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.
There was a superb full moon last week. Viewing that lunar sight, the low-lying orange moon filling the night sky, a friend of mine commented: “Seeing the moon so large makes me feel small.” It was a lovely if sad admission, but one that comes and goes when we think about humans in the context of space. Such questions are of great interest to me, and in my opinion we can can only start to grasp such context by looking closely at the rest of existence. To that end, there is another project my friend is unlikely to take comfort in, but it has something to say about viewing humanity in context.
NASA has compiled a survey of the Milky Way Galaxy from data collected by the WISE Mission. The survey is made up of a collection of 2.7 million images containing data points in quantities that are beyond my capacity to comprehend. When I take the tour of our galaxy, swimming through the infrared seas of space, I am not struck particularly by feelings of insignificance, but wonder that something can be so familiar-after all this is just the night sky-while simultaneously so unknown. This is often how I relate to the supreme bigness of the universe: it is both familiar and unknowable. I want to understand it and think I can, but then fail to. And I fall back to awe.
At times like this I leave it to others to try to grasp with words the universe, or even our galaxy, in its entirety. I read Phil Plaitt’s attempt to understand a billion stars, only to agree that such a concept is “so big, so overwhelming, that words simply cannot suffice.” I let Ethan Siegel walk me through what I’m looking at and I nod and think, Okay, now that makes sense. But a survey of the galaxy never really make sense. I wade into the images and the information and repeat to myself: what you are seeing is real and exists as you are seeing it now. But often the result is little more than the sensation of immersion. It’s more like a taking bath in wonder.
This sensation does not come only from the stars and the galaxies beyond us, nor are questions of human context confined to interstellar imagery. This Earth provides a reality that is just as unknown and mysterious and overwhelming as any off-planet pictures. Individually, humans encounter an infinitesimal percentage of the life on this planet. When an unseen portion is put on display, it can create a confrontation of the senses just as jarring as when trying to conceptualize the cosmos. The easiest way to see such unfamiliarity-and one of the best-is on Planet Earth. But if you’re indoors and not amid the woods, there’s something to be said for a simple unexpected photograph.
I had this experience this week with a picture of a Canada Lynx. The Canada Lynx is an animal known for its elusiveness. Photos of lynx in the wild are rare, and sightings even in areas where the lynx population is high, more unusual still. To see a lynx crossing a highway on full display is just stunning, so when I saw this picture, from the Highway Wilding project, it produced a gasp. It was a moment when you realize you are seeing something in nature that one just does not see.
The experience of this photo was all the more powerful after soaking it in for a few minutes and beginning to realize that lynx are beautiful and strange creatures-no less beautiful or strange than the stars. The proportionality of their bodies, compounded by the angles of their shoulders and jaw lines amid their bearded ruff and tufted ears…lynx are, in my opinion, uncanny. I’ve never seen one in the wild, of course. We have a minor population in Minnesota, but encounters in the U.S. are becoming very scarce; the Canada Lynx was listed in 2000 on the Endangered Species List as threatened in the contiguous United States. But I won’t stop looking around when I’m in the woods for a chance to feel such awe away from the glowing screen of this machine.
So this is something I’ve learned: outdoors or on the computer, one should always look around. This sensation of being totally awed by the incomprehensible reality of existence need not be uncommon. It happens best when most unexpected, but won’t at all if we’re not looking. That sometimes means taking the telescope out and pointing it at nothing and looking through the lens for an hour. It might also mean going to the woods, and walking nowhere for miles and miles. Or it might mean stumbling onto a blog with a picture of the galaxy. Because if you are truly looking at the real world, there is no such thing as nothing to see, and there is no such place as nowhere.
Christopher Zumski Finke, Staff Blogger