Star Stuff Contemplating the Stars

The title comes from Carl Sagan, in his television series Cosmos. The atoms in our body have been generated inside stars, therefore we are star stuff. It remains a fascinating thought. It would make sense to make children aware of this at school. Even though science reveals laws of nature that are neutral to our emotions, Sagan knew to enjoy the beauty of science and found meaning in this beauty. It all becomes even more meaningful now with the James Webb Space Telescope, which is entirely composed of very sophisticated star stuff. In some years from now, the Plato mission will help us discover exoplanets from nearby space. It must be a great time for astronomers.

As interested members of humankind we tend to wonder about our origins. It appears that even time has an origin. It goes back to about 13.8 billion years ago. It seems surprising that time has an origin. Intuitively we can't really imagine a time that goes back infinitely. On the other hand, we can imagine a time that goes back 14 billion years but our intuition deceives us. The laws of nature tell us that we cannot go further back in time than 13.8 billion years ago. If time has an origin, does it also have an end? Probably, but we have no clue when that might happen (that = the last event in our space-time universe).

Another surprising element of our universe is that the forces of nature are so well balanced that they allow us to exist. This is called the anthropic principle. It is as if we were supposed to establish the consciousness of the universe. That doesn't need to imply we are the only ones. There may well be thousands of extra-terrestrial civilizations, isolated from us in time and in space by millions of light years. The search for extra-terrestrials living on exoplanets is interesting.

What if time disappears? It would mean there is not a single trace left of anything ever happened, not a memory, nothing, as if it never happened. You can claim there is no memory left, because all memories ceased to exist, but claim it never happened? We have such a strong sense of the past that its existence can never be denied, whatever the laws of nature may dictate us.

It is hard to imagine this; we already have difficulty imagining that our loved ones are no longer there but now we need to imagine a time as if none of us ever existed. Some sort of complete tabula rasa. It seems a bizarre thought. Another idea we need to get familiar with, is that we could be caught in a black hole and transferred to another universe, keeping all our entropy, and becoming the seed of a next new brave world. Is our universe only the n^th attempt to become a next new universe full of consciousness? On the other hand, is it healthy to think about things that go anyway beyond our capabilities?

I refer to my blog: “Alles Leben ist Eins“.