The Cosmos and Me

As a kid I was absolutely enamored by Astronomy. One of the perks of not having cable TV was that when the cartoons were done there was a strong flow of science and nature documentaries always playing. Of these, I was perhaps the most involved with Nova and its spin off shows, and I used to sit for hours at a time in front of the TV, to the chagrin of parents, listening to the soothing voice of the narrator as images of stars, galaxies, and all sorts of awe-inspiring stellar phenomena lit up my screen and my imagination.

Strangely enough, this was still during the time when I wanted to be nothing other than a paleontologist, but a second career option was an astronomer. At the time, I thought they did little else but look through telescopes and have these fantastic pictures of the universe revealed to them. Now I know that astronomy as a career involves a great deal of parsing through data, difficult calculations, and computer programming, and on top of that, the pictures often shown on social media and TV are actually "false-color" images, often translated from other wavelengths of light to transform infrared light into the visible spectrum which we can see. I remember when I first learned about "false-color" I was absolutely crushed.

Despite the saddening realization that almost all the pictures of the universe I'd seen were colored by computers and not reality, I still remained passionate about astronomy. I used to visit the Merrimack College Observatory on Wednesday nights, looking out at fuzzy images of our planets. Once, one of the hosts asked the group how large the Milky Way was, and I answered, "100,000 light years." The host took me aside and told me about a competition for children interested in astronomy, wherein an essay was required depicting our history and love for the field, and if it was well-written enough, we may win a telescope.

I not only won the telescope, I got to attend a "conference" where all the winning kids and their parents sat around a big table and talked about... I don't know exactly what, but it was a good experience. In fact, I even made The Eagle Tribune, though when you're clicking through the pictures please ignore the shirt my mom obviously picked out for me that's two sizes too big, and the clearly just-washed and severely parted hair.

Okay, narcissistic tangent about my career as a public figure aside, nothing fills me with the same mixture of feelings as astronomy. There's the awe of seeing such massive and complex structures at such a distance. There's the comfort of knowing that our world, our star system, and our galaxy are but one of many in an ever-expanding and breathtaking cosmos. Of course, that comes with the sadness of realizing just how big the universe really is, and how even if humanity survives for a hundred thousand more years, it's unlikely we'll explore even a fraction of it. Finally, there's the existential dread which comes when we wonder who exactly we are in such a grand scheme, and whether our lives really matter or have any purpose when we're grains of sand on a grain of sand on a beach the size of a galaxy.

None of these feelings has a "solution", per se. I'm not here to solve the ontological quandary of our existence in the context of God; are we the universe experiencing itself through a network of electrochemical reactions, or is there divinity within our conscious spirit? Certainly an intriguing question, but it's not one I'm equipped to answer right now. Nor am I trying to synthesize the conflict of finding awe, comfort, sadness, and dread, all from the same source. I'll leave that to Hegel.

The last time I was close to the field was in the summer of 2017, when I spent two weeks living at UMass Amherst, taking a class on astronomy. I already knew much of what they taught from years of documentary back-logs stored somewhere in the musty corners of my mind, but it was a valuable experience. Unfortunately, after that I never really felt like diving back into the world of space and time. I was one of the leaders of my school's astronomy club, and while that may have helped me get into college, it was frankly just an excuse for my friends and I to meet in a classroom and joke around for thirty minutes before school, with the occasional astronomy lesson taught, once again, by old-documentary knowledge. Once I started college, the most exposure I had to astronomy was in 2-am conversations with my friends where we marvelled on the scope of the cosmic-scale and wondered if we were really alone.

You'd be fair to ask the obvious question: why am I even bothering with writing this post? Well, recently the James Webb space telescope released its first images, and they rekindled that intrigue which I was sure I'd lost in my years of dereliction. This powerful instrument, so precise and yet so massive, is helping us to understand the secrets of the very space we inhabit, and it can see further back in time than any previous telescope could. Even ignoring the visual splendor of what it's revealing to us, the James Webb telescope provides us a unique philosophical insight into our very being. In fact, even though I have a scientific background, I'm not even sure what questions this beautiful thing may answer. Perhaps questions which haven't even been raised yet.

As I'm writing this at 10-pm on a work-night, some insects are smashing against the window, trying to get to the dining room light. Is that not what we are in the context of the cosmos? Bugs desperately trying to make their way through a frozen barrier of knowledge, which even our "infinite faculty" cannot comprehend? We see a light in the distance beckoning us; a beacon of knowledge and truth, and yet we cannot reach it. No matter how hard we try, we bump into a pane of glass which taunts us ever so by letting us see the light for which we yearn and yet keeping it from us. I won't go so far as to say the James Webb telescope is the hammer to smite the glass, but perhaps it's a pebble we can use it to crack the window just enough to let us see the truth of the light behind. Maybe it's something terrifying we'll witness. Maybe it's something that, when we learn, proves to be the catalyst for our mental undoing, completely breaking our sense of self. Then again, maybe it's something so wondrous that it makes us realize just how lucky we are to be able to see it. That's the hope I'm holding on to, and even if the James Webb telescope provides us with nothing other than some beautiful images of far-distant galaxies and nebulae, it'll at least have reignited my passion to learn about this noble science.

Over the next few weeks, I'll be dedicating some special essays to astronomy. Most of them will be on the philosophical questions I mentioned earlier, and even though I said I'm not ready to answer them, perhaps taking a stab at them won't hurt. I'm also not against making a post or two about some more fun astronomy questions, like my take on aliens, even the ancient variety, and a loony simulation theory I've been cooking up. I'm also hoping that the images the telescope provides can inspire some poetry, and maybe even a short story or two. I know I'm usually not the best about keeping to an upload schedule, but hopefully that'll change soon.