our ironically significant place in the universe
before college, i avoided learning about anything space-related because the sheer scale and eternity of the universe was an unsettling thought. the fact that you could take a picture of the observable at the point you were born and the point you die and the picture would look the exact same was a horrific thought: if our existence is so inconsequential to the universe, then why does anything matter?
a funny meme i once saw that was quite relevant to my experience as a class clown in high school covered the idea of jester’s privilege. when you are always a jokester, it’s quite frustrating to make a point in times of gravity, as everyone in the room still thinks you’re joking.
i spent about a month or two at the end of the fall semester with this sort of existential dread. i emailed my astronomy professor for that semester to discuss these feelings and he presented me with a method of cognitive restructuring similar to our jester. this was the quote he told me:
In the vastness of space and the eternity of time, it is my joy to share a planet and an epoch with you.
he told me that he lives by this quote not only for loved ones, but for acquaintances, enemies, and everyone in between.
according to astronomer michael cox:
As a fraction of the lifespan of the Universe, as measured from it’s beginning to the evaporation of the last black hole, life as we know it is only possible for one-thousandth of a billion billion billionth, billion billion billionth, billion billion billionth, of a per cent. The most astonishing wonder of the Universe isn’t a star or a planet or a galaxy; it isn’t a thing at all—it’s a moment in time. And that time is now.
realizing that our existence is ultimately meaningless is ironically freeing. going back to my remark about taking a picture of the universe on your birth and death day, the same can be applied to negative experiences too. the universe is unbothered when you screw up or when you have a bad day. suddenly, my heart started to race a lot less before i gave presentations in class when i started to fully appreciate this fact of life. you start to appreciate a lot more of the positives and disregard all of the negatives.
another thing i realized while stargazing the night before thanksgiving was the human gift of feeling emotion at all. everyone knows the carl sagan quote about being made out of star stuff, but when you truly stop to appreciate the fact that you are a product of 14 billion years of quarks coming together to form atoms, stars fusing and exploding to form heavier elements, and elements coming to form organic compounds that would eventually evolve into you. we’re all the product of the big bang, so every thought we think and emotion we feel is the universe experiencing itself.
i used to feel a certain sense of dread when reading about the collosal celestial bodies in the universe, such as black holes with masses billions of times greater than the sun, or galaxy clusters where a single pixel was an entire galaxy. that feeling of overwhelming scale was frightening, yet my professor made me realize that despite us not being the most significant masses in the universe, we are special because of our ability to understand. our ability to reason, to feel, and to question makes us separate from everything else in the universe. while we might not have the gravity to suck things in like a blackhole, nor the mass to fuse atoms together, we have the ability to feel excitement, happiness, despair, and heartbreak, all of which are emotions that no star, brown dwarf, neutron star, black hole, or neubla can ever feel.
thus, when i’m on grounds late at night after a discussion section, as a walk on the south lawn and look into the night sky, what once used to cause me immense dread and hopeless now inspires and empowers me. then it all disappears when i get home and start my computer science homework
