A few years ago, a professor
teaching a college astronomy class asked the students why they all seemed to be
interested in questions about life on other worlds. There were several answers,
but one student was particularly passionate about the matter. “The universe is
so big and so old,” she said, “that it would just be too depressing to think
that we were all alone in it.”
Big and old certainly. As scientists
theorized during the 20th century, and most now believe, the
universe stretches billions of light years in every direction and began with a
“big bang” some 14 billion years ago. But while people in previous centuries
didn’t realize how vast it is, the fact that it’s big isn’t a modern
discovery. The ancient Greeks and Christian thinkers in the Middle Ages thought
that the earth was just a speck when compared with the whole universe. Today we
know that it’s far larger than they knew.
But it wasn’t just size and age that
troubled that astronomy student. Her feeling was probably more like what Blaise
Pascal wrote back at the beginning of the scientific revolution: “The eternal
silence of those infinite spaces fills me with terror.”1
Size and age alone aren’t
terrifying, but what if they’re filled with — silence? What if no one speaks to
us and no one listens? The Nobel Prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg wrote
a book titled The First Three Minutes about the attempts of scientists
to probe back to the beginning of the universe. After describing what had been
learned, Weinberg asked what it all means. His answer was essentially,
“Nothing.” “The more the universe seems comprehensible,” he wrote, “the more it
also seems pointless.”2
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