On a clear, cold, moonless night drive out into the countryside. Find a quiet spot and lie on top of your car, looking up and out into the night sky. What do you see? Some might see romantic twinkly stars. Some might see the Glory of the Creator`s handiwork. Some might see the spirits of their ancestors looking down upon them, watching and waiting. Some might find inspiration for a poem, song or painting. I am an atheist, and (as my wife would surely testify) not a very romantic one at that; so what do I see?
Do I see rocks moving in curves, stars slowly using their fuel until they're snuffed out, life popping into a pointless existence only to be destroyed by a meaningless accident, tiny points of white light illuminating dead worlds that we will never see, galaxies flying away from each other for no good reason?
To a certain extent, yes. But there is more than that. Much more.
I see a myriad of coloured suns. Stars are not just twinkles of white. All the colours of the rainbow are up there for you to see, their hue determined by their age, size and chemical makeup. From the monstrous Supergiants like Antares, with a radius three hundred and twenty times that of our Sun, to Red Giants like Betelguese in the constellation of Orion, to brilliant White Dwarfs barely the size of Jupiter.
I see chunks of rock, iron and ice; pebbles that have been circling the Sun for a billion years, being drawn into the gravity well of our planet, plunging into the atmosphere and exploding in a streak of silent light. Lying on top of your car, you see one burn across the sky every few minutes, leaving a ghostly, glowing trail suspended miles above the cloudtops. Thousands burn up in the sky every day, their dusty remains drifting down to the ground. While you're sitting in your office, or watching Oprah, or choosing a new brand of toilet paper, ancient bits of the solar system are being violently annihilated a few miles above your head.
I see the Earth hurtling along its orbital path at sixty-seven thousand miles an hour, creating a bow-shock as it pushes through the thin gases surrounding Sol, and leaving a trail of hydrogen in its wake. Charged particles from the Sun pour into the Earths magnetic field, grounding at the North and South Poles as dancing curtains of light. I see our Moon, pock-marked and white, its rotation halted by millions of years of gravitational braking as it tried to drag our oceans around with it, washing our shores with the daily tides. Inch by inch, every year, it falls away from us.
I see the Sun itself hurtling along its orbital path around the galactic core, dragging along a shoal of planets, comets, asteroids and moons, ineffectively showering them with neutrinos. Four million tons of hydrogen are burnt in this stellar furnace every second as it performs its alchemy, breaking down light elements and rebuilding them as iron. Sudden bursts of magnetic energy release huge flares and prominences of fire, extending thousands, millions of miles into space before falling back to the surface. I see our Milky Way, just one of a hundred billion others ploughing through space in a great river of galaxies, driven by forces on a scale that the human mind can barely begin to comprehend.
I see galaxies colliding, slowly and inexorably, their contents spread so thinly that it is hard to think of it as a collision at all. On a different scale, they smash into and through each other, ripping themselves apart and sending their stars swirling off to form elongated curls and spirals, eventually settling down into new galaxies and clusters of stars.
I see space distorted by the weight of a cluster of galaxies, forming a lens hundreds of thousands of light-years across. A giant magnifying glass creating multiple images of distant stars that would otherwise be obscured by the very galaxies forming the lens.
I see millisecond pulsars - exotic objects billions of light-years away, spinning hundreds of times a second and pumping out flashes of light at a regularity that our best technology would struggle to match. I see quasars - bizarre creations throwing out more energy than the stars of a hundred galaxies combined.
I see vast glowing nebulae, huge clouds of gas slowly condensing and heating - the birthplace of stars. The universe was not formed with a fixed set of stars - they are dying and being born every day, and their planets along with them. A good pair of binoculars will show you the stellar nursery in the Orion Nebula - a glowing patch of sky that is home to newborn stars.
I see black holes spinning at unimaginable speeds, dragging the stuff of space-time around with them; warping and bending space; slowing and maybe even stopping time itself. As they spin, they pull in gases, asteroids, dust and any stars unfortunate enough to be caught by this irresistible force. The matter joins a disc spinning down into the multi-dimensional whirlpool faster and faster, until it is destroyed and releases a scream of X-rays. The lucky particles that escape are ejected from the disc as twin jets of matter travelling at speeds exceeded only by light itself.
I see binary star systems. A tiny but brilliant white dwarf and a massive but dull red star spinning around each other like mismatched ice-skaters holding hands. Spiralling closer and closer, eventually they may collide, or one will suck the life out of the other, connecting the two via a bridge of plasma and burning hydrogen. Periodically, the dwarf will take more matter than it can absorb, and vast quantities of matter and energy are thrown off in a supernova explosion, leaving the skaters to continue their dance.
I look up, and for each and every star I can see on the clearest of nights, I know that there are a million galaxies that I cannot see. Too distant and too faint, moving away from us so quickly that their light is shifted out of the tiny visible spectrum. Only seen by powerful computer-guided telescopes that can focus on a tiny patch of the sky for day after day, collecting photons one at a time. Our galaxy contains an almost incomprehensible number of stars, but this is just one galaxy of hundreds of billions just like it. We can estimate and write down the total number of stars in the universe, but it's nothing more than a number on a piece of paper. There are more stars than our imaginations are capable of dealing with.
I see Andromeda, our nearest neighbour galaxy. With the unaided eye barely a faint glow on the clearest night. The pale light falling from it into my eyes is two million years old - a shame to waste it. Humans did not even exist when it began the journey, and our entire evolution to Homo sapiens, the development of language, civilisation and science has occurred during the flight of these photons across the cold intergalactic void.
I see planets orbiting a distant sun, detectable only by the tiny wobbles they create in the motion of their host. Are they tiny burnt cinders like Mercury, or toxic hellholes like Venus? Are they cold, dead worlds like Mars or massive gas-giants like Jupiter and Saturn, with a core of metallic hydrogen protected by storms that rage for a thousand years? Are they so cold they have seas of liquid methane, or mountain ranges of frozen ammonia? Do they have deep, warm seas teeming with life - odd creatures being selected by evolution for their ability to survive out of the water, crawling up an alien beach under an alien star, the first faltering steps on stubby limbs that might be fins or might be legs?
I see stars finally exhausting their fuel and collapsing as their nuclear engines can no longer overcome the pull of their own gravity. The star falls in on itself and explodes in a catastrophic supernova, expelling iron, carbon, silicon and all the stuff of life out into the universe. (In the night sky, a star suddenly brightens until it outshines the full moon, dazzling the tiny amphibian stumping up the muddy beach.) The shock waves from this destruction compress nearby gases, starting them on the long journey that will see them condensing into hot, spinning clouds. Clouds that will eventually form new solar systems and give rise to life that can look up and out into the clear night sky. And think, and wonder, and let their minds take them on a journey that their bodies can never achieve.
Carl Sagan said, "We are made of star stuff". Religion teaches that we are Children of God, and the heavens declare His Glory. The reality is, as Rev. Chuck said, "far greater than your religion could ever allow for".
This is a godless universe and it thrills me that I have the chance to ride along with it, even if only for my few decades of awareness. Many people turn to religion saying, "But there has to be more to it all than this." To them I say, "Look around you! What more could you ask for?" In terms of Truth, Beauty and Wonder, all the worlds religions cannot compete with a clear, cold, moonless night.
We are star-stuff, you and I. We are children of the supernova and our beginnings lie in the death of a star.
