The Third Ten Million Years is a weekly Precipitate feature exploring the mysteries of life on a single planet, as seen through a single pair of eyes in a single body composed of the same fine material as the deserts of Mars.
Image courtesy of the author.
I have a distinct memory of a specific feeling caused by an individual event. It’s a bit cliché and the memory is not unique. I was on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean, during a spring in college. It was about 2 o’clock in the morning, and I stood on the starlit grey-dark beach, watching the waves in the moonlit sky. The air was heavy and the sand was dry and I walked about a half a mile; there was no one to be seen. I stopped, dropped sitting to the sand, looked at the stars, watched the waves. I was still and silent and entranced by the scene. That’s the event.
The feeling this event inspired, too, is unoriginal. I remember thinking about the waves that were unfolding in front of me. Thinking these waves originated in the depths of earth’s history; they take their roots in the unfolding of the Big Bang itself. The movement that brings these waves to the shore only occurred because everything that previously happened since time and space began happened as it did.
At the time I would have said that God created these waves via the Big Bang and all, and created them only for my personal pleasure. I was the only audience in the history and future of existence that would ever watch these waves hit the shore. God during those years meant something specific in such moments: a direct experience of the cosmic reality carried weight. The notion was powerful at the time, and as I sat on the shore I remember thinking about the scale of the human experience, that it was so tiny in the context of the universe. But still, something as big as the ocean still makes waves just for me. It was heavy shit.
Our earth’s oceans, I would say now, makes waves for no one. The ocean makes waves because of wind and drag and the collective force of molecules brought together by external forces. This knowledge is not representative of the loss of depth of feeling, but rather an enrichment of it. How I felt that night meant something, and the memory of it still does. Adding knowledge only makes things better.
That memory lingers now in the death of Neil Armstrong. I stood on the ocean shore and watched waves; Armstrong was the first man who ever stood on the surface of our moon. Those experiences are not comparable, obviously. But still, the story of one invoked the memory of the other. Armstrong experienced the moon alone, for about 20 minutes, and was then was joined by Buzz Aldrin. But for 20 minutes Neil Armstrong had the moon to himself, a first unlike any other, an event that, to say the least, has left an indelible mark on the history of our species. To say the least. Armstrong looked out from the Moon at his home, he recalled at a recent dinner, and saw a “turquoise pendant against a black velvet sky.” We are pinned upon the blouse of the universe, a decoration to behold.
That something might happen only for a single individual experience in the entire cosmic story is a romantic notion, not a scientific one, but it holds an important place in the mind, especially for those of us interested in the idea of place. We have a place, constructed in our minds, and we want to feel that we belong there. My place is Minnesota; my place is my home, my wife, my life. I think often about what it means, how I interact among my idea of place, and how I want it to be thinking of me, too. I want it to consider me special, as I do it. It doesn’t, but still, I love the notion that Minnesota loves me back.
As it happens, humans are blowing apart the very notion of place, or maybe exploding it beyond our previous understanding, in ever more fascinating and complicated ways. The standard Third Ten Million Years example of this is climate change. We are not just interacting with our place, Earth, but altering its chemistry. Humans are not just inhabitants of this planet, life evolved from the dust of stars to the top of the food chain. We are behaving in ways that have, for better or worse, altered the planet’s physical composition for the next several millennia. That’s a new complexity in our understanding the individual interaction with the world. Place, now, is not just where I feel at home. It’s what we have manufactured through human activity into a conglomerate of nature and product. When I stand on the shore, I see the waves of the cosmos and am moved, but I also see our water and what we have put in it.
Climate change is only one alteration of the human sense of place, and not all such changes are negative. Neil Armstrong walked alone on the moon for 20 minutes, changing the meaning of Earth and the cosmos, and our relationship to both, forever. Such an experience can never, ever, be repeated;, Neil was already there, with Buzz, planting our flag. How can that not alter everything we know about human place? Everything changed, and in the past40 years , even more so. Earlier this summer, NASA launched and landed a roving chem-lab vehicle on the surface of Mars, 100 million miles away from Earth (give or take). But that distance grows ever shorter, and that landscape, alien by its definition, becomes more recognizable, and less unknown, with every curious image Curiosity returns.
Curiosity may not be human, but it is humanity, on wheels and carrying a whole laboratory designed by human scientists, on a quest for human knowledge, searching for life and more on an alien planet, preparing the foundation for another unimaginable expansion of human notions of place. Curiosity explodes my sense of place, only to create a bond between my philosophical ‘place’ on earth with my enthusiasm for the scientific, the exploration of the universe, the future of human/space interaction. Presumably, Curiosity bears that load for many. At the same time, I can’t help but wonder: should Curiosity mean anything to me, personally, the way the ocean waves meant something to me those years ago?
That’s a totally selfish question, brought about by the inherent selfish nature of dwelling on the ideas of place. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t important.
Christopher Zumski Finke, Staff Blogger