Galactic Perspectives on Humankind

“An interesting, but in the long run, irrelevant accident.”

Those were the terms my father, a nuclear physicist at Yale, sometimes used to describe humanity. I think he did it mostly to tease my mother, an artist, who at that point in the dinner conversation would sigh loudly and refill her martini glass.

My father was also an amateur astronomer, who would have been thrilled by news of the recent discovery of  “the South Pole Wall"  – thousands of galaxies, beehives of trillions of stars and dark worlds, as well as dust and gas” hidden behind our own galaxy, the Milky Way, in the so-called “zone of avoidance”. A collection of matter “so massive that it perturbs the expansion of the universe”. 

Part of me wants to acknowledge the ways in which my father might have been right. Against the scale of the South Pole Wall, humankind is indeed “an interesting accident”… and not all that significant.

But unlike my mother, whom it drove to drink, I find this formulation reassuring. Almost in a spiritual way. I see it as permission to step away from the dramas and crises and urgencies of everyday life to contemplate our individual and collective problems and struggles from the perspective, if not of eternity, then of the Big Bang and the expansion of the universe (which for me is actually easier to get my head around than the construct of eternity). 

It’s not that from the perspective of “a giant curtain arcing across 700 million light years of space” COVID, or Democratic control of the Senate, or global warming don’t matter. It’s that they matter in a different way. In fact, they matter somehow even more, and more urgently, in terms of how they will improve or degrade the quality of human existence -- our lives and those of our fellow human beings -- right here and right now, precisely because our existence on this planet is so transient.

Of course, the Big Bang presents its own set of unanswerable questions: How did it all begin? Where did everything come from?

To which my father, smoking his pipe in the front yard on summer night, squinting through the eyepiece on his reflector telescope, would have responded: 

“Unless you think the universe has an end, why does it need to have a beginning?”