When I was a kid, growing up in the wooded hills of Allamakee County, Iowa, I rarely spent a summer night indoors. If I wasn't sleeping out in the tree house my Dad and I had built in a big box elder overhanging the creek, I was sleeping in a pup tent in a meadow somewhere, or even in one of the several small caves I knew of in the area. One of my favorite reasons for doing this was the fact that I could lie on my back and watch the stars. On moonless nights in particular, in the higher of the two meadows on my parents' land with the nearest yard light 3/4 of a mile away, the stars were brilliant.
The stars have always had a certain fascination for me, perhaps because I shared my Dad's fondness for science fiction, a fondness that led me to become a science fiction writer myself. I have fond memories of an evening when I was about 19, when my brother showed up and told me the Perseids meteor showers were going on, and we spent most of the night sitting on the tailgate of his pickup with a cooler full of beer, watching the meteors that had crossed unimaginable expanses of space to bring us a great show.
I write often on the natural world, for several reasons: I live out in it, and even when I lived in a major city, I spent as much time as I could get away with out in the woods. The natural world gives us some valuable perspective. As I often point out, the Earth alone is so ungrokkably vast in its systems and its patterns that it's difficult to imagine and impossible to predict.
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But when we go beyond the Earth and our little solar neighborhood? That's when things get really staggering.
Take a look at our closest cosmic neighbors, the Alpha/Proxima Centauri system. Those stars are about four light-years away. Four light years away is, of course, just next door in astronomical terms, but it is several lifetimes away with current technology. And it would be the wildest of long shots to send a ship there without knowing if there are planets we could land on at all, much less habitable ones.
But who knows what we’ll be able to do a generation or two from now? My grandparents went from horses and buggies to seeing men – Americans – walking on the moon. My Dad went from the Model A Ford era to the Internet. Who knows what my grandchildren will live to see? I doubt we'll break the laws of physics as we understand them, but we should also bear in mind that these laws are, like the Earth, beyond our current understanding, and what is a scientific breakthrough one day is a task for engineering the next.
But let's keep looking out, into that impossibly vast expanse.
Our Milky Way galaxy contains somewhere between 100 and 400 billion stars. Moving out past the Magellanic clouds, which are basically small satellite galaxies to our Milky Way, we have the Local Group, a group of 54 galaxies with a gravitational center somewhere between our galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy. The galaxies of the Local Group cover about 10 million light years and are bound together by a webbing of hydrogen and a few single stars.
The Local Group is part of the Virgo Supercluster, a massive structure of 100 groups of galaxies like the Local Group, and spans about 33 megaparsecs – that’s 110 million light years.
The Virgo Supercluster is part of the Laniakea Supercluster, which contains about 300 to 500 clusters the size of the Virgo Supercluster and spans 160 megaparsecs, or 520 million light years. And the Laniakea Supercluster has as its cosmic neighbors the Shapley Supercluster, Hercules Supercluster, Coma Supercluster, and Perseus-Pisces Supercluster.
It's staggering, when you think about it, and can make our local problems look small by comparison.
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That's not to say our local problems aren't important. They are - vitally so. We contend with them daily, and not just on the geopolitical or national scale. We also deal with our work, paying our bills, guiding and counseling our children, taking care of our elderly, and occasionally trying to find a little joy in our existence.
One of my literary heroes, the science fiction master Arthur C. Clarke, wrote:
In my life I have found two things of priceless worth - learning and loving. Nothing else - not fame, not power, not achievement for its own sake - can possible have the same lasting value. For when your life is over, if you can say 'I have learned' and 'I have loved,' you will also be able to say 'I have been happy.'
That's another good bit of perspective.
When life seems troubled, when we face a burden we are struggling under, a good thing to do is to remember all we have learned and all we have loved - and to look up at the stars, at that unimaginably vast expanse.
