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| The Horsehead Nebula in the Orion constellation, as captured by the Hubble back in 2001 |
I read about Al
Worden’s experience in space today, back when he was the pilot for the command
module of Apollo 15 in 1971. He officially became the “most isolated human
being” in history and entered the record books when his command module orbited
the far side of the Moon. That is the furthest any human has ever gone in this
universe. But something about what he said reminded me of what I said to myself
a few years ago. When asked if he felt lonely during that experience, he
replied “There’s a thing about being alone and there’s a thing about being
lonely, and they’re two different things. I was alone but I was not lonely.” This
got me thinking about the significance of his statement and the insignificance
of its context.
If our Sun is one
star among the 200 billion stars in our galaxy, and if the Milky Way is but one
galaxy of the 350 billion galaxies in our observable universe, and if our
observable universe is infinite, then time and space is immemorial with only
the Big Bang as the common origin of all beginnings and endings. Because the
Big Bang didn’t just happen over there, or right here. It happened everywhere.
All space was present in that time when the universe was hot and dense and it
has expanded and cooled ever since. But it was all there – the centre of the
universe – and also everywhere. And in a beautifully narcissistic way, aren’t
we also at the centre of the universe?
That last thought was
from a period when we first started to measure our place in space and time. But
ever since the days of Giordano Bruno and Nicolaus Copernicus we humans have
gone through a tremendous intellectual ascent. We were no longer at the centre
of the universe and the pursuit to attain that consciousness, and the
intellectual climb necessary to demote ourselves after that was stunning. We
ascended ourselves into insignificance, and rightly so.
H.G. Wells sums it up
very nicely for me in this rather poignant purple prose that still resonates
well into today’s era more than 100 years after it was spoken: “It is possible
to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning, and that all
that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn. It is possible to believe
that all that the human mind has accomplished is but the dream before the
awakening; out of our lineage, minds will spring that will reach back to us in
our littleness to know us better than we know ourselves.” In short, we humans
are not the pinnacle of emergent life.
The somewhat
pessimistic undertone makes me wonder about our story and its ending. With the
things that are going on in our world today, there is no telling when our final
chapter will be prematurely written. The media and literature we consume in
this day and age may give us reasons to look out ahead for an asteroid, some
new disease or the re-emergence of an age-old pestilence, even terrorism or a
21st century Cuban missile crisis. Or it could be just Mother Nature
doing her chores, or maybe even self-replicating machines pulling a Skynet on
Homo sapiens. Whatever the reason, the practical pause that stems from the
human instinct has evolved in modern times to account for our cautionary cause
to observe the signs for our harbinger of death.
The promise and peril
of the 21st century is a reflection of the mixed optimism and
anxiety of our times; a time of intellectual culture where it is worse for scholars
and scientists to fool themselves into believing in something that did not
exist, than not to believe in something that did. As the stakes get higher and
higher, the area between science and speculation is more muddled than ever.
If scientists from
before the 16th century could look at us today, they will be
captivated and overwhelmed by our expanded understanding of nature and the
cosmos. But they would be even more disturbed by the threats and risks we have
knowingly and naively put ourselves in. Although new advances in science offer
new breakthroughs, it is the costs and consequences of our discoveries that
could jeopardise our survival. There is a very real concern out there in the
scientific community that this “auto-pilot” mode that humanity is on at the
moment is going so fast that neither the leaders nor the masses can cope with.
So consider our
isolation and position in the universe, consider our insignificance and
infancy, and consider our obsession and hubris. Then weigh in the man-made
threats, natural disasters and even the existential ones. Will this be our
final century?
I came across some
scientific journals a while back that stated the odds of humans perishing at
our own hands are a lot higher than us being wiped out by an extinction-level
event asteroid impact. It is interesting how we like to place a greater importance in
ourselves over nature. So it went on that asteroid impacts are one of the few
threats that can be quantified because every 10 million years, an asteroid a
few kilometres across will hit us and cause a global cataclysm. And ever so
rarely like every 100 million years or so, there will be one major asteroid
impact so large it will wipe out nearly all life on Earth – like a “reset”
button. But can we pause long enough to give ourselves cause to look ahead for these
unknown dangers?
There are already
scientific endeavours by private corporations and governments to survey and
monitor the millions of asteroids that cross our planet and track their orbits
close enough to predict impacts way before they happen. With these warnings in
place, actions could be taken well in advance to evacuate certain areas and save
lives. But is that enough?
There is a theory
currently circling among scientists – especially from the data gathered
recently on the Philae landing – that existing technologies like the thousands
of satellites and probes that roam the Earth’s orbit or those that are
scattered around our Solar System could be directed toward the asteroid months
or years before the impact. Upon arrival, the satellite or probe can be
positioned in such a way that it is close enough to cause a “nudge” on the
asteroid due to the interaction of forces between the two bodies in space. Unlike
popular conventional wisdom, there is no need to shoot the asteroid off course
with satellites or missiles. Every single mass of body in space acts like a
gravity well and exerts a gravity force of its own, no matter how small. That
small force from the proximity of another object close to the asteroid is all
that is required to nudge the asteroid and change its velocity by a few
millimetres per second. Over time, that velocity displacement would accumulate
and increase to a point where its path would be deflected away from Earth. Risk
and crisis averted.
Which leads me to
wonder is Earth covered by insurance against an asteroid impact? Unsurprisingly
enough, some think tank out there has already done the math by multiplying the
probability by its consequences. The premium turns out to be approximately 1
billion dollars a year to reduce an asteroid impact risk. That is nothing when
compared to the government budgets of most countries.
If anything, these
interstellar threats are actually more predictable than your natural disasters
on Earth. Our grasp and understanding of the laws of nature on our planet are
still fundamental at best and flawed at worst. Two things all these threats
have in common are that they are known and the risks they pose are getting smaller each year.
But it is the unknown threats that we should really be preparing for.
As with all infinite possibilities and finite
probabilities, mathematics dictates that there will be the existence of at
least one unknown threat we believe to not exist that we did not prepare for. So
it does not follow that because a threat is unknown and yet exists, that any
threats, in order to exist, need only be unknown.
