Things to Think About While Watching the Stars
I was recently outside at night in Sacramento and I had nothing else to do, so I decided to do a little star watching. These are just some things that I thought about while gazing above:
* The stillness of everything. We live in a dynamic world where everything is changing and moving, but the stars creep ever so slowly as the night goes on. Even our beloved movies have sped up, thanks to music video and 24-style hyper fast editing. You know, where you only hold a shot for a fraction of a second before cutting to something else for the sake of keeping you on your feet. It’s almost meditative to look at them and slow your pace down to the turn of the earth. If you have a telescope with a good enough eyepiece you can look at a star in the sky and literally (well, implicitly) see the Earth turn as the star wanders out of view.
* Since stars are so far away odds are if you’re looking at one, people in most other parts of the world where it’s dark can see the very same star you’re looking at at the very same time. Well, okay, not if you look at ones near the horizon (unless you’re at a pole), but you get the idea. We used to have to send letters to share something with someone else, then we had telephones and could share our voices instantly, and now we have text and internet, but it seems so very dehumanizing to turn things into a digital signal. You can experience the very light that someone else is experiencing in Jamaica at the very same time (well, almost, speed of light issues and all…). It’s like watching the same television screen in the same room, except the room is the universe and the t.v. is projected onto the night sky (Oh what a modern world we live in where I fall back on making analogies to television to better express thoughts on nature).
* Similarly, humans have seen these very stars in (almost) these same positions for thousands and thousands of years. Ramses of Egypt, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Lincoln, Einstein, all looked up at the sky and saw these same light sources providing Earth with a free preview of the universe. The same balls of plasma millions of miles away were seen by our ancestors. Isn’t that somewhat comforting? In the same way that inevitably dying isn’t necessarily bad, because after all Shakespeare did it, he’s in the club. Who would be irked to be in a club with Shakespeare?
* Light pollution is obnoxious and most people don’t realize how bad the problem is. This is probably because they never look up at the sky. Just a few minutes drive out of town reveals a whole different ballpark. It’s like upgrading from a 10″ tv/VCR combo to a majestic HDTV with wifi netflix access (Damn, another TV similie). Shakespeare didn’t have to worry about light pollution…
* The light you see is thousands and millions of years old. The photons that hit your eye were emitted by nuclear fusion and other processes in other stars far away so very very long ago. You’re looking into the past yet it feels immediately present, because anything occurring in your frame of reference is the present for you (well, not quite, since signals take time to travel in your brain). Space is so much more complicated than it seems. Rather than having three directions up, straight, and to the side, there’s also the invisible dimension of time which makes it so much more abstract than was thought for thousands of years. The fact that this is reality is somewhat mind boggling.
* Flip flop sandals are made of suspiciously cheap rubber that easily chafe your feet. This problem needs to be rectified. We have man made hunks of metal and wire flying around Saturn that you can’t see when you look at it with a telescope (which is quite beautiful), things that teams of hundreds with PhDs spent years building, and the world has yet to see an affordable, comfortable flip flop sandal.
* The statistical unlikeliness of our being able to look up at the stars and think these thoughts is so extraordinarily high that it’s actually outside of the realm of statistics since we wouldn’t be able to ask the question if we weren’t here in the first place. In other words, well, from our perspective the probability of the universe’s laws working to build us up from the primordial ether is exactly 1, since we are here.
* The amount of effort that goes into manufacturing a rubber flip flop sandal is enormous yet veiled by the convenience of the modern world. Think about the years of research and design for the most comfortable foot wear: someone had to design the machines to build them, someone had to design the parts to make the machines, someone had to mine the metal and process the metal to make the machines, someone had to ship the metal to make the machines, someone had to design the trucks to ship the metal, someone had to design the machines to build the trucks to ship the metal, someone had to investigate labor practices to produce cheap sandals, someone had to operate the machines, someone had to evolve from a common ancestor with the chimpanzees to first lead us humans on this quest, this never ending evolutionary cycle that inevitably led to the creation of these god awful, uncomfortable, chafing rubber flip flop sandals.
