Astrophysical Humility

Sakyamuni understood somehow that the universe was full of other worlds, and thought there were many with life on them. In recent years, astronomers have caught up with the Buddha, and have begun to find that many stars have planets circling them. As of 2006, mostly large planets have been discovered around near stars, finding others like Earth still beyond existing technology. It is simply quite difficult to see something as small as an Earth-type planet at interstellar distances, but there is nothing to indicate that there are not a huge number of them in the universe, just as research has indicated for larger ones.

To give an idea of the magnitude of the universe, there are about 100 billion stars in our galaxy, which is called the Milky Way galaxy. Maybe the number of planets is about the same, as some stars might have ten or so, as ours does, and other might have none. There are about 10 billion galaxies in the universe. So, a guess to astrophysical accuracy (plus or minus a few zeroes) is a trillion billion planets. It’s hard to feel that the Earth is really special, isn’t it?

Maybe only one in a million of them develops life like ours. To be more conservative, maybe only one in a billion has creatures with the intelligence to, say, count planets like we do. So, only a trillion planets with life like ours. It will be some more decades before we figure out if this number is ten trillion or only a tenth of a trillion. Maybe we are so astonishingly special there are only one thousandth of a trillion, or a billion planets with people (somewhat different than us, but thinking beings) like us.

The distances are so immense in the universe that we will probably never establish communication with even a single other life-form, but who really knows what science will bring. If we used light, it might take a million years to get a ring-tone, and another million to leave something on their answering machine. This doesn’t matter too much to the article here, which is about humility, but it explains why we haven’t heard from anybody.

It’s already pretty hard to feel you are something at all unique on a planet with billions of people. It’s even harder, much harder, to feel unique if there are billions of other planets with other life-forms on them. Somebody might feel uniquely brilliant if he discovers something, like an element or a supernova. However, if the same element has been discovered on all the other planets, how uniquely brilliant is it? In fact, discovery of almost everything is inevitable and somebody would have stumbled onto it anyway. There are a certain number of elements (and this holds for almost everything), and somebody is going to discover them. Whether it’s you or somebody else depends on a lot of things, thousands, like where you were born and who your influences were in your early life. The dice are thrown and someone is the winner.

Composition might be thought to be unique, but only slightly. Niches in art and music get filled one way or another, and if a particular individual didn’t do something that gets a lot of public praise, someone else would. The selection function cannot be stopped, and the details of the work of the person selected might be less of a motivator than the process that selected them for some measure of fame.

The same holds for getting rich. If one person didn’t discover that gold ore deposit, someone else would. If one person didn’t come up with that invention, someone else would. If one person didn’t start that company, someone else would. Gold just keeps waiting for a discoverer, and so do inventions and niches within society where companies can fit. Yes, there is some uniqueness that the person adds, but the social processes and natural dynamics that put people into unique roles in society are often ignored or downplayed. There is an adulation function in society, encapsulated in the press, which takes a person who accomplishes something and pretends no one else could ever have done it.

Adulation has a legitimate social function, in that it motivates individuals to attempt things, which leads to a faster rate of finding gold, writing music, starting companies and so on. This is very interesting from an astrophysical perspective. Earth has existed about four billion years, life for a billion, mammals for twenty million, and primates for a million. Humans (homo sapiens) have existed for about ten thousand. So, the tremendous adulation function might have that gold mine discovered ten years earlier than otherwise. Instead of happening 1,000,000,000 years after life started, it would have happened 1,000,000,010 years after life started, which clearly has a great import for the rest of the universe.

All humor aside, what we do on this planet has, as far as is known now, no effect on any of the other billions of civilizations throughout the universe. We are here for a period of time, then we disappear through evolution of something that replaces us, or we simply die out for one reason or another. Individual species last for periods of tens or hundreds of thousands of years. They then become extinct or evolve into something different. Larger branches of life, as for example dinosaurs, last for of the order of tens of millions of years. Mammals are probably of that scale in time. Whether intelligent life, if we define ourselves as that, lasts of the order of mammals or an individual species, i.e. tens of millions or tens of thousands of years, or something in between, remains to be seen. Either way, there is a little bubble of time during which we can do civilization, and then it’s all over on this planet, and probably just getting started on others, and long disappeared on still others.

Thus, the realization of Sakyamuni that Earth is not a unique place, as buttressed by recent science, brings us to the point of wondering why we should rush around trying to discover that gold mine ten years earlier. If we understand the true scope of the universe, and our place in it, we have a different perspective on ourselves than if we believed we were the center of the universe and all the rest of everything revolved around us.