32. THE UNIVERSE AND NIHILISM - What We Can Learn from Space
I am personally of the belief that if space does not blow your mind, then you have no emotion. It’s space for God’s sake. Now, I’m slightly biased as I’m an aspiring astrophysicist, so that opening sentence is the equivalent of a billionaire telling you that raising income tax is basically bringing back the death penalty. But unlike that proverbial billionaire, I have a good point to make.
There’s nothing that I’ve ever experienced entertainment-wise that has truly encapsulated what space actually is. If it’s a book or a movie, it’s about the sci-fi aspect of space; what is actually out there to discover or what might happen if it discovers us first. Video games have helped me get a little closer, but they’re either sci-fi in nature themselves or are just glorified truck simulators but in *SPAAAAAAAAAAACE*. That isn’t to say that those things aren’t good, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy is still one of my favourite books of all time. But they don’t really get what space is, mostly because they’re not trying to. What they’re actually showing is what we want space to be.
Space isn’t something that’s ‘strange’ or ‘out there’ beyond us, space is literally every single goddamn thing. By definition, everything is in space. Because of how we have evolved, we’re used to the idea that what we see during the day is normal and what we see at night, however beautiful, is abnormal. But in fact it is at night, when the ball of fusion and anger that is our own sun finally decides to just chill for a change, that we see the universe as it truly is. When you look up on a starry night, you are looking BILLIONS of miles away at a ball of fire that could be either an insignificant dot or what the life around said star will ever know. It contains both treasure troves and horrors that you would literally not be able to fathom. Some of the naturally occurring phenomena in this universe are so extreme that they break our understanding of mathematics. Looking at you, black holes. Do you know what has to happen, or even begin to happen, to create something so extreme and so unceasingly deadly to scare maths itself? The answer is apparently not much, seeing as how there are literally BILLIONS of the damn things.
That is the universe, plain and simple. It is too extreme to imagine it on any scale, from the size of the observable universe to just the physical processes it takes to form a single stupid goddamn atom, it’s all beyond the scope of the human brain. Sure, we can know all of that stuff. But we don’t understand it, not really. Because we can’t understand it. It took billions of years for the universe to get where it is and billions more still to form our sun. After that, it took a few billion more to get where we are now. And, fun fact, it still has trillions left to go. The sum influence of your life, as well as mine, as well as every human who has or will ever live is less that a piece of dust floating around alone in a dark room that neither noticed its presence nor will notice its absence. That is the universe. It is both light and dark, life giver and uncaring undertaker. It is all, and it truly doesn’t care.
You may be wondering why I just induced so many existential crises in you to cause three heart failures, a panic attack and an aneurysm, and you’ll be thankful to know that it wasn’t for my own amusement. It’s because this article isn’t really about space, it’s about the question. The question that we all ask but are too afraid to truly think about because we already know the answer. The question that, while it may lay dormant, bubbles to the surface whenever we gaze up at the stars peppered in the abyss:
Why? Why bother?
Reality is uncaring and everything that exists will die, the universe included. It will turn dark, cold, hostile and unable to nurture the delicate flower that is life. Life on a biological scale is an accident, basically a fluke that happened when chemistry wasn’t paying attention. The human race came about because while we were developing big brains nothing chose to hunt us to extinction before we could invent WiFi and Nandos. On a personal level, life is just a song that we sing around a campfire to an audience that isn’t there. “I have stared into the void, and do you know what I saw? A goddamn void”.
That is the true nihilism we see when we stare into the stars: why do any of this? Why find new knowledge, or try to be happy? Why try to find connection or huddle around the campfire until it inevitably burns out? Why play? Why indulge ourselves in this universe?
Well, I mean…
Just look at it.
I haven’t yet found romantic love within this lifetime, and I’m not exactly the sentimental type, but when I look up into the stars at night, I don’t just see the physical beauty of the stars, although that is there, I see, for perhaps the first time, true unfiltered beauty. Not just the twinkling lights but the knowledge that comes with them; that they are unfathomable distances from us, that they are only so far away because of the great expansion. Even the twinkling only happens because a whole other planet, like the one that I have spent my entire life on, is moving in front of it. Seeing the universe like that is like looking at a person and suddenly understanding that they aren't just a face and a body, but a whole other entity that is truly impossible to fully comprehend. We know this fact, but we don’t understand it. Once you understand that, or understand that the universe is truly a moving, three dimensional entity, your vision can’t snap back.
That is the true meaning that we can derive from looking into space. I don’t mean just physically looking at it, I mean literally taking all of the information we know and looking at it. Don’t play the song of life for an audience that isn’t there, play it for yourself. You can pretend that there’s something listening to you out there in the big bad universe if it helps, but as long as you know that the song you’re playing is for you and no-one else, you can defeat the nihilism that the universe has thrust upon us.
Life is still just mutated chemistry that clings to this asshole rock we call home, but it just doesn’t matter. Because despite that, we still find meaning from life; friends, books, music, Rubik’s cubes, girlfriends, boyfriends, wives, husbands, even silly little articles about space. Looking up at the night and asking the question we already know the answer to doesn’t give us a mute reply, it gives us an optimistic form of nihilism: “if life has no meaning, then why not do whatever the hell you want to do, as long as it doesn’t stop other people from doing what they want to do?”.
That’s what I find when I look at space. Not just an excuse for a hopeful future career, or the only true beauty that I’ve found so far while living on this planet. I find the reason to carry on, and I hope after reading this that you do to.
Author: Benjamin Alien (see what I did there), Student, King Edward VI Aston