Cosmic Thoughts for the Holidays

Understanding of the universe is changing dramatically. The quest for knowledge has barely begun.

In the last century more has been discovered about the found worlds of cosmology, and of the far past, than in all prior centuries combined.

The pace of discoveries is quickening as two new telescopes placed in space beyond the moon – NASA’s Webb and the European Space Agency’s Euclid – begin to send back results. Three additional advanced telescopes are under construction.

The Webb Space Telescope, activated 2022, has already returned images suggesting much that we thought about the early universe is wrong.

Rather than the incipient cosmos being an opaque undifferentiated blur of plasma, bright highly ordered galaxies formed almost immediately. (Here’s the paper, sorry, a lot of math and jargon.) This isn’t possible under standard Big Bang assumptions.

There are more surprises coming in cosmology. Recent anthropology has been full of surprises too.

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Science of the current generation shows the cosmos far larger and grander than known by great minds such as Kepler and Galileo: suggests the cosmos is not doomed to “heat death” as long supposed, but will last a trillion years, possibly forever.

Science about the past is showing the human family far older and better spread across the globe than once believed.

We know perhaps 1 percent of what can be known. Imagine when we know 2 percent!

In a moment will be a review of some striking recent findings of cosmology and anthropology.

First let’s consider how basic understanding of the universe has been transformed in a short time.

Next year, 2024, will be the hundredth anniversary of the discovery of the larger universe, unknown to nearly all of our ancestors.

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To our ancestors, our galaxy, the Milky Way, was the entire firmament conceptualized as a single nebula containing perhaps a few hundred stars, no planets other than Earth and its local companions with their mythological names.

The existence of the larger universe was not proven until 1924, when Edwin Hubble identified two galaxies beyond the Milky Way.

Hubble stood on the shoulders of Henrietta Leavitt, a deaf astronomer who was among pioneering women in the hard sciences.

Leavitt developed a means to estimate the light-years to objects at the maximum resolving range of telescopes of her era. In 1924, Hubble employed Leavitt’s technique to show that two out-of-focus lustrous areas admired by astronomers are so inexpressibly remote they must be separate galaxies.

In 1929 Hubble made a second fundamental discovery, determining the two galaxies are moving away from ours.

Leavitt’s measuring technique stopped at around 20 million light-years, a distance that is, itself, hard to conceptualize. (Twenty million light years is about 1.3 trillion times the distance from the sun to Earth.) Leavitt wondered if she had identified the edge of the universe. Turns out what Leavitt saw was some local suburbs of a far, far larger structure. 

Using Leavitt-Hubble techniques, researchers began finding more galaxies. Each is moving away from us at speeds that increase in proportion to distance from the point where it seems everything was at the genesis moment. Eons into the future, the galaxies may have moved so far away from each other that intelligent beings would no longer be aware other galaxies even exist.

Discovery that the universe is expanding inspired a treatise by Georges Lemaître, a Belgian professor of physics at what is now called the University of Louvain. In a 1931 paper, Lemaître, trained as a priest, offered what came to be known as the Big Bang hypothesis. He proposed that explosion of a “primordial atom” hurled existence outward from the genesis structure – and we still see the results today, in the form of galaxies that exhibit centrifugal motion.

Through the 1940s, dozens of outlying galaxies were detected. Through the 1950s the total reached hundreds, so many that the research was challenged as flawed. The universe could not possibly be as ultra-huge as galaxy-counters were asserting!

In 1966 Time magazine put California astronomer Maarten Schmidt on the cover for discovering a quasar 2 billion light-years away, 100 times as far as Leavitt thought was the border of creation.

In 1968 a Cal Tech team led by astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky completed a six-volume catalog of 29,000 distant galaxies, which the science world received as an utterly staggering number.

Today astronomers believe there are at least 100 billion galaxies. Today cosmologists believe the universe has at least 12,000 times the volume suggested by Schmidt’s discovery in 1966.

A reasonable though not conclusive body of new research suggests there are 2 trillion galaxies -- perhaps an infinite number. Not a very large number of galaxies in a very large place: an infinite number in a place with no boundary and no end.

New Webb Space Telescope image of Uranus. The things that look like shiny little Frisbees are entire galaxies of 100 billion stars each. NASA photo.

When formulating his theories of relativity, completed 1915, Einstein did not know about the vast numbers of galaxies. He believed there was just one, the Milky Way. When staking his claims regarding matter, light, gravity and the subtle power of laws of nature, Einstein had no idea nature is billions of times larger than his generation of scientists assumed.

Isaac Newton and Nicolaus Copernicus never had the slightest idea of the size or age of the cosmos, or the influence of recently discovered dark energy and dark matter.

For their parts clergy and theologians had no idea, either. All authors of the Judeo-Christian Bible, all saints and martyrs who conceptualized Western monotheism did not know creation is so majestic.

Thomas Aquinas, Augustine of Hippo – they died believing the firmament was a few planets decorated by a few hundred stars. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth died believing there are a few relatively small galaxies holding perhaps a few million stars. Current estimates have the universe holding at least a septillion stars. That’s 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 gigantic objects bursting with power, most able to shine for many billions of years.

Whether formed by God or by natural forces, the cosmos is so magnificent it just can’t be some meaningless coincidence of quantum fluctuation. An enterprise of this majesty must have a purpose – or perhaps, be waiting for us to give it one.

Once Hubble showed other galaxies are moving, researchers conjectured their headway should be slowing, as momentum of the Big Bang wanes. Instead, in the 1990s astronomers affiliated with Johns Hopkins University showed the recession of the galaxies is speeding up.

In order for the firmament to accelerate, there must be an impetus. Caption writers dubbed the cause “dark energy,” which sounds like the elevator pitch of a superhero movie – but should have been pitched to the discipline of theology, as it suggests the genesis force still exists.

Following the Johns Hopkins discovery, astronomers using the Keck Observatory on Mauna Kae found expansion of the universe is speeding up at a greater rate than in the remote past. This implies more dark energy now than before. Perhaps a lot more in the future.

A newsletter coming next spring will delve into whether dark energy overturns assumptions about the running-down of the cosmos.

The fantastical strength behind the dark-energy effect appears to emerge ex nihilo -- out of nothing.

Around 150 CE the commentator known to scholars as the Shepherd of Hermas supposed God “made all that is from that which is not.” Whether God or nature is the creator force, all that is made from that which is not holds up pretty well in recent science.

That thought is hard to get one’s head around, yet evidence is clear in the numbers.

Some force that comes out-of-nothing is accelerating entire galaxies. The only other proposed explanation is the galaxies move at a steady pace while the space between them expands. Mull that and you may find it’s even harder to get your head around than galactic acceleration.

Ever-richer astronomical data led to another brainteaser. Certain interstellar structures are inexplicable unless there is a lot more gravity than could be accounted for by the mass of stars, planets, asteroids, quasars and black holes. The hypothesized cause of the extra gravity, dubbed by headline writers “dark matter,” seems entirely unlike the atoms and molecules taught in chemistry class.

The most recent measurements indicate 68 percent of the universe is dark energy, source unknown; 27 percent is dark matter, source unknown. “Ordinary matter” – what planets and people are made of – is actually peculiar matter, comprising about five percent of creation.

That does not make humanity unimportant -- only tells us we understand next to nothing about the cosmic enterprise.

The apparent existence and great magnitude of dark energy and dark matter suggest philosophy and theology must ponder whether the John Hopkins astronomers discovered skid marks of the genesis mechanism.

Since Galileo, astronomers have debated whether there are outer planets in our solar system. Though the Webb Space Telescope can see very large bright objects 13 billion light years away, almost nothing is known about planet-size objects at the rim of our solar system.

Out on the rim may be planets too dim to see, or vast numbers of extinct or dormant comets, or black holes, or for all we know, a car-park for starships. The rim of the solar system is much closer than anything else in the universe -- and we barely have a clue about this adjacent territory.

That we don’t know how many planets reside in the local neighborhood places into perspective our lack of knowledge of a universe which is at least 460 quadrillion times the size of the solar system. (I thank Marcelo Gleiser, a Dartmouth physicist, for that estimate.)

Taking into account the apparent age of the universe, the observed rate of cosmic expansion, efforts to “weigh” the universe via topographical calculation, mapping of the cosmic background radiation and other measures, existence has a radius of at least 46 billion light years, while the solar system has a radius of five light days.

Another way to think about this is that our solar system, which we do not understand, is less than .0000000000001 percent of the cosmos.

We understand so little about our own relatively tiny solar system it was only in 2019 that 20 more moons of Saturn were found – not noticed till 2019 despite centuries of studying the beautiful ringed planet.

We cannot grasp the pre-Big-Bang plenum of 14 billion years ago, governed by forces unknown, when we lack rudimentary information about what’s nearby in the here-and-now.

But we’ re going to find out, perhaps soon.

Science, culture and theology must take into account the enormity of creation. It doesn’t make humanity unimportant – it makes us part of a cosmic enterprise vast in size and power.

The first Webb Space Telescope deep field image. Most of the bright spots are not stars, are entire galaxies. NASA photo.

In 2022, President Joe Biden was shown the first “deep field” images returned from space by the Webb. On the plates were hundreds of twinkling lights. Each light was not a star – was an entire galaxy. And far less than one-thousandths of a percent of creation was depicted.

If we don’t destroy ourselves, our descendants have a bright future – perhaps in an eternal universe.

Thumbnails of recent discoveries. First, anthropology.

For generations, anthropologists believed the Clovis People, who lived in New Mexico (modern names will be used for locations) perhaps 13,000 years ago, were the first human population of the Western Hemisphere.

The dates keep getting pushed back. Now there is evidence men and women lived in New Mexico as much as 23,000 years ago. Before controlled agriculture, before metalworking, before written language.

Twenty-three thousand years ago was before controlled agriculture, before metalworking, before written language: and was during the last glacial maximum, when travel from Asia – presumed origin of Paleo-Indians – would have been extremely hazardous. Did they walk here? Come by boat?

And why take on such a dangerous journey in the cold at a time the globe’s population was only around 5 million persons, so land and resources in Asia were not constrained.

New fossil evidence suggests there were people living in Mexico 30,000 years ago, twice as far back as the Clovis culture. Did they arrive by boat? It’s hard to believe they crossed Beringia then walked south from Alaska during an ice age and kept on walking past California to reach Mexico.

A find in Indonesia shows cave paintings 44,000 years ago. That’s 20,000 years before the famed French cave paintings in Lascaux, several thousands years before the Swabian cave paintings in Germany, long thought oldest.

The Great Bull cave painting in Lascaux. Photo courtesy Bradshaw Foundation.

Just think for a moment of human beings making paintings 44,000 years ago. Taking time away from daily survival to fashion dyes and implements like brushes.

Why were they painting? Because they had an aesthetic sense? (Some animals seem to.) Because they sought to comprehend the strange world in which they found themselves? Because they wanted their descendants to know they experienced joy and sorrow? Wanted to say to history, “We were here!”

For three generations the “Out of Africa” hypothesis held the common ancestors of all humanity evolved in the Olduvai Gorge, near the home of our very distant grandmother Lucy; moved outward to other places from 70,000 to 50,000 years ago. Then 120,000-year-old human footprints were found in Saudi Arabia.

Recently the super-productive science writer Ed Yong reported evidence of “modern humans” (in the trade’s language) living in Greece 210,000 years ago, much farther back than Out of Africa conjecture.

Think about people pretty similar to us 210,000 years ago. That’s nearly a million generations of men and women awakening to this life, struggling with pain and hunger, experiencing joy, dying and becoming dust.

As for those not similar to us, it’s been found there were at least three species of people – genus Homo, Neanderthals and the Denisovans.

Studies now suggest our line diverged from theirs not through violence – it’s fashionable in elite academia and the high-lit world to suggest Homo sapiens won because we slaughtered the competition – rather, by becoming less warlike and more cooperative. Our opposable thumbs were an edge: cooperation was a larger advantage.

The cherry on this particular sundae: new evidence animal life began not about 650 million years ago as long believed, but 890 million years ago. That’s an extra 240 million years for evolution to develop complex organs.

Back to cosmology

There’s a star out there whose flares are 10 billion times brighter than our sun’s.

A newly discovered star with the beautiful name Earendel, the most distant confirmed object – 28 billion light years away -- formed in the early hours after the Big Bang.

You don’t run into many 2023 newspaper headlines like THE ORION NEBULA IS FULL OF IMPOSSIBLE ENIGMAS THAT COME IN PAIRS.  And by galactic standards, the Orion Nebula is nearby.

The story says, “Stars in our universe form when giant clouds of dust and gas gradually coalesce under gravity.” That’s straight out of the playbook of Pierre Laplace, 1749-1827, who proposed dust-disc star-system formation. When asked by Napoleon why he did not mention God, Laplace replied, “I had no need for that hypothesis.”

This statement has long been celebrated by rationalists as showing a famous thinker had disproved God. But that’s not what Laplace said – he only said divine power was not required to explain the formation of star systems. Anyway maybe you do need that hypothesis.

Have you been sitting around wondering how large the universe is?

Aristotle thought Earth was the center of a universe that held only the stars that can be seen with the eye. Copernicus thought there could be stars too far away to seen – perhaps a thousand. Martin Luther King Jr. pronounced himself “amazed” by a contention the universe is 100 light years across, said such an expanse was proof of the magnificence of God.

This recent paper from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory finds the diameter of creation is at least 92 billion light years. That’s 920 million times larger than the estimate that amazed MLK.

Unless creation is “infinite in all directions” – the physicist Freeman Dyson.

There is still no sign of (or radio sound from) intelligent life anywhere in the vastness of the Milky Way. An upcoming All Predictions Wrong will assess what this might mean.

Nor any cogent theory on how life began. Natural section accounts for how organisms that already exist respond to changes in their environments. By why do organisms exist?

Brother Darwin was silent on that, never claiming his theories explain the origin of life.

Some contend life arose spontaneously without guidance, and perhaps that really is what happened.

But if so, would not be a one-time event – we could make the inanimate come alive de novo whenever we want! As The Atlantic said in 1988, “Until biologists can create life at will, temporal forces alone cannot explain our origin.”

Humanity knows perhaps one percent of what is possible to know. The grand project of understanding why we exist; what the genesis force was or is; whether higher intelligence exists – this grand project barely has begun.

Stars are still forming, some right in our neighborhood.

The Rho Ophiuchi star forming cloud, 360 light years away. Photo courtesy NASA.

Fourteen billion years after the command “let there be light,” stars are still forming, near Earth and broadly across the heavens.

Studies of the rate that stars come into existence suggest the universe may continue in approximately the present configuration for a trillion years, which might as well be eternity. If dark energy keeps adding vitality somehow originating outside the observable cosmos, there may never be an ending.

Because creation is ancient compared to us, we assume the universe old and running down. But compared to itself, creation glistens with the dew of morning.

Our position – 14 billion years into a trillion years – is near the beginning.

When we look up at the stars of the night sky, what we observe is sunrise.

Given how much lies ahead, who can say where the cosmic enterprise may lead?

If a trillion-year universe were a single year, you are reading this on January 5^th.

Happy holidays!

Next: An ode to Christmas Eve, both written and performed (by actual artists, certainly not by me!) on December 24.

No Tuesday Morning Quarterback this Tuesday, which is the day after Christmas. Then regular schedule resumes.