7.4 Nothing more precious
One night when I was about eleven, my dad, my sister, and I took our dog Cindy for a walk to the top of the hill where our street dead–ended. We stood just over the crest in a dark field and looked up at the sky. I remember saying to my dad, in my earnest little boy way…
I know that Pittsburgh is in Pennsylvania, and Pennsylvania is in the United States and the United States is on the Earth and the Earth is in the solar system and the solar system is in our galaxy and our galaxy is in the universe, but where is the universe?
Everything I knew of was located in something bigger and so I couldn’t fathom how the universe could just be in and of itself. How you could get to the edge of the universe and there would be nothing there holding it, except there couldn’t be an edge then.
This was my first encounter with mystery and wonderment.
These days when I happen to be out in the country at night, and look up at the multitude of stars in their brilliant array, all those sparkling pin points beyond counting, I can still get lost in wonderment.
But just for a few moments. It doesn’t last long because in my old age, I know too much. I start thinking about what I’m really looking at…
A vast hellscape of fiendishly cold emptiness punctuated by fierce nuclear furnaces.
And I think about how hostile the great, great majority of the universe is to life and I feel scared, not in an immediate, personal way but in a deep ontological way.
And sometimes a sense of cosmic loneliness comes over me because we might be the only beings with our degree of intelligence anywhere in all that vast expanse of space.
Ever since we discovered that there actually is a full–blown universe out there beyond our planet, we’ve been asking the question: Are we alone? And it’s become a debate of statistical arguments.
The yes side says there were so many chance events that made life, and then us, possible here on Earth, that the odds against this being replicated anywhere else are vanishingly small.
The no side says the universe is so vast, and the stars with habitable planets probably number in so many billions, that it’s impossible to believe that life hasn’t developed elsewhere and that in some places it’s advanced to a level of intelligence that’s at least equal to ours.
Personally, I’m an agnostic. Without further evidence for or against, I won’t pick a side.
And so far, SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, has come up with nothing. Which makes sense given it’s still quite a new enterprise and has only searched an infinitesimally small sector of the heavens.
If we were assured of thousands of more years of survival, I would ask for SETI to be changed to SETN, the Search for Extraterrestrial Nurturance. I don’t look forward to us finding intelligent creatures out there if they might mean us harm. Or who might be failing on their planets like we are failing on ours.
What I’d love for us to find instead are beings who could help us in very practical ways with our nurturance deficit, so we could learn to take care of ourselves instead of terminating ourselves.
Meanwhile, it seems to me that we don’t have enough time left to find kindly intelligence, and so we will have to live out our days not knowing the final answer to the SETI question.
But whether we’re ultimately alone or not, if there is intelligent life on other planets, even if it’s there on lots and lots of other planets, given the scope of the universe, we’d have to say it’s an exceedingly rare occurrence.
Which makes me think of Carl Sagan. He said that the human brain is the most complex thing we’ve ever discovered. And that we can have, even the most humble among us, more brain states, meaning the combination of synapses being switched on or off, than there are atoms in the universe. Atoms in the universe!
So maybe we could say our brains are the most different thing in the universe.
And maybe we could say the same thing about our love. It’s the most different.
I think of how the universe is extremes of bitter cold and scorching fire with only the tiniest bits of habitable zones here and there where human warmth is even possible, however probable or not. And given this, I want to say that in all the universe…
Human love is the most precious thing ever.
I believe we’re in the final chapter of the human story, and I find it poignant that now, in the season of our death, is when we have a chance like never before to upgrade our love and make it the best it’s ever been.
And it’s certainly true that upgraded love is the most different thing in our long history of tribal fundamentalism. It’s the most potent force in opposition to the tribalism that’s killing us. It’s the best force for healing that we’ve got.
So while we can only take an educated guess that our upgraded love might be the most precious thing in the universe, we can know for sure that it’s definitely the most precious thing in this human world of ours. And its only home is…
Here in our hearts.
