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Will the universe slap our species in the face?
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IT is a pleasure to read Caleb Scharf’s article about exploring life elsewhere in the universe, or indeed in multi-universes, beyond our plundered planet.
As director of astrobiology at Columbia University, Caleb Scharf calls upon us human beings to look up into the sky for something more important than what we struggle for every day in the mundane world.
“The struggle to mold our future, to stave off the humanitarian disasters of war, disease, and starvation leaves little room to be philosophical about our place on this crumb of cosmic dust. But many scientists, including me, have a sense that the universe might be about to reach in and give us a metaphorical slap in the face,” he writes.
Indeed, human beings have been short-sighted for too long. We have been blind to greater universes that may hold the answer to the real meaning of life. We have succumbed to the worldly view that life is about survival of the fittest, about win or lose. Is there any other type of life, or, more important, another way of life in the vast unknown space?
As I read the following from Scharf’s article, I have hope that answers to the earth’s problems may well lie beyond the earth: “... the cosmic sprawl can help us disentangle the complex terrestrial systems and histories of which we are a part. This is not a frivolous exercise. On the contrary, it could be the key to overcoming our scientific ignorance.... Biological networks change, chemical balances change, species go extinct, ecosystems unravel, and new ones emerge. Cosmic context would go a long way in sorting this out.”
The author goes on: “... if we are to sustain our species into the distant future, we need to make big decisions correctly. It is time to take the long view seriously, because we have tried the short view, and it has not worked.”
Here, however, I will respectfully change “our species” to “our universes.” I hope to “sustain our universes” into the future, instead of just “sustain our species” into the future.
To say “sustain our species into the future” implies that we fear our planet may well disappear in an inevitable cycle or at the hands of rapacious human beings. Whichever way, the planet has indeed suffered from human depredations for too long — from oil extraction to forest elimination — in the name of an ever more civilized life.
The author could have gone further and asked: Can our species find a better life in another world? There’s no point in sustaining our species if, on another planet, we continue to fell trees, extract oil, devour other living creatures and fight each other, until one day we have to escape to yet another planet to plunder it.
Before we escape the earth, we should be honest with ourselves and ask: Does our species, if hard-wired to dominate as usual, deserve any dignity in the vast universes, after the earth disappears or becomes uninhabitable?
I hope professor Scharf’s dream will come true — that we will land on planets with favorable conditions for human life. But if that day comes, I hope “our species” in a new cosmic context will somehow be powerless in doing evil. Otherwise, let our species perish — for the good of the cosmos.
Dinosaurs have gone extinct, and so have many other species.
If astrobiology helps “our species” understand that nothing visible in the universes is constant, we should be at ease with our fate, and hold nature in awe once again as our ancestors did.
The problem with science since the Industrial Revolution is that it emboldens “our species” in the face of nature and renders “our species” ignorant about the possibility that the universes might be about to reach in and give us a slap in the face — and not just a metaphorical one as Scharf nicely described.
Be nice to the earth, be nice to the universes. The more we look into space, the better we know that the earth and “our species” are nothing but “a crumb of cosmic dust.”
Most men knew this before the Industrial Revolution, but most of them don’t know it today. There’s too much superstition about the power of science, though science cannot answer the fundamental question: Where does life go after the physical shape perishes?
If astrobiology and other sciences follow in the old rut of the Industrial Revolution, they will only prolong the existence of our physical forms, but not necessarily the essence of life itself — which matters most in the future of “our species.”
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