yet to reach that questionless sunny meadow in my spiritual path where I can declare myself as thy done, because the upgrade that has happened now is only an intellectual realization and not an experiential one. So until a complete transformation happens, questions are bound to persist, if not about the imponderable Creator Himself, then at least about His creations, namely, the universe, earth, life, and humans.
Anyone who stares up at the black tarp filled with uncountable pinpoints of brightness is likely to wonder with reverence about the how and why of our cosmos. I too have done this staring thing a few times in my life and coupling this sense of awe with my inability to reconcile with the current events of the world, I am starting to wonder if humanity’s relationship with this magnificent universe is like that of a marriage – a forced marriage to be precise where the universe is the beautiful, wealthy, and intelligent bride while we humans are the lousy, broken, dimwit of a groom who wouldn’t realize just how lucky he is until he has one foot in the grave.
In order to justify my bellyache, let me borrow a few highlights from the most original story ever told – the story of our universe. But first, a disclaimer – the scientific information to follow is simply an echo of what has already been widely hypothesized, asserted, and deduced by experts and enthusiasts in the field and not an independent revelation of my own. I wish it were, but it’s not. I am simply assimilating the knowledge, piecing things together, and wondering about the bigger picture, the same as others.
Size and scope
Cosmologists talk about something called the observable universe, which is the limited stretch of space in the entire universe that we are able to observe from our vantage on earth. The size of this observable universe is estimated to be some 93 billion light-years wide. To get a handle on what this number means, let’s consider the following:
- One light-second is the time taken by light to travel 186,282 miles in one second. In other words, in just one second, light would have gone around the earth’s equator seven and a half times.
- The distance between earth and our moon is 1.3 light-seconds. This meager number actually means that the moon is so far from the earth that all of the inner planets along with the behemoths Jupiter and Saturn could be accommodated comfortably in the space between the earth and the moon. Considering the size of Jupiter, which is big enough to fit an entire earth within its red spot alone, 1.3 light-seconds is clearly not a meager but a mammoth distance.
- The ‘morning star’ Venus which is seen as a bright dot to unaided eyes is an average of 6 light-minutes away; and the recently booted out Pluto some 300 light-minutes away.
- Our vast solar system with sun as its star is only two light-years wide and it sits off center in the Milky Way galaxy along with billions of other stars, some of which are 100 time the size of our sun.
- There are more galaxies than there are stars in our observable universe. This is to say that if we held up a grain of sand against the sky, there would be 10,000 galaxies in that tiny space occupied by the grain of sand.
In simpler terms, the size of our earth in relation to the observable universe is equivalent to the size of a virus in our solar system. And out of some 100,000 galaxies in this 93 billion light-years of vastness of our observable universe that our super telescopes and SETI signals have snooped on, it has been concluded that we are the only intelligent life.
Take a moment to let that settle in.
It is pretty spectacular that we, the humans, are here as a part of this vast, seemingly edgeless universe. But more importantly, it is spectacular that we are even here despite this vast, seemingly edgeless universe.
Odds of odds
Our cosmos is not exactly a serene expanse of soft, twinkling dots, but rather a constant churn of violent explosions and extreme conditions. Stars are converting massive amounts of matter into energy every second with just one gram of such energy equating to an atomic bomb; and at the end of its life, the star undergoes an epic explosion called supernova where its planets that were not already fried during this stellar death are flung into the far reaches of the space to float as lonely orphans of the galaxy, aka rogue planets. Then there are gamma ray bursts, quasars, and supermassive black holes with extreme gravitational fields posited at the center of each galaxy that shred everything in its vicinity, including entire stars, and warp the very space and time in such a powerful manner that even light cannot escape.
Compared to this cataclysmic dance of the cosmos, a volcanic eruption here on Earth would seem like a soft hiccup, an intense hurricane rather like a gentle sigh, and the fracture from an earthquake like the hint of a smile on mother earth’s face.
Conditions within our solar system aren’t all that homey either. In relation to the violent universe, our solar system may seem relatively calm, but if dead is considered as calm, then our solar system is calmer than calm except for the one blue orb blustering with life.
So despite all of this chaos, despite having every odd in the system stacked against us to dizzy heights, we are here because life appeared on earth and evolved in our favor. But this feat of nature did not happen just because the preferred chemicals were readily available or the primordial soup was bubbling at the right temperature, but rather because life intended to happen.
Gumption of Life
The first form of life appeared on earth as single-celled organisms four billion years ago. How a bunch of chemicals reacting with electrical charge created an organic living cell is nothing short of an evolutionary magic show that scientists are still scratching their heads about. But when these single-celled organisms came into existence, they came with awareness.
These separate cells had skin-like membranes that had the ability to discern everything they came in contact with in the environment. Every time they encountered an atom or a mineral they had to make an informed decision – whether to allow the guest in or seal it out, whether it is food for the cell or a foe that could mean destruction. Over the next millions of years they interacted with other cells, learned patterns, exchanged information, and organized themselves into communities, eventually paving way for the evolution of multicellular organisms like fishes, reptiles, dolphins, and humans.
Now these cells could have remained complacent, happy in their tiny homes, interacting with other molecules only for sustenance. But they took a risk. They opened up to other cells to consolidate, organize, and restructure their protein and diversified the genes to create newer species in the evolutionary chain. The early cells from which all other life forms emerged had the kind of consciousness that was pro-life.
Why did these early cells assume this purpose? It would be wrong to egocentrically think that it was maybe ‘for our sake’ but truth is that whatever the purpose was, we are somehow the beneficiaries of it. Not just these cells, but even our early earth and the universe despite its coldness and chaos seemed to have been pro-life.
For example, it is a fact that the earth has to maintain a very narrow range of surface temperature in order to sustain life. During the four billion years when life was slowly emerging, the sun was also undergoing nuclear fusion that made its temperature increase by 25 percent which was fatal for life. But the earth adapted to this increase by drawing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through photosynthesis and cooling itself down to maintain that narrow range of temperature, thus allowing life to flourish. Planet earth was not just a mute, rocky platform for life but it was a complex and dynamic entity that was pro-life.
Since big bang, the universe has been constantly expanding, in fact faster now than expected. While talking about the expansion rate of the universe, scientist Stephen Hawking calculated that if the universe’s rate of expansion immediately after the big bang had been even one millionth of one percent slower, the universe would have re-collapsed on itself and formed into a black hole; and had it expanded one millionth of one percent quicker, the universe would have exploded, which means no life and no humans. The universe was expanding at the exact rate required to cause the protons and neutrons to collide with each other to form hydrogen and helium, make gravity to form stars and galaxies from clouds of gas, and eventually, enable life to come forth.
Perspective
We are a speck of dust in this massive universe, both in size and span. Given the number of stars, scientists have estimated that a supernova explosion happens every second in the universe, but the last supernova that humans saw was 400 years ago. So in the time it takes for universe to snap its fingers, we humans would have lived and died five different lives. Astrophysicist Neil Degrasse Tyson beautifully explains that if earth’s history was reduced into a 24-hour time period, we humans would have appeared on earth in the final 30 seconds of the last hour. We are insignificant than a speck of dust that we shouldn’t even be registering on the universe’s radar.
Yet it seems as if all of these colossal players – the universe, gravity, dark matter, stars, galaxies, and the earth – set the rules of their game keeping us in mind. Life meant for us to be spectacular when it started its creative endeavor with single-celled organisms, spanned over millions of years, and reached its masterstroke with us humans. We are life’s magnum opus for we can contemplate life itself. We think, and therefore the universe is.
Such is the legacy that the universe and life have handed down to humans. But what do we do in return?
We airstrike an innocent child, wipe out this family in the blink of an eye, and prop him in the back of an ambulance covered in blood and dust too shocked to even cry. We watch from the sidelines as macho patriotism rationalizes war and capitalism while famine and poverty still prevail in many countries. We destroy habitats and make species become extinct at a rate 100 times more than the natural rate of extinction. We are anti-life. We are quick to becoming the universe’s lost cause.
Have we always been anti-life? At what point did humanity’s genuine efforts to combat overpopulation and enable industrial advancements become one step too far that our own progress landed us elbow deep in deforestation charges and irreversible climate change? Was it when we moved away from nature in the name of urbanization that we started to care less for our biosphere and its life-supporting delicate balance? Or was it when biological phrases like natural selection and survival of the fittest became more of a requirement for sociopolitical grudge matches among world leaders? Are we pawns of the state or is the state misguided by our apathy. Human-induced climate change and loss of biosphere integrity are said to have started only in the last 60 years. But a passing glance at our history would reveal the bloody smears left by war-induced massacres and genocides by every civilization, with a more strategized version of it still continuing today. So why are we so anti-life?
Truth is that individuals are capable of kindness but as a collective whole, we have too many differences that in the short run keeps us at loggerheads with each other while in the long run pushes humanity over the brink of self destruction. It is for this reason that throughout time the true leaders of our world have emphasised on one quality as the binding thread that would save humanity. It was not loyalty, power or honor but simple compassion – a certain kindness, love and awareness toward other life forms and our own.
Maybe we don’t have to owe earth anything. The earth doesn’t expect any favors from us either. Global warming and deforestation will be a big blow for humans for sure, but the earth is resilient. If it had managed to survive ice ages and mass extinctions before, it will sail right through our environmental excesses and mistakes too. But we certainly owe it to life because life did not put million years of work and perfection so we can destroy each other. Life did not make us capable of reason and compassion just so we could set them aside on a golden pedestal as abstract virtues.
In five billion years, our sun will burn out bringing with it the last for humanity. The universe will keep writing newer chapters in its original story. Stars will be destroyed and stars will be made. Life will find a way to carry on with or without us. But when the curtain finally comes down, when our stellar death knocks on our doors, would we have left behind a stellar chapter for the universe or would we just be a ripped page?
