The Pinpricks in the Universe That Let the Light In

[To be read when looking at the stars, preferably when Andromeda is visible.]

We’re looking up at the stars tonight, looking up, as our ancestors have done for countless generations. We can see the same constellations that the ancient Greeks named when they played connect-the-dots with the pinpricks in the rotating shell of the heavens.

Well, maybe not quite the same constellations. As far as the Greeks could tell, the stars never moved, except for a few they called “The Wanderers”. The word they used was “planétés”, which is more or less the word we use in English today: The Planets. The Wanderers.

But planets are not the only little pinpricks in the universe that move. All of the stars do. The night sky looks mostly the same tonight as it did when those Greeks looked up, but there have been small changes in the last few thousand years.

And that’s how long much of this light has been travelling. When we look at these stars, we are seeing the photons they were emitting when the Greeks were naming their constellations.

We’re not just looking across unimaginable distances. We’re also looking back in time.

Light from the Moon reaches us in 1.3 seconds.

Light from the Sun reaches us in 8.3 minutes.

Light from Proxima Centauri, our closest star (aside from the sun), reaches us in 4.2 years.

Light from the most distant individual stars that the naked eye can see reaches us in a few thousand years.

Light from the center of our galaxy (our very own home galaxy!) reaches us in about 26,000 years.

The most distant object that most people can see unaided is the Andromeda galaxy. Light from Andromeda reaches us in 2.5 million years. If we could see all of it, it would look considerably larger than the moon, and would absolutely dominate the night sky! Even at an incredible 2.5 million light years away, our nearest galactic neighbor is flippin’ huge. But from this distance, all we see of its ONE TRILLION stars is the small fuzzy blob of its galactic core.

One. TRILLION. Stars.

Let me digress for a bit on what I mean when I say the word TRILLION, a word I write only in all caps. When my wife was 31 years old, she gave birth to our youngest child. 11 days later, our newborn baby turned one million seconds old. My wife was still a few months shy of one Billion seconds old. In contrast, the oldest cave paintings in the world are about one TRILLION seconds old.

An eleven-day-old newborn. Her 31-year-old mother. The oldest cave paintings.

Million. Billion. TRILLION. Honestly, it’s a crime against mathematics that these numbers rhyme. The word TRILLION should take at least a half hour to pronounce.

The Andromeda galaxy has ONE TRILLION stars.

You, my dear beautiful people, are made of some THIRTY TRILLION cells. 30 galaxies of cells, you are.

One TRILLION stars, sending out photons that travel for two and a half million years, until their journey ends when they enter your eye. When one of those photons, created in the furnace of a star, began its journey to your eye, our homo habilis ancestors were just beginning to use stone tools. They walked on two legs, but that photon would travel for a half a million years before our ancestors evolved to walk upright.

That photon actually got 90% of the way here before our ancestors uttered their first words!

As it got closer and closer, we developed speech, we developed art, we developed religion. We buried our dead and clothed our bodies and spread all over the earth.

When that photon was almost, almost, almost here, we built towns, cities, civilizations, great monuments all around the world. We created the pipe organ and the electric guitar. We learned how to fly. We learned how to kill with incredible efficiency, destroying an entire city in an instant. We left this pale blue dot and walked on the Moon! We perpetrated injustice and we fought against injustice. We created the mortgage interest deduction, disco, Rubik’s Cubes, the poop emoji, and marketing campaigns based around the poop emoji.

And still this photon came, unimpeded for that entire, inconceivable journey, until that journey ended, just now!

Just now!

Just now! Just now! Now, now, now, now, now, now-now-now-now…

 . . .

That incredible journey this photon has taken, from the nuclear furnace of a star in the most violent of births, all the way into the gentlest death in your eye, in an unbroken two-and-a-half million year line, connects you to that star. And now, at the end, that energy is absorbed inside of you, a piece of that star, transformed into signals to your brain, into the experience you are having right now, seeing this night sky.

This experience. This human experience.

Because we are what make this experience even possible. The night sky doesn’t really look like this. It doesn’t really look like anything. The same photons come through the same atmosphere during the day. The sky isn’t really blue during the day. That’s just the experience we have because of the particular way our eyes function: the wavelengths of light we can see, our range of sensitivity, etc. Glass isn’t really transparent, just as rocks are not really opaque. It depends on which wavelengths of light you care about. The earth isn’t really solid, as the atoms that comprise it are mostly empty space. What feels hot or cold to us is really just the kinetic energy of the particles of a substance. Our experience of hot and cold has almost nothing to do with what we might call “objective reality”.

The earth turns in space, but you make it feel solid. The universe vibrates, but you create ‘hot’ and ‘cold’. A distant star fuses atoms that emit photons, but you create the starlight.

YOU create the blue sky in the daytime. YOU create the twinkling lights at night.

BECAUSE YOU ARE THE PINPRICKS IN THE UNIVERSE THAT LET THE LIGHT IN.

Happy One Billionth!

[Traditional Wafflican reading upon someone turning one billion seconds old, a bit over 31.7 years.]

One billion years ago, something amazing happened. For the first time, individual cells came together to live as a single organism, and the world saw perhaps the greatest invention of all time: sex. A billion years ago was a time of love.

Here's to a billion years of sex!

 . . .

By a billion months ago (~83 million years) so much had happened! Tons of evolutionary diversity: from simple multicellular organisms, up through dinosaurs, and all the way to primitive mammals. And for the first time, mammals were growing their babies inside the mothers' bodies, so they could be born more grown, more developed, more ready to survive. (You'd never know it looking at human babies, but that's a very special case: think of gazelles standing immediately after birth.) The first placental mammal was born a billion months ago.

Here's to a billion months of mammals!

 . . .

By a billion weeks ago (~19 million years), mammals had become hugely successful. Primates had evolved, and some had even lost their tails and grown bigger brains. The first apes were born around a billion weeks ago, just as you were born a billion seconds ago.

Here's to a billion weeks of apes!

 . . .

Around a billion days ago (~2.7 million years), some of the apes learned to walk upright, and lost all of that unsightly body hair, allowing them to run great distances and sweat all over to keep cool. They learned to use basic stone tools. Homo habilis and homo erectus become the greatest long-distance runners in the animal kingdom (as are their ancestors, modern humans, today).

Here's to a billion days of standing upright!

 . . .

You, dear human, were born a billion seconds ago; the first humans were born a billion hours ago. About 120,000 years ago lived Y-chromosomal Adam and Mitochondrial Eve. Also around that time was the birth of speech. Adam and Eve and The Word were born a billion hours ago — and you were born a billion seconds ago.

Here’s to a billion hours of humans!

 . . .

A billion minutes ago (around year 100) was the peak of the Roman Empire, the Pax Romana, and the birth of Christianity. Vesuvius destroyed Pompeii. Bookbinding was invented, and the first codex (precursor to the modern book, much superior to scrolls or clay tablets) was born.

Here’s to a billion minutes of books!

 . . .

One billion years of sex.

One billion months of mammals.

One billion weeks of apes.

One billion days of standing upright.

One billion hours of humans.

One billion minutes of books.

And one billion seconds (so, so many seconds!) of you.

Here’s to you!