THE universe holds eternal fascination for us, and hopefully, each new discovery about our environment will make us marvel at the immortal hand or eye that frames its fearful beauty.

A revised and expanded 2012 edition of "How to Build a Habitable Planet: The Story of Earth from the Big Bang to Humankind" by Charles H. Langmuir and Wally Broecker (Princeton University Press) manages to work in some of the new discoveries.

To understand the extent of the growth of knowledge and new topics in recent years, the new edition has 718 pages, more than doubling the length of the popular first edition authored by Broecker (Eldigo Press, 1984).

"While this book has a primary aim to present some of the current scientific knowledge on these topics, a secondary aim is to encourage a mode of thinking that is often latent for us - how we are derived from and related to a larger world," the authors state in the introduction.

Many are the new discoveries, though they in no way diminish my wonderment when pondering the question, "How we are derived from and related to a larger world?"

In the spring of the year 353 AD, Wang Xizhi, one of the greatest calligraphers in China, attended a gathering in Orchid Pavilion of men of letters to exorcise evil spirits. In a preface to an anthology of poetry written on the occasion Wang wrote:

It is a clear spring day with a mild, caressing breeze. Looking up, we admire the vastness of our universe, and looking down, we marvel at the world throbbing with life of every conceivable kind, that entertain the eye and please the spirit and all the senses. It is perfect!"

Then, like a true Chinese, Wang became poignantly aware of the brevity of human tenure, and the futility of human strife. "Whether individually we enjoy longevity or not, we all return to dust. The ancient tended to see death as a great issue. Is it not painful to think of it?"

We know more about the universe than Wang.

According to the book, the universe as we know it began about 13.7 billion years ago with a huge explosion now referred to as the Big Bang.

It would be illogical to ask of the pre-Big Bang conditions, because time was created in that spectacular explosion, so there is no "before" in the first place.

Vital issues

In the Buddhist vision of the world, it is posited that the physical world is unreal compared to our inner consciousness. That view is denigrated as idealist, but when we attempt to comprehend the pre-Big Bang nothingness, we find that our consciousness is more enduring, and real.

To think that on a scale of reliability that goes from 0 (idle speculation) to 10 (proven fact), the theory about Big Bang gets a 9.9!

As a consequence of the explosion, we are being hurled outward, for otherwise the mutual star-to-star gravitational attraction would lead to an unbalanced pull toward the "middle" of the universe in a big crunch.

Data recently provided by he Hubble Space Telescope data suggest that the expansion is accelerating.

We also know that the "mild, caressing breeze" Wang mentioned in his prose is actually part of Earth's atmosphere, which is in a state of disequilibrium,warmed by the continuous influx of energy from the sun, which is not at equilibrium either, but maintains a delicate balance between gravitational forces leading to contraction, and expansion forces resulted from the heating of its interior by nuclear fusion.

Another challenge arises when we try to understand "the world throbbing with life of every conceivable kind." Apparently we not only owe much for our life to the life-giving sun, but also to the moon, other planets, and the stars.

Was life an accidental occurrence of interstellar interaction, or are we more than the molecules and atoms that comprise us?

Here arises the dichotomy of reductionism versus systems thinking in conceiving the creation of a living organism.

Reductionism assumes that the whole be reduced to the sum of the parts, while systems thinking asserts the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and there are properties arising from the whole that could not be understood from a reductionist approach.

When we try to understand the world from the perspective of the big-scale structure of the universe or at subatomic level, the increasing complexities present constant challenges to the reductionist approach.

There is a lot of speculation about life. One theory holds that it came from Mars, after a Martian meteorite hit Earth. As Mars is only about half the diameter of Earth, it took much less time for Mars to cool to a habitable state from its original molten state.

Destructive know-how

Technological advances are considerable, allowing us glimpses into cosmic mysteries, whether at the macroscopic or microscopic level. We no longer have much time to stand and stare in amazement, like Wang.

Successful people are using their technological know-how in extracting gold, oil and minerals from the most unlikely places.

Gold was formed in stellar processes at extremely high temperature.

Armed with this knowledge, geologists in the United States are extracting gold from rocks in Nevada where the grains of gold become visible only after being magnified millions of times.

The US is now the world's fourth-biggest gold producer.

According to International Energy Agency, the US will overtake Saudi Arabia and Russia to become the world's largest global oil producer by 2017, as a result of the shale oil revolution.

And Google Inc executives Larry Page and Eric Schmidt and filmmaker James Cameron are among those bankrolling a venture to survey and eventually extract precious metals and rare minerals from asteroids that orbit near Earth.

It has been smugly commented that human beings' ceaseless pursuit of gold and oil enormously facilitates our knowledge about the universe.

Towards the end of the book, it is observed: "In the long term, our modifications of the physical environment and destruction of other species and entire ecosystems may lead to planetary crises that affect our own preservation ... The health and future direction of Earth will depend on our actions."