Pale Blue Dot - Carl Sagan [20]
Our powers are far from adequate to be creating universes anytime soon. Strong Anthropic Principle ideas are not amenable to proof (although Linde’s cosmology does have some testable features). Extraterrestrial life aside, if self-congratulatory pretensions to centrality have now retreated to such bastions impervious to experiment, then the sequence of scientific battles with human chauvinism would seem to have been, at least largely, won.
THE LONG-STANDING VIEW, as summarized by the philosopher Immanuel Kant, that “without man … the whole of creation would be a mere wilderness, a thing in vain, and have no final end” is revealed to be self-indulgent folly. A Principle of Mediocrity seems to apply to all our circumstances. We could not have known beforehand that the evidence would be, so repeatedly and thoroughly, incompatible with the proposition that human beings are at center stage in the Universe. But most of the debates have now been settled decisively in favor of a position that, however painful, can be encapsulated in a single sentence: We have not been given the lead in the cosmic drama.
Perhaps someone else has. Perhaps no one else has. In either case, we have good reason for humility.
*St. Augustine, in The City of God, says, “As it is not yet six thousand years since the first man … are not those to be ridiculed rather than refuted who try to persuade us of anything regarding a space of time so different from, and contrary to, the ascertained truth?… We, being sustained by divine authority in the history of our religion, have no doubt that whatever is opposed to it is most false.” He excoriates the ancient Egyptian tradition that the world is as much as a hundred thousand years old as “abominable lies.” St. Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologica, flatly states that “the newness of the world cannot be demonstrated from the world itself.” They were so sure.
*Our universe is almost incompatible with life—or at least what we understand as necessary for life: Even if every star in a hundred billion galaxies had an Earthlike planet, without heroic technological measures life could prosper in only about 10-37 the volume of the Universe. For clarity, let’s write it out: only 0.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 1 of our universe is hospitable to life. Thirty-six zeroes before the one. The rest is cold, radiation-riddled black vacuum.
*For such ideas, words tend to fail us. A German locution for Universe is [das] All—which makes the inclusiveness quite unmistakable. We might say that our universe is but one in a “Multiverse,” but I prefer to use “Cosmos” for everything and “Universe” for the only one we can know about.
CHAPTER 4
A UNIVERSE NOT MADE FOR US
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
—MATTHEW ARNOLD, “DOVER BEACH” (1867)
What a beautiful sunset,” we say, or “I’m up before sunrise.” No matter what the scientists allege, in everyday speech we often ignore their findings. We don’t talk about the Earth turning, but about the Sun rising and setting. Try formulating it in Copernican language. Would you say, “Billy, be home by the time the Earth has rotated enough so as to occult the Sun below the local horizon”? Billy would be long gone before you’re finished. We haven’t been able even to find a graceful locution that accurately conveys the heliocentric insight. We at the center and everything else circling us is built into our languages; we teach it to our children. We are unreconstructed geocentrists hiding behind a Copernican veneer.*
In 1633 the Roman Catholic Church condemned Galileo for teaching that the Earth goes around the Sun. Let’s take