Into the Unknown, page 32
The particular happenstance of that mushroom was compounded by how transitory it was. But even as the curious little mushroom had only a few brief days above ground, it is part of something much more expansive that permeates the hidden ecosystem below the surface.
I am left wondering whether we have a similar arc of existence in the universe—whether there is a web of life from which “intelligence” might spring if the conditions are right, whether we are part of something much larger and hidden from our limited perspective, whether we have a symbiotic relationship with the cosmos, and—if so—whether we are doing our part. Taking our happenstance for granted strikes me as tragically complacent. We are fundamentally collections of molecules imbued with something we call consciousness—fluctuations of universe that are self-aware. It seems a real pity to me if we don’t take maximal advantage of our cosmic self-awareness during the brief time we have to bloom above the forest floor.
The question is, given that we have this cosmic awareness, what do we do with it while we are here? To be sure, one option is that we ignore it and go about our existence as if we are not part of something much more expansive than our paltry human experience might lead us to believe. I’m not a fan of a blanket ignore-the-cosmos approach, though, which you might have inferred from my career choice. I suppose the universe doesn’t really care if we pay attention to it or not, but we ignore it at our peril. To begin with, in any matchup of humans versus the universe, the universe will always win. More importantly, given that we are sentient fluctuations of the universe, trying to understand the universe ultimately gives us insight into who we really are and what we could be. Ignoring the cosmos feels a lot like not living up to our potential.
The Fermi paradox is staring us in the face. If one of the options for solving this “paradox” is that technologically advanced civilizations frequently or even always destroy themselves, I would like to humbly advocate that humanity try not to be a data point in that sample. My belief is that, collectively, humanity needs more exposure to awe and wonder to draw our focus outward and remind us that we are connected to something unimaginably vast, that—much like the mycelial network—extends far beyond both our short lives and limited lived experience.
Unfortunately, and simultaneously, my sense is that our collective willingness to embrace existential questions of reality is becoming increasingly thin amid modern life as we spend less time in nature. I worry that this growing detachment from the reality of the universe and our place in it is slowly making us collectively myopic. Over the generations, we have increasingly moved inside at night, where we have a level of comfort and safety that can make us indifferent and incurious about the outside world. The night sky has all but disappeared for over 80 percent of the global population living under severe light pollution.3 I can’t help but wonder how this impacts our worldview and sense of self and place in the universe. I conjecture that this disconnection from the universe translates into an overinflation of superficial concerns. I could well be romanticizing the distant past, but I yearn for a time when people would look up at the sky at night and simply wonder.
I know that for many people, going about the business of being alive without considering the underlying reality of the cosmos is a comfortable condition. I can slip into that mindset, too, especially amid the urgent demands of life, so I’m not here to pass judgment. As I sit at my table writing, I am struck by the vertigo of simultaneously interacting with the mundane “reality” of the day-to-day, getting the laundry done, and being aware of the profound “true” reality that is outside of our experience and perhaps beyond our grasp. I suspect that refocusing on the day-to-day is in part a mental defense mechanism and a retreat to our comfort zone, and in part a purely practical necessity to continue with the tasks of daily life and our physical requirements as living creatures (after all, homeostasis only gets us so far, even for tardigrades). The rapid flow of daily life is always there to entrain us, refocusing our concerns on pressing daily issues from groceries to politics. But the pervasive tendency to ignore the reality of our place in the universe and the devaluing of the future of humanity can and will come back to bite us. Before we know it, the future is upon us. We can chastise our one-time selves (or our ancestors) for not having had a broader or longer vision, but that does us little good in the moment. Daily choices add up, and the integral of these choices across humanity not only determines our own path, but the circumstances our descendants will face. I am struck by how easy it is to discount our ethical responsibility to the people who will live in the distant future. Even just a few generations from now seems beyond the horizon of our concern.
Sometimes I feel that humanity is participating in a global-scale Marshmallow Test; in this classic psychology experiment, children are tempted with a marshmallow. If they can wait a little while and not eat the marshmallow, they will get a second marshmallow later. While this experiment is typically done with young children, it strikes me as comparable to the current evolutionary state of humanity and the choices we make that have impact on our flourishing in the long term. After all, we seem to be in our technological adolescence, and we haven’t quite developed a societal prefrontal cortex. Our immediate aspirations continually outpace our long-term vision and ethical considerations.
This isn’t really our fault—we are evolutionarily hardwired to be shortsighted; if you didn’t eat that berry now, someone (or something) else would. Consequently, we are prone to heavily discounting the future. I chronically undervalue my time a month or a year from now, which I also chronically regret, yet somehow, I never manage to stop devaluing it. Immediate needs trump long-term what-ifs; it’s hard to worry about the fate of the universe when you are trying to meet a 5:00 p.m. deadline or getting food for your family.
Intelligent Life?
When I think about the patterns and habits of modern life, a glass-walled ant farm my children once had often comes to mind. We would watch the ants scurry about, devoting their lives to digging tunnels and ferrying crumbs back and forth. As far as I could tell, the ants seemed perfectly happy with this state of being, but for all I know some among them may have been in existential crisis, questioning their significance and asking whether there was more to life than digging and collecting crumbs. Watching the ants dig new tunnels, some of which would abut the glass, I couldn’t help but wonder whether any of them wanted to know what was beyond this invisible barrier and if they hoped one of their tunnels would get them access to something more. Or alternately, whether they just accepted the barrier they didn’t understand and went about their business without a care for reality beyond their ability to access it. I liked to imagine that there are at least some philosopher ants that looked up now and again and wondered at their circumstance or marveled at the properties of their world that might provide clues about an underlying reality and their place in it.
I realize that juxtaposing our human response to the universe with the behavior and psychology of ants may not provide the most flattering analogy, but keeping our arrogance in check has value. We have a lot in common with these ants (six legs and lack of lungs notwithstanding). Much like the ant farm inhabitants, we are effectively confined to a limited domain, with restricted access to the cosmos. One could, of course, argue that we also have a key difference—that our human intelligence is capable of trying to understand the universe we are part of (or so we would like to think). We have learned how to extend our awareness of reality beyond that of our own senses, using sophisticated equipment (by contemporary human standards) to probe the universe outside of the ability of our bodies to perceive it. That is a big deal. However, despite all our supposed intelligence, we do a remarkable number of stupid things. I conjecture that at least part of our focus on tempting short-term societal “marshmallows” and our ready willingness to devote our lives to building up piles of crumbs is simple unawareness of how phenomenal the universe is and how special our role might be in it—if we can get out of our technological adolescence unscathed.
As a thought experiment, I sometimes imagine a scenario in which the universe was created as a homework project with the sole purpose of finding out whether sentient life could evolve to understand reality. Sentient life arose in this experiment, but this life decided that scrambling to hoard crumbs is how they want to spend their ephemeral existence. The resulting universe in this experiment becomes akin to a grid in Conway’s Game of Life (from Chapter 9) with nothing but blinkers. I don’t know about you, but when I’m playing around with the Game of Life and end up with nothing but stagnant forms like blinkers and blocks, I pull the plug and start over.
An Antidote
Of course, ignoring the universe isn’t our only possible response to facing the existential. Why did you pick up this book and decide to spend your valuable time reading it? People who read astrophysics books are surely drawn to the topic for diverse reasons—perhaps seeking spectacular images of the universe or looking for answers about how things work (in which cases, this book was surely a disappointment on both fronts). But my suspicion is that underlying these reasons is a thirst to experience awe and be filled with wonder. My belief is that the universe simultaneously causes us to feel part of something bigger than ourselves, invokes humility, and induces awe. This belief is why I decided to write this book.
Exploring the profound mysteries of the universe is a quest that belongs to all of us. Moreover, if we don’t find a way to share the wonder of science with all of humanity, we are setting ourselves in opposition to the universe, and we will not fare well. I worry that as our hypotheses become more advanced, the math more complex, and the outcomes more challenging to visualize, it will become increasingly challenging for nonexperts to penetrate the jargon. As the jargon begins to sound incoherent to an outsider, we also risk the jargon being indistinguishable from nonsense. If cutting-edge science and nonsense are indistinguishable to most people, we have a serious problem, ripe for science denial and ready for pseudoscience to make even deeper inroads.
With three kids of my own, in addition to teaching in the trenches for decades, I’ve watched how science education unfolds on a daily basis. On one hand, schools (at least the public ones) are under a tremendous strain and often don’t have the resources to do much beyond following standard established curricula, which comes with set worksheets, homework, and “right” answers. On the other hand, as a college professor I see student after student come through the system as if it is a race to get a job their parents will approve of and that will get them a big pile of crumbs. The fastest (and easiest) route to this end is to follow the known path. It strikes me that there is very little room left for deep thinking and creative exploration on this route. Sometimes I worry that our education system has excelled at training creativity out of us, and we learn (both overtly and through inference) that there are established ways of thinking about things from which we should not veer. Scratch the word “sometimes,” I worry about this every day.
My own (very strongly held) position is that our world desperately needs more people who learn and think about lots of (apparently) unrelated things. Yes, of course, we need people to go deep and narrow and drill down on very specific questions, but if too many people take this route, we lose the connective tissue, cross-pollination, and innovation that come from a truly broad education. If you are reading this, and there happens to be any children in your life, please take some time to talk with them about whatever topics in this book you found the most intriguing. I hope they will have lots of questions. It is totally OK to answer with “I don’t know, but maybe you could be the person to figure that out.” Celebrate and nurture their curiosity. I give it even odds that there is a child right now who could think about black holes, or dimensions, or dark energy in some creative and novel way that would open the field and move our understanding forward.
To be sure, we understand a tiny fraction of reality (if that), but the mere fact that we understand that we don’t understand is nontrivial.4 I like to envision reality as a vast landscape, in which we have charted many trails through various terrains, some of which have led to mountain peaks from which we can see how different local ecosystems are connected. Other trails have led to sheer cliff walls we don’t yet have the know-how to scale or swamps in which we are easily mired. Still other locations in the landscape can be accessed from multiple trails that begin at distinctly different trailheads. If we want to see what is on the other side of the swamp or at the top of the cliff, we have to keep exploring and—critically—we must be open to new routes that may take us in unexpected directions. It is equally essential that people who have walked different trails convene to share what they learned on their route. If we all walk the same trail, over and over again, we will have deep expertise of that trail, but we stand little chance of gaining significant new insight into the full underlying structure of the landscape.
While we may not be able to see more than a few turtles down, we can also turn our gaze upward to appreciate the view of reality that we already have. Even this view within the horizons of our knowledge is spectacular, and those very horizons are ever expanding. No single human can become an expert in more than a sliver of our collective and cumulative learning. You could spend your entire life exploring the diverse landscape of thought. Given the knowledge that we do have, how do we make the best use of it going into the future?
Homework
Surely you didn’t think you could read an entire book written by a professor and not have homework. For better or worse, you don’t have to turn anything in. But if you do the homework, it will make me happy, and it might make you happy, too.
1. Teach someone something you learned in this book. I’ve come to believe that learning is one of the very most important things we humans can do. Which makes teaching like the next most important thing. I have this naively optimistic notion that if more people had a visceral understanding of the vastness of the universe, the world would be a better place. So, humor me, OK?
2. Visit a truly dark night sky and bask in the universe. Depending on where you live, this might be a challenge,5 but do what you can. Pack a blanket to lie on (you’ll regret it if you don’t), appropriate clothes, bug repellent, and so forth so that you will be comfortable. You do not want to be distracted by a mosquito or shivering from the cold while trying to contemplate the vastness of the universe. Or maybe you do. You do you. Also, bring a friend or two.
3. Make a long-term habit of thinking about our place in the universe. After you’ve closed this book and put it on the shelf, it will be easy to go about life ignoring the universe. I don’t know if the universe cares, but I do. Find a daily or weekly occasion that you let yourself sink into the existential and how profound it is for us to be alive at all.
Finally, a sincere thank you for taking the time to read this book. I hope that your curiosity is piqued, and you see the universe in a different way than you did about three hundred and fifty pages ago.
Acknowledgments
This is a book that I’ve started writing three times over the last fifteen years. Amid my waffling and fits and starts, many people have been entrained in the process to whom I owe an enormous debt of gratitude.
First and foremost, my family. I had three small children when I first started playing around with this book. It turns out that having three small children is not overly compatible with finding time to write a book, so I put the project aside and convinced myself that I had no business writing a book anyway. Over the last year, after I picked up this project for the third and final (?) time, my children and husband, Rémy, have provided support and encouragement in myriad ways both large and small and impossible to enumerate. Simply put, this book would not have been written without them.
In the intervening years, hundreds of students have put up with me experimenting on them in class with new material and new ways of presenting it. To be sure, not all experiments succeeded. I have long suspected that when I am teaching, I end up learning even more than the students. So, a big shout-out to my amazing students who have helped me become a better communicator, often through trial and error. Over the last year, several students have given direct feedback on drafts of the manuscript for this book, which has been invaluable. In particular, Jessica Chung has provided constructive criticism on more chapters of this book than probably anyone other than my editor.
The second time I picked up this project, my one-time postdoctoral fellow (and now collaborator) Allie Costa agreed to help me turn my crazy idea into a textbook. Allie is a gifted teacher with an innate drive to help improve science education, and the perfect partner for such an endeavor. We spent a lot of time developing an outline and plan for that project. Then COVID hit, and as with many things in the world, that project got derailed. Who knows, maybe we will pick it back up again.
My dear friend Bree Luck provided essential input to help make this book more accessible to people without a deep science background. As an artist and theater director, Bree read this manuscript with an entirely different perspective than anyone else. Her feedback was brilliant and thoughtful, and I owe her a very nice dinner.
I also owe deep thanks to my colleagues in Religious Studies who have graciously put up with me and my naive questions and lines of inquiry. We’ve had fantastic discussions over the years (at least I think so, and I hope they do, too), which have helped to broaden my perspective and understanding in ways that were important for this book. In particular, I would like to thank Martien Halvorson-Taylor, Kurtis Schaeffer, Willis Jenkins, Matt Hedstrom, Janet Spitler, and Chuck Mathewes.
The third time I picked up this book, it finally stuck in large part thanks to my terrific agent, Jim Levine. Jim is a natural matchmaker for authors and editors, and he connected me with the best possible editor for this book, T. J. Kelleher. I’ve found a kindred spirit in T.J., and the process of bringing this book to completion has been a joy with his support, guidance, and advice.
