Cosmos

I recently finished reading Carl Sagan's wonderful book Comos.  It is filled with a wealth of historical and scientific information.  Sagan has a grand vision of the human race in space, and some of the most interesting parts of the book concern the possibility of contact with another intelligent race in the universe or the possibility of interstellar travel.  These are fascinating concepts and the book goes a long way to inspire awe and wonder at the Cosmos.

Cosmos comes from a Greek word meaning order.  It is the opposite of Chaos.  There is a beautiful orderliness to the universe.  There are fractal patterns: moons orbiting planets orbiting stars orbiting galaxies orbiting each other.  There are billions and billions of stars and galaxies, and the same laws of nature which apply everywhere.  And most wonderful of all there is at least one place in the universe where matter has become alive.  Humans beings, creatures made from matter, from the same protons and electrons that make up the stars and were once in the stars, are conscious and able to ponder their own destiny.  What wonders!

Yet, Dr. Sagan's book is not just a search for order but for meaning.  In fact, this is largely how Sagan views the human endeavor in space.  Our current forays into space parallel the great historical voyages of discovery.  He writes:



The Eagle nebula



The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean.  From it we have learned most of what we know. Recently, we have waded a little out to sea, enough to dampen our toes or, at most, wet our ankles.  The water seems inviting.  The ocean calls.  Some part of our being knows this is from where we came.  We long to return.

If we discover intelligent life on another planet, Sagan thinks we will have a better grasp on what it means to be human.  As we continue to learn about the expanse of the universe, we learn what it means to be live on earth.  We learn that such a habitable world is precious, but that it pales in comparison with the rest of the universe.  As we seek to learn more about the universe, we seek to learn more about ourselves.

Meaning.  Perhaps this is the thing that people are searching for.  We want to know what our lives are all about, what life itself is all about.  When something captures our imagination, be it a sunset, a song, or a beautiful face, and we feel that twinge of restless longing that can never quite be satisfied, it's as if we're on the verge something profound.  It seems like the meaning we are looking for is finally within reach, but, like the end of the rainbow, it always remains just ahead of our outstretched hands.  And so we keep searching.

Thoughts of space, time, and the cosmos are tantalizing.  They are exciting.  They fill us with wonder.  It's tempting to think that we can find the answers to some of life's most persistent questions out there among the stars.  Science has worked wonders and given humans so much.  With it, we have fed the masses, eradicated disease, and traveled around the world and into space.  Science has answered questions about gravity, the lives of animals, and how our own minds work.  What can't science do?  Yet, Palmer Joss (character in the film Contact based on the Sagan novel by the same name) reminds us that "Ironically the thing that people are most hungry for, meaning, is the one thing that science hasn't been able to give them."

No matter how long we listen with our radio telescopes among the stars, no matter how many light-years we travel, no matter how much our hearts ache as we gaze at the night sky, we will never find meaning there.  Sagan is fascinating, inspiring, and uplifting in his book as he searches for order and meaning.  He is also dead wrong.  Science can say nothing about the questions that matter most.  Allow me an example.  It is a scientific fact that if you were randomly inserted anywhere in the universe, the odds that you would be on or near a planet would be less than 1 in 10^33.  The odds that you randomly select a place in the universe where there is life is considerably less, much less intelligent life.  It would be fair to say that beings such as humans are rare.  This is a fact of which modern science makes us acutely aware.  Yet Sagan goes on to write, "Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another." I don't disagree a bit, but his statement is one of pure philosophy.  He assumes that because something is rare it is therefore precious and ought to be preserved.  But mightn't it be the other way around?  Might not humans be like ugly recessive mutations in a universe meant to be perfectly smooth and uniform?  Wouldn't it then be better if we blew our tiny planet up and squashed conciousness out of existence?  Science or nature by itself tells us nothing about the value of our lives.  It's worth repeating here part of the GKC quote from my last post. (I think it rather apt here.  Sorry for the redundancy.)

Nature does not say that cats are more valuable than mice; nature makes no remark on the subject...We think the cat superior because we have (or most of us have) a particular philosophy to the effect that life is better than death. But if the mouse were a German pessimist mouse, he might not think that the cat had beaten him at all. He might think he had beaten the cat by getting to the grave first...It all depends on the philosophy of the mouse. You cannot even say that there is victory or superiority in nature unless you have some doctrine about what things are superior. You cannot even say that the cat scores unless there is a system of scoring. You cannot even say that the cat gets the best of it unless there is some best to be got.

Orthodoxy, Chapter VII, The Eternal Revolution

If Sagan's logical leap from saying that life is rare to saying that life is precious seems natural to you, that is because you and he are both humans.  The conclusion does not come from science, but from the very thing that makes us human.  To paraphrase Pascal, our heart tells us what our reason cannot.  Science is by no means useless in the pursuit of ultimate truth.  The facts of science can challenge our worldview and help us to think in new ways.  Philosophically, it did make a big difference when we realized that the earth was not the center of the universe.  It makes a difference that our universe is big and not small.  It makes a difference that there are beautiful, unexplored worlds out there.  It makes a difference that the human spirit is not bounded to this planet alone.   But these facts only make a difference because humans are humans. We are influenced by the world we inhabit.  At the end of the day, the answers are not going to be found out there, but in the depths of our human hearts.  It is ironic that we should look billions of light years away in search of ourselves.