So widely spaced are the stars in our neighborhood that the four spacecraft that already left the Solar System or are about to leave it, won’t enter another star system for 10^20 years. Think about that: A trillion is only 10^12, not even close to 10^20. Let me write it out: 10^20 years = 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. Such is the space in Space. However, Coryn Bailer-Jones and Davide Farnocchia have determined that the two Pioneers and two Voyagers will, over the next million years, come “relatively” close to ten stars—if one considers two parsecs close (a parsec is 3.26 light years, or 19 trillion miles).* Pioneer 10 will pass within 0.231 parsecs (4.389 trillion miles—less than one LY) of the star HIP 117795 in the constellation Cassiopeia in about 90,000 years.**
What’s new here? Anyone aware of just basic astronomy knows that the galaxy is big and the universe even bigger (waaaay bigger, to use the technical term). That volume of space in Space does provide us with a choice about how we view ourselves: 1) We are insignificant. That’s how tiny we are. And our insignificance is demonstrated by our isolation in the Waaaay Big. 2) We are significant because, in all we know, together we are the only representative of the universe’s matter and energy that is conscious of itself. Everything “out there” in the space of Space of the Waaaay Big is meaningless wasteland.
Those two views, in turn, provide us with two attitudes: 1) Nothing really matters; life on Earth, however meaningful it appears to be for conscious entities like us, is essentially just a brief unplanned experiment in a temporary cooperation engendered by molecules, a manifestation of a Sartrean dream. 2) Everything really matters, given the complexity of arrangements that produced us in 13.8 billion years of cosmic history and 4.5 billion years of Earth history. This is the most significant time in the history of Everything only because we can say it is the most significant time in the history of Everything. We might be tiny and isolated, but because we know we are tiny and isolated, we give meaning to All There Is. Other life-forms with varying levels of consciousness can’t do what we do, that is, to think in terms of what isn’t, in terms of comparison, or in terms of a place in Space. Here in this place, this planet you call home, there is meaning. And if you decide to travel to Mars, you will carry meaning and significance with you.
Having been born on a tiny rocky planet in this galaxy might, for some, seem to be a simple matter of fate. Those who think so would grant powers to the stars to say, using the stars as representatives of Determinism, that we owe what we are to the stars. And any problems we have—diseases like cancer and behaviors like war—are the product of a deterministic world that once positioned us in time and space, imposed destiny forever. The fault, they, like novelist John Green, would say lies in our stars in a universe determined at its outset. We could argue thus that we are fated to be what we are.
But consider what we’ve become in light of what our cousin species didn’t become.*** Consider all that we have accomplished in just a few hundred thousand years, but essentially and most spectacularly in just the last 6,000 years, a period not even close to the time it will take for one of those spacecraft to actually “fall into” the gravitational well of another solar system. While the Pioneeers and the Voyagers wander about in meaningless emptiness, we will continue to do what we do better than any other entity in the Cosmos: Fill in all the spaces in all the places in this little rocky ball with meaning that we can discover or invent and then impose upon the future, just as our recent ancestors have imposed meaning upon us while our planet traveled through the galaxy hitched to the chariot we call the Sun.
If Fate played any role in our lives in addition to a chance heritage of genetic composition and a biological affinity for health or illness and relative abilities, it was in providing us with the ability to question Destiny and arguably change it. Did the Fates, the Stars, conspire to imbue us with an ability to make the meaningless meaningful and to make them meaningful only to the degree that we wish them to be so? Even if we differ only in degree and not in kind from our extinct hominin cousins, there is little to compare in their quite-by-chance limited “accomplishments” and our planned alterations to the planet and our conscious alterations to the meaning of meaning itself.
“But what if HIP 117795 is teeming with consciousness?” one might ask. Is it possible that in the Grand Scheme we are not alone in struggling with a definition of or a meaning for existence? Sure. With hundreds of billions of planets in the Milky Way and possibly a couple trillion galaxies each with millions to billions to trillions of planets, we might not live on the only place where the universe is conscious of itself and wondering, “Who or what am I?”
From what Bailer-Jones and Farnocchia tell about the chances of encountering any similar consciousness, we can conclude that we are, in fact and for all practical purposes, a solitary intelligence and the sole consciousness that can discover whether or not we are insignificant or significant. Our apparent isolation makes a good argument for significance by uniqueness, at least for the next 10^20 years when those four spacecraft have their chance encounters with another solar system. Unfortunately, in “only” 5 X 10^9 years, the Sun and Earth will no longer exist as they do now, the former turning to red giant and the latter to a cinder in the giant’s outermost layer or to a charred missile blasted into the space in Space, chasing after the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft, the Earth itself doomed to wander through the Milky Way on its own for 10^20 lonely years. In that physical destiny we can, in fact, find fault in our stars.
The stars haven’t conspired to make us what we are beyond basic intelligence. We conspire to make the meaningless stars meaningful. Even in myth, we make meaning. Take that “W” of stars in the sky, the location of HIP 117795. Regardless of there being no actual connection among the points of light that make up the constellation Cassiopeia, the ancient Greeks imposed a connection and meaning upon them. And today, we still accept their connection as a guidepost to find other stars, such as HIP 117795, the destined location toward which Pioneer 10 is headed.
Until we entered the Waaaay Big, it was void of meaning. Maybe it was in our stars to be by chance individually more or less healthy, more or less talented, more or less long lived, or more or less capable of understanding, but in one respect we all share a unifying significance in our consciousness and our ability to impose meaning on what would otherwise be a meaningless Cosmos.
*Yirka, Bob. 27 Dec 2019. Calculating the time it will take spacecraft to find their way to other star systems. Phys.org. https://phys.org/news/2019-12-spacecraft-star.html
Accessed December 28, 2019. Coryn A. L. Bailer-Jones and Davide Farnocchia Published 2019 April 5 • © 2019. The American Astronomical Society.
Research Notes of the AAS, Volume 3, Number 4
**For comparison consider the dwarf planet Pluto recently photographed by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft. As it travels its orbit, it ranges from 2.6 to 4.6 billion miles from Earth, and New Horizon, which left Earth in 2006, didn’t get there until 2015. A trillion is a thousand billion. So, HIP 117795’s gravity won’t capture the spacecraft as it goes by. No Cassiopeians will see the tiny spacecraft in their telescopes. “Hey, is that a UFO?” Anyway, the star is too faint to see from Earth without a telescope; but if you want to look toward the “W-shaped” constellation on some clear night, the star can be located at the coordinates of Declination +59d 56` 42.1 and Right Ascension 23h 53m 19.75. It’s a reddish orange star within, but not part of, the constellation.
***See my essay for 12/27/2019 entitled “Ngandong.”
What’s new here? Anyone aware of just basic astronomy knows that the galaxy is big and the universe even bigger (waaaay bigger, to use the technical term). That volume of space in Space does provide us with a choice about how we view ourselves: 1) We are insignificant. That’s how tiny we are. And our insignificance is demonstrated by our isolation in the Waaaay Big. 2) We are significant because, in all we know, together we are the only representative of the universe’s matter and energy that is conscious of itself. Everything “out there” in the space of Space of the Waaaay Big is meaningless wasteland.
Those two views, in turn, provide us with two attitudes: 1) Nothing really matters; life on Earth, however meaningful it appears to be for conscious entities like us, is essentially just a brief unplanned experiment in a temporary cooperation engendered by molecules, a manifestation of a Sartrean dream. 2) Everything really matters, given the complexity of arrangements that produced us in 13.8 billion years of cosmic history and 4.5 billion years of Earth history. This is the most significant time in the history of Everything only because we can say it is the most significant time in the history of Everything. We might be tiny and isolated, but because we know we are tiny and isolated, we give meaning to All There Is. Other life-forms with varying levels of consciousness can’t do what we do, that is, to think in terms of what isn’t, in terms of comparison, or in terms of a place in Space. Here in this place, this planet you call home, there is meaning. And if you decide to travel to Mars, you will carry meaning and significance with you.
Having been born on a tiny rocky planet in this galaxy might, for some, seem to be a simple matter of fate. Those who think so would grant powers to the stars to say, using the stars as representatives of Determinism, that we owe what we are to the stars. And any problems we have—diseases like cancer and behaviors like war—are the product of a deterministic world that once positioned us in time and space, imposed destiny forever. The fault, they, like novelist John Green, would say lies in our stars in a universe determined at its outset. We could argue thus that we are fated to be what we are.
But consider what we’ve become in light of what our cousin species didn’t become.*** Consider all that we have accomplished in just a few hundred thousand years, but essentially and most spectacularly in just the last 6,000 years, a period not even close to the time it will take for one of those spacecraft to actually “fall into” the gravitational well of another solar system. While the Pioneeers and the Voyagers wander about in meaningless emptiness, we will continue to do what we do better than any other entity in the Cosmos: Fill in all the spaces in all the places in this little rocky ball with meaning that we can discover or invent and then impose upon the future, just as our recent ancestors have imposed meaning upon us while our planet traveled through the galaxy hitched to the chariot we call the Sun.
If Fate played any role in our lives in addition to a chance heritage of genetic composition and a biological affinity for health or illness and relative abilities, it was in providing us with the ability to question Destiny and arguably change it. Did the Fates, the Stars, conspire to imbue us with an ability to make the meaningless meaningful and to make them meaningful only to the degree that we wish them to be so? Even if we differ only in degree and not in kind from our extinct hominin cousins, there is little to compare in their quite-by-chance limited “accomplishments” and our planned alterations to the planet and our conscious alterations to the meaning of meaning itself.
“But what if HIP 117795 is teeming with consciousness?” one might ask. Is it possible that in the Grand Scheme we are not alone in struggling with a definition of or a meaning for existence? Sure. With hundreds of billions of planets in the Milky Way and possibly a couple trillion galaxies each with millions to billions to trillions of planets, we might not live on the only place where the universe is conscious of itself and wondering, “Who or what am I?”
From what Bailer-Jones and Farnocchia tell about the chances of encountering any similar consciousness, we can conclude that we are, in fact and for all practical purposes, a solitary intelligence and the sole consciousness that can discover whether or not we are insignificant or significant. Our apparent isolation makes a good argument for significance by uniqueness, at least for the next 10^20 years when those four spacecraft have their chance encounters with another solar system. Unfortunately, in “only” 5 X 10^9 years, the Sun and Earth will no longer exist as they do now, the former turning to red giant and the latter to a cinder in the giant’s outermost layer or to a charred missile blasted into the space in Space, chasing after the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft, the Earth itself doomed to wander through the Milky Way on its own for 10^20 lonely years. In that physical destiny we can, in fact, find fault in our stars.
The stars haven’t conspired to make us what we are beyond basic intelligence. We conspire to make the meaningless stars meaningful. Even in myth, we make meaning. Take that “W” of stars in the sky, the location of HIP 117795. Regardless of there being no actual connection among the points of light that make up the constellation Cassiopeia, the ancient Greeks imposed a connection and meaning upon them. And today, we still accept their connection as a guidepost to find other stars, such as HIP 117795, the destined location toward which Pioneer 10 is headed.
Until we entered the Waaaay Big, it was void of meaning. Maybe it was in our stars to be by chance individually more or less healthy, more or less talented, more or less long lived, or more or less capable of understanding, but in one respect we all share a unifying significance in our consciousness and our ability to impose meaning on what would otherwise be a meaningless Cosmos.
*Yirka, Bob. 27 Dec 2019. Calculating the time it will take spacecraft to find their way to other star systems. Phys.org. https://phys.org/news/2019-12-spacecraft-star.html
Accessed December 28, 2019. Coryn A. L. Bailer-Jones and Davide Farnocchia Published 2019 April 5 • © 2019. The American Astronomical Society.
Research Notes of the AAS, Volume 3, Number 4
**For comparison consider the dwarf planet Pluto recently photographed by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft. As it travels its orbit, it ranges from 2.6 to 4.6 billion miles from Earth, and New Horizon, which left Earth in 2006, didn’t get there until 2015. A trillion is a thousand billion. So, HIP 117795’s gravity won’t capture the spacecraft as it goes by. No Cassiopeians will see the tiny spacecraft in their telescopes. “Hey, is that a UFO?” Anyway, the star is too faint to see from Earth without a telescope; but if you want to look toward the “W-shaped” constellation on some clear night, the star can be located at the coordinates of Declination +59d 56` 42.1 and Right Ascension 23h 53m 19.75. It’s a reddish orange star within, but not part of, the constellation.
***See my essay for 12/27/2019 entitled “Ngandong.”
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