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The Blooming, Buzzing Confusion

Our star--the Sun:  "Sol"--lives in a galaxy like the one at the left; on an arm, out toward the edge.  We have given our galaxy a name:  The Milky Way.

I recall, as a child, trying to understand that the band of stars stretching across the sky, rather like a gauzy belt, was what our galaxy looks like when we look toward the center, which is a very nasty place to be.  There is probably at least one massive black hole there, pulling everything it can in to a crushing end of time and space, and spewing out awful radiation.

All of that was a bit vague.  It still is.  What was much clearer was what our religion told us.  We understood that we were on a very special place--earth--created by God just for Adam and Eve and us.  The sun and the moon and the stars were created for us, too; light for the day and night, and to light the path to the outhouse.  Somebody had thought of everything about five, six, or seven thousand years ago.  Our particular religion did not worry much about the exact age:  six days of creation quite a while ago was close enough!

Turtle talk!  "The earth rests on the back of a turtle; perhaps a whole stack of turtles."  We did not really believe in those turtles, but we had plenty of other semi-eternal critters to think about:  angels, demons, archangels, gods, virgin births, stars behaving like global positioning systems, miracles, resurrections; even cosmic wars between god and evil with blood up to the horses' bits.  Our turtle talk was pretty elaborate.

We were geo-centric.  Earth was right in the middle of everything; not a flat earth--we did not believe that sailing ships might tip right over the far edge--because we knew earth was a globe.

We listened to learned biblical scholars as they assured us that earth was unique, created by God just for us, and that there was nothing else in the universe quite like us.  There were no Unidentified Flying Objects when codgers like me were pups.  The notion of other intelligent life on some other earth was a laughable idea.  Nobody, absolutely nobody, had ever seen another earth, not even with the finest of telescopes.  All alone, we're so all alone!"  Best to get back to good, honest work, just in case Jesus came on a cloud, or maybe riding on the back of a turtle.  "Look busy!  Jesus is coming!"

Our galaxy--we know now--has 100 billion stars; maybe up to 400 billion.  That is a 1 or a 4 followed by eleven zeroes.  And astronomers suggest to us, now, that there may be 8.8 billion earthlike objects in our galaxy that are capable of supporting life of some kind.  And our galaxy--our Milky Way--is one of 100 or 200 billion galaxies.  But who counts?  Nobody!  Nobody can.  Not really.

We might be unique, but there is no need to be lonesome.  There is certain to be life in any direction we look.  Maybe even some more turtles.  And probably some more turtle talk.

Religious accounts of the universe enabled people to put everything together, and to give it some sense.  We like for things to make sense.

William James, trying to imagine what a newborn baby's experience must be, suggested it was "a blooming, buzzing confusion".  We tell turtle stories to lend sense to the blooming, buzzing confusion.  "What holds the earth up?  A turtle.  Turtles all the way down!"  "In the beginning, god created the heavens and the earth.  On the first day. . . ."

Our stories, today, are not populated with quite such mythological critters as cosmic turtles and fornicating gods.  We speak of galaxies, and atoms, and sub-atomic particles; of quarks and bosons and Higgs particles, of Big Bangs and black holes and string theories.  It is a way to understand the blooming, buzzing confusion.




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