How Deep Can We Look?

This video about launching the new James Webb Space Telescope got me thinking about the so-called ‘vast emptiness of the void’. I remember reading Sartre and Camus, the French existentialist, especially Satre’s Nausea, while living in Barcelona. I’d walk to a nice plaza with some great trees and open air but with some kind of enclosure and privacy from prying eyes of the dreaded other, and I’d read all day. Nausea had me pacing the streets, walking in the crowded busy strip of Las Ramblas, oblivious to any person around me. I’d walk and read, looking up only every once in a while, to check my surroundings, looking for anyone I thought could relate to this book gripping me by the heart and soul. I desperately sought refuge from this something making me almost keel over with a throbbing anxiousness in my gut.

I think I read that book in a couple days span, and I was so happy when I finished it. Nausea is a fiction novel about a French writer who is completely terrified of his own existence; thus, Sartre’s famous quote, “Hell is other people”. All this is to say, when peering into the void of one’s own existence it can feel completely lonely, especially after ruling out any kind of solace through others here on Earth. Us humans are big-minded and too big for our own good. With just a glance to the heavens we conquer planets and whole galaxies. We traverse the universe and set up commerce with each look to the stars.

”Everything is better in space. There are no people there. It could be all mine.” I’ve had this thought on a time or two. I’d dare posit that Sartre’s miseries were actually his own projections of misconception of the universe and our ‘alone-ness’ in this world. It certainly chills my bones to think there’s nothing out there; that this is it. I’d love to get away to another planet, my own planet! Even the Mormons have their planets. Kolab for Joseph Smith and then if you’re good here on this planet during this life, you’ll get your own planet too someday. Maybe we all want to be the Little Prince. Maybe, and we can only hope, the universe out there is devoid of any grown-ups and their seemingly useless perspectives.

I fear this misunderstanding of alone-ness and this vastness, is a slippery slope. Sounds an awful lot like “A land without a people for a people without a land,” an idea propagated by during the establishment of Isarel in the Palestinian lands. The repercussions of this ideology are still being felt by billions of people today. Should we gaze into the universe with such anxious abandon as well? Should we search for a new home as if the entire plane of existence is up for grabs?

The catch 22 here is that in our search for other life there is a tendency to disregard that life itself in favor of an expansion of ‘our own life’. It is as if to satisfy the urge to expand in order to quell this feeling of alone-ness and to find purpose, we rule out the existence of an other and so cannot see their unique perspective. The boa constrictor digesting an elephant being mistaken for a hat is a prime example of this logical fallacy. Take into account the way the so-called New World was ‘conquered’. The collective mirada of the ‘old world’ was skewed and misunderstood as they gazed westward toward riches, fortune and fame, and where they looked for intelligent life, they found none. With all the technology, weapons, resources and collective knowledge of the old world, there was still no ‘intelligent life’ to be found in the new world. There was no companionship with the peoples already living there. No willingness nor openness to the new ways and new life they sought that was now right in front of them. There was only a willingness to expand what they already knew. To expand the collective consciousness that had sent them forth into the unknown. To quench the desires of their hearts and mind; desires born from the old world, the old life, the old way. Desires so strong that one could overlook the urges for change, so strong that one could be convinced the old way was actually good, but there just wasn’t enough space. Now with more space, that no one is using, the collective consciousness goes about remaking anew the old way until the new world looks an awful lot like the old one. The cognitive dissonance is astounding. The reality of moving to the new world was that you definitely could, and would, get a new life, but it would be a new life made up of the already existing life there, and not this idealized version of a completely free and clean slate to create the ideal life that depends on a vast void and the non-existence of every other being but oneself.

For me it is very lonely to look to the stars with hopes of expanding my pocketbook. It’s utter tragedy. If one were to look out into the universe with this misunderstanding, it is no wonder why we are not contacting life. It is as if the predator stalks the forest seeking only one thing; kill, consume, repeat.

While looking away from this planet, searching for meaning and companionship, you see only unintelligible light. A few stars, the sun and the moon. Nothing that actually helps one feel any more less alone in this world. But why is this the popular way of looking at it? If we (whatever collective action is driving this 10-billion-dollar gamble) have reached a point in our technological advancement and are looking far beyond the reaches of the Hubble Telescope, is this all just a manifestation of our collective and global loneliness? Do we reach farther into space and in turn further within ourselves with each look deeper and deeper into existence as an attempt to quell some feeling of aloneness in the face of the vast void of space and human existence? Are we only searching for more resources that fit the economic schematics of this planet?

One scientist in the first linked video here says looking into the past, to the beginning of our existence and the start of the universe is possible with this new telescope. When the James Webb telescope sees into the deepest regions of space, it will actually be picking up light from the first events of the so-called ‘big bang’. She says the light the telescope can see will have traveled 13.5 billion years across the galaxy to reach us. To many, including me, and I assume the collective action toward more knowledge of space in general, it is absolutely unbelievable that there is NOT other life out there. The vastness of 13.5 billion years is as misunderstood by the laymen as the vast wealth of billionaires. The exponential distance between the two points is utterly incomprehensible. At 38 years old, I’ve lived only a fraction of the total time the universe has existed; 0.0000002814814815% of that time. For some perspective, that would be like buying Bitcoin before it was born and then cashing out as a billionaire (not a just a millionaire) this last year when it hit all-time highs close to $70,ooo per coin. A little bit of math and using the percentage of time I’ve been alive versus the 13.5 billion years the universe has existed, buying one dollar worth the crypto at that fractional price would yield you over 3.5 million shares. Multiply that by the high value of the coin this year at just over $68K and that’s roughly $238,000,000,000 (that’s billion), a profit of 237 billion, 999 million, 999 thousand, nine-hundred and ninety-nine dollars. Incredible. If you spent just a penny on your investment, in this scenario, you still come out a billionaire with just a measly $2,380,000,000. That’s how big the universe is, as we know it.

At the request of astronomer Carl Segan, Voyager I turned around to face Earth at the end of its journey, some 6 billion kilometers from Earth and took a last photograph. This was in 1990. The photograph is named the Pale Blue Dot and further lends a feeling of aloneness in the world. Last year astronomers located the farthest known galaxy, some estimated 13.5 billion kilometers from Earth, and still no sign of life? Unbelievable. How could this be? Is my wish to believe just a primitive coping mechanism? When I look out into the stars, I do not feel alone. I feel connected to something greater; something whole and I’m excited to see if this 10 Billion Dollar Gamble pays off. I hope we can render enough pixels to see deeper into the planets and solar systems so far away.

Still with this wonderful new telescope, more detailed photographs are surely forthcoming, but is it just another study of the physical? As we look for an other are we looking in the wrong place? In the game Minecraft the process of rendering a 3D world was complicated to implement. The data alone was unsustainable. The solution involved not rendering the world in its totality. If we continue to seek within the confines of this 3D reality, are we not at the whim of the same struggle a Minecraft character would have if it were to suddenly become sentient and seek for the user who plays the game? The two places, or spaces are totally distinct and separated by some vast void.

Tesla had said, “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence”, and here again we see this exponential vastness between two points. Looking into the stars are we still looking for a physical manifestation of what the-collective-we thinks they are looking for?