In the latest Harper’s Magazine the physicist and novelist Alan Lightman has an essay on “Our Place in the Universe: Face to Face with the Infinite.” The problem as he sees it is that our science is discovering a larger and larger cosmos. Professional astronomers such as Garth Illingworth  at the University of California at Santa Cruz have used images from the Hubble Space Telescope to view galaxies so far away that their light has been traveling
over 13 billion years to reach us. The distance from Earth adds up to about 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles. Lightman questions whether we as human beings can actually comprehend such enormous expanses of distance and time. “Science has vastly expanded the scale of our cosmos,” he writes, “but our emotional reality is still limited by what we can touch with our bodies in the time span of our lives.” He wonders whether Illingworth and other astronomers can feel connected to this huge cosmic terrain: “Or are such things instead digitized abstractions, silent and untouchable, akin to us only in their makeup of atoms and molecules?” In other words, can we only comprehend and feel we are a part of the same reality with the cosmos when we reduce it all through physics to basic particles?

Lightman quantifies our existence within the cosmos in another way, a way that makes us seem like a random, insignificant detail in the general cosmological scheme of things: the totality of living matter on Earth—everything
from human beings to the scum floating on a pond—accounts for 0.00000001 percent of the amount of the mass of the planet, and based on the best research we have at the moment for the potential for life-sustaining environments elsewhere in the universe, that number for living matter in the universe amounts to 0.000000000000001 percent of the mass of the universe.  A very small number indeed. Beyond insignificant in fact. Yet such reductionism  doesn’t actually help our understanding of our place in the cosmos. 

It’s more relevant, Lightman implies, to look at our personal experience. The physicist both begins and ends his essay remembering an experience he once had of “infinity” when he was sailing on the Aegean Sea. He and his wife found themselves in  a place where they could look fully around themselves and see neither land nor any other boats. Just water and sky. It was then that he realized some sense of infinity: “a sensation I had not experienced before, accompanied by feelings of awe, fear, sublimity, disorientation, alienation, and disbelief.” And with that moment of insight he understood more about what it means to be human in this vast universe than all the numbers and digital images of far away galaxies could ever convey to him.  So perhaps we can only be truly at home in the universe, not by intellectualizing it or analyzing it, but just by settling right in and fully experiencing it.

Back to my blog after some professional and personal interruptions. I thought I’d begin again by talking about the way many people so readily embrace the new technologies that stream out of software and hardware  companies and into their lives. Most dismiss objections about the changes in our lives, in our relationships—indeed in our brains— that those new technologies may trigger.  For better or worse, it’s inevitable, people say. Stopping the changes, or even the rate of change, is impossible now. Many pundits and members of the digerati enjoy not just defining the current trends but also predicting the future, whether it be the next new thing or a broad vision of social change over the upcoming twenty years or more.

But is it all inevitable? I recently came across another take on the issue of inevitability and the impossibility of stopping the relentless march of change over time. In Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, the narrator reflects on the consensus in his intellectual circle in Munich that as the 1930s unfolded, Germany was in for “hard and dark times
that would scoff at humanity, for an age of great wars and sweeping revolution, presumably leading far back beyond the Christian civilization of the Middle Ages and restoring instead the Dark Ages that preceded its birth and had followed the collapse of antiquity.”

Yet Mann’s narrator observes that no one objected to those conclusions. No one said this dark version of the future must be changed, must be avoided. No one said: ”We must somehow intervene and stop this from happening.” Instead they reveled in the cleverness of their insights, in their recognition of the facts and their inevitable results. They said: “’It’s coming. It’s coming, and once it’s here we will find ourselves at the crest of the moment. It is interesting, it is even good—simply because it is what is coming, and to recognize that fact is both achievement and enjoyment enough. It is not up to us to take measures against it as well.’”

It is a predicament well worth remembering, I believe, as we listen to our own technology enthusiasts. Our dark age ahead my not have death camps and atomic bombs but it has the possibility of being just as pernicious and inhumane. It could well be a time where in celebrating the wonders of technology we ignore what is the best essence of what it means to be human. We would do well to consider our choices while we still can.