Putting Things into Perspective

Only a mere 1,000 years ago, men looked up into the night sky and could scarcely see 3,000 stars on a clear night. He observed the sun in the morning coming up in the east and setting in the west, so he naturally assumed that the sun was moving around the earth, which made his world the very center of the universe he knew about. He thought the earth was flat with four corners. Nicolaus Capernicus was the first man to suggest that the earth was not the center of the universe; rather the planet earth and her sister planets orbit around the sun. It would be many years before anyone could guess that our sun is only one of billions of stars and is also not the center of the universe.

Then for hundreds of more years human beings assumed we lived in one single Milky Way galaxy and there were no more galaxies in the universe. This view lasted until January 1, 1925 when Edwin Hubbell discovered the existence of other galaxies. Every time we build a better telescope, we discover more galaxies. Someday we may build a telescope so powerful that we finally see into an empty void; however, that will only last until the light from far distant galaxies have time to reach our world. The light from distant galaxies (traveling at 186,000 miles per second) that we view tonight in the evening sky left their home billions of years ago and are just now reaching planet earth. Our own star, the sun, is relatively small compared to many stars in the universe, and yet it weighs an impressive one thousand trillion trillion tons. In 4 or 5 billion years our sun will explode like the distant star pictured below with the Hubbell Telescope, and all life on earth will become extinct.

A Dying Star

In the end, we are barely beginning to study the universe we live in, but as far out as we can see; we have discovered 10 million superclusters (groups of galaxies). They range in size from 100 to 500 million light years across. There are 25 billion groups of galaxies in the known universe. There are 350 billion galaxies in the universe, and 7 trillion dwarf galaxies (small galaxies with a million to several billion stars and a diameter of 30,000 light years or less). Finally, there are 30 billion trillion (3 X 10²²) stars in the universe. Our little sun and our tiny solar system orbit the center of the massive milky way galaxy every 250 million years. Look at the photos below which just shows a portion of our universe. Be patient, they are high resolution and will take a while to download.

We humans are a part of nature – part of the universe, and nature is vast and expansive more than we can imagine. Humanity must evolve beyond cultural religions and learn to tolerate others or we will destroy ourselves. It seems silly, in light of what we have learned about the universe we live in, that the Supreme Power that animates the vast stretches of the cosmos, would be found only on a tiny, obscure planet 2/3 out from the center of the Milky Way where he had chosen an insignificant little tribe of people and revealed himself to them alone. My existence on this planet is far less than a cosmic heart beat in universe time. Only my self-centered ego gives me any sense of importance or recognition. I have existed forever as part of nature, and I will continue to exist forever as part of nature.

Hundreds of years before Christ an ancient Chinese sage pondered the Supreme Power that animates the world. He did not know what to call this power so he said this; “Something mysterious and perfect existed before even heaven and earth were born. Silent, immeasurable, standing alone and unchanging, moving without end or exhaustion, it is the mother of the known and unknown universe. I don’t know its name, so I call it by an alias: Tao.” Here is how he described that Supreme Power:

Looked at but not seen,

Listened to but not heard,

Grasped for but not held,

Formless, soundless, intangible:

The Tao resists analysis and

Defies comprehension.

It’s rising is not about light,

It’s setting not a matter of darkness.

Unnamable, unending,

Emerging continually,

And continually pouring back into nothingness.

It is formless form, unseeable image,

Elusive, evasive, unimaginable mystery.

(Brian Browne Walker translation of chapter 14 of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, previous quote from chapter 25.)

Perhaps Lao Tzu got it right.

The Photos below are high resolution and they take a while to download, however, they are well worth the wait.

Photo 1: The Milky Way Galaxy, home on planet earth.

Photo 2: Andromeda, Galaxy M31, our closest neighbor galaxy, 2.5 million light years from earth. It is on a collision course with the Milky Way and the two will collide in 2 billion years.

Photo 3: Galaxy M33, 2.9 million light years away.

Photo 4: Galaxy M81, 12 million light years away.

Photo 5: Galaxy M101

Photo 6: In 1995, astronomers pointed the Hubble Space Telescope was pointed to a blank spot in the sky located in the Ursa Major area. The telescope was left untouched for ten days so that time lapse techniques could pick up any light not previously seen. The result was the Hubble Deep Field Image shown here. Every light you see is a galaxy. These galaxies are 5 to 10 billion light years away. The red galaxies are old, and the blue ones are young.