Touring Orion: Astronomy and the Depth of Wonder

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

- Walt Whitman, When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer

People look at you funny when you talk about outer space. The artists and poets think you're too cold and analytical, and others think you're a nerdy space cadet who should come down to earth. People think pondering the depths of space just isn't cool. But, then, people can be pretty silly. And as much as I love Walt Whitman, he was being a little silly, too. His mistake in the poem above was thinking we have to choose between science and the experience of gazing in awe at the night sky. It's a false dichotomy. You can have both at the same time, if you just decide your mind is big enough to hold them both. Besides, science can make the experience of looking up at a night sky all the more awe-inspiring, by telling you just how ancient and far away those stars really are.

So, if you're one of those people who think space is either too square or too dorky, I'd like to try to convince you otherwise.

First, let's just walk out and take a look at the night sky, like Mr. Whitman did. Imagine that we're walking out in the early spring, to see something like the image below. There's the Milky Way arched across the sky, and Orion the hunter with his bow outstretched. The little cluster of stars on the right is the Pleiades, and the bright star on the left is Sirius, the Dog Star.  Between Orion and the Pleiades is Jupiter, which is not a star at all, but the biggest planet in the solar system. If you had a pair of binoculars, you could look up and see four of it's moons. It's the first warm night of the year, and the frogs are singing off in the distance. Altogether, it's a glorious, overwhelming experience.

But what if we could look deeper? What if we could take a closer look at those distant worlds, and see them as more than just points of light? Well, we can, at least in our imaginations. And the reason we can is all those learn'd astronomers with their charts and figures, which helped them figure out so much about what's really going on out there.

So let's take an imaginary trip, straight into Orion and beyond, to see how much deeper the sky is than we can see with our naked eyes. First, let's consult a map to see where we're going. Here's our itinerary:

The trip seems to jump around so much because we're starting with the closest objects, and making our way toward the most distant ones. We're going to start with Jupiter, and then go deeper and deeper into space, in the general direction of Orion. I'm not going to dwell on the planets much, because most people learned those in school pretty well. What most people don't know is how things are arranged out beyond the solar system. That's where we're headed, but we'll stop at Jupiter, since it's on the way.

Jupiter is the first and largest of the gas giant planets out beyond Mars and the asteroid belt. It's not a solid object, except at its rocky core. Its famous bands are formed by rising and falling clouds of ammonia ice and ammonium hydrosulfide. Jupiter is the big boy of the solar system--over 1400 Earths would fit inside it, and it's twice as massive as all the other planets combined.

But Jupiter is a pipsqueak compared to the sun, which is over 1000 times as massive. Really, the planets are just bits of detritus around the sun, and even the sun isn't that impressive by astronomical standards. This becomes obvious if we look backward and remove the constellation lines, to see the inner solar system as it would really look from Jupiter. The sun just looks like an unusually bright yellow star from here, and we wouldn't even recognize the inner planets--including our own--if they weren't labeled. But then, we've come a long way, by our normal standards. To put the distance to Jupiter in perspective, if you could point your car there and start driving at a steady 75 miles per hour, it would take several hundred years to get there. You would need to bring a lot of music.

But we've barely gotten started. Our next stop is Sirius, which is 8.6 light years away--a whole different level of far away. A beam of light, which can goes fast enough to circle the world over 7 times a second, would take 8.6 years to get to Sirius. And Sirius is one of the closest stars to Earth. If the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which has just reached the edge our solar system after 35 years, were heading for Sirius, it would take about 180,000 years to arrive. Travel to the stars is still pure science fiction.

Luckily, we're taking an imaginary trip, so we can get to Sirius in no time at all. As we approach, we see the single point of blue-white light resolve into two stars. It turns out Sirius is a binary star system, with two stars orbiting a common center of mass. The bigger one, Sirius A, is about twice as massive as our sun, but it's much hotter, and thus 25 times as bright. Sirius B is an entirely different story. It's a white dwarf star, slightly smaller than the earth, but more massive than the sun. In other words, it's astoundingly dense--a piece of it the size of a sugar cube would weigh about a ton. Try dropping that in your coffee.

White dwarfs like Sirius B are the shrunken cores of larger, deceased stars. Around 120 million years ago, Sirius B resembled Sirius A, but it became unstable as it used up all its fuel. This caused it to swell up into a huge red giant star, and eventually puff its outer layers of gas into space, creating a luminous nebula which has long since dispersed. All that remained was the hot, tiny core, which will burn with stored heat for billions of years to come, until it finally cools down into cold, dark object called a black dwarf.

The next leg of the trip is a big one. We're going to the Pleiades, or Seven Sisters, a group of stars at least 390 light years from Earth. That means the light we now see on earth when we look at them has been traveling through space since around the time the Mayflower landed. Unlike most constellations, the Pleiades are an actual group of stars, called an open cluster. But I like to think of them as a litter, because they are siblings--born together in a giant cloud of collapsing gas. The bright blue stars we see are blue giants, which are bigger, hotter, and far brighter than most of the other 1000 or so stars in the cluster. Blue giants are like rock stars, living hard and dying young, burning through their fuel at a furious pace. Some of the ones in the Pleiades are already showing their age, and they're a mere 100 million years old. The smaller yellow and red stars take the slow and steady approach. They will live on for billions of years, some of them for many times the current age of the universe.

Rogelio Bernal Andreo (Creative Commons Att. Share Alike)

Now it's time to head for Orion itself. First, let's take another, closer look at Orion as it appears from earth.  The amazing photo to the right is a long-exposure mosaic showing the clouds of gas and dust that fill the constellation. The red clouds, called emission nebula, glow because they're heated up by the stars forming in and around them. If you look closely, you can see darker clouds too, which show themselves by blocking the stars behind them. The Orion region is one of the most active regions of star formation known. In fact, some of the stars visible around Orion's belt and sword were born together out of those clouds. It's unusual for the stars in a constellation to be related, but many of the stars in Orion are, possibly including the next two we're going to meet.

Our next stop is Betelgeuse, the enormous red supergiant that defines Orion's left shoulder. When I say Betelgeuse is enormous, I mean it's really just stupendously huge. If the center of Betelgeuse were where our sun is, it would swallow all the planets up through Mars, and come nearly to the orbit of Jupiter. But Betelgeuse is nearing the end of its life, and it's really starting to fall apart. It roils and pulsates, belching plumes of gas as large as our solar system. In about a million years, it will collapse and then explode as a supernova. Anyone still around on earth will see it shine as bright as the moon for a few weeks, even though it's 640 light years away.

The brilliant blue star that forms Orion's right foot is called Rigel. It's a young blue supergiant star, around 8 million years old. It's no small fry itself. If the sun were the size of a BB, Rigel would be about the width of a beach ball. It's not nearly as big as Betelgeuse, but it's big. It's also tremendously bright--at least 117,000 times as bright as the sun. Its brilliance caused partly by its size, but mostly by its intense heat (with stars, size is not nearly as important as heat). Rigel's brilliance is the reason we see it so clearly, even though it's about 860 light years away, and the light we see left it around the time Genghis Khan was born.

If you walk out on a clear night and look up at Orion, the middle of his sword is actually not a star at all, but a glowing red cloud called the Orion Nebula. It's one of the most spectacular star formation sites known, so let's go take a closer look. As we approach the nebula, about 1,344 light years from earth, we see that it's really a bright cavity in a more extensive cloud. It's like an amphitheater full of thousands of stars. The brightest, as usual, are blue giants and supergiants, but there are stars of all other sizes and temperatures being born too. Some are still wrapped in discs of dusty debris which will one day aggregate into planets. Others are in the so-called bipolar outflow stage, with great jets of gas shooting out from each pole. Astronomers have even seen brown dwarfs, balls of gas too small for fusion reactions to ignite, so they never quite turn into stars. If we could look into the cloud with infrared vision (and astronomers can do just that) we would see even younger stars forming from the dense gas. After they form, stellar winds of radiation will push back and illuminate the gas, deepening the cavity of the Orion Nebula. This, in turn, will cause gas further back in the cloud to collapse toward stardom. Starbirth propagates itself like spreading wildfire, so that as we move deeper and deeper into Orion, we find younger stars. Looking back toward Earth, stars like Rigel and Betelgeuse may be older progeny of the same great cloud across Orion, born in clusters like the stars of the Orion Nebula, but drifting away from their siblings over millions of years.

We've gone straight through the heart of Orion, and now we're on the other side. Let's keep going, to see what we can see. Our next stop, the Crab Nebula, is many times farther away than anything we've seen so far--6,500 light years. That means we see it as it was about a thousand years before the Sumerians built the world's first cities. The Crab Nebula is a completely different animal than the Orion Nebula. It's what's left over from a supernova explosions in 1054 AD. Chinese astronomers at the time recorded a "guest star", which appeared all the sudden, bright enough to be seen in the daytime. What we see today is a cloud of glowing gas 11 light years across, and still expanding at about 1,500 kilometers per second. Yes, per second. At the center of the cloud is the leftover core of the old star. When the core collapsed and then rebounded, the pressure was so great that it collapsed protons and electrons into neutrons, forming a ball of neutrons as dense as an atomic nucleus, but as large as a city. It's still spinning about 30 times a second, pouring radiation out from each magnetic pole. We see this radiation as rapid-fire pulses, so this kind of neutron star is also known as a pulsar. It's hard to believe anything this extreme really exist out there, but nature is full of surprises.

In the long history of the Milky Way galaxy, there have been countless supernova explosions like the one that created the Crab Nebula. In fact, we owe our existence to them. When the universe was born in the Big Bang, the only elements that existed were hydrogen, helium, and traces of lithium. Then, when the first stars lit up, they burned by fusing hydrogen and helium into heavier elements, creating the rest of the periodic table--the atomic alphabet that makes life possible. All stars create a few heavier elements, but some of the most crucial elements for life, including sulfur, sodium, and potassium, are created in supernova explosions. We are, quite literally, made of stardust--stardust blasted into space in some of the most violent explosions in the universe. It's a pretty amazing heritage, and we share it with everything in the solar system.

Maybe we've come far enough for now. We're over 6,500 light years from home, farther than light could have traveled in all of written history. But just how far is that, in the grand scheme of things? Not very. In the picture below, the yellow line shows roughly where we have been so far. Except for the Crab Nebula, which is in the Perseus Arm of the Milky Way, everything we saw on our tour was in the little sub-arm of the galaxy known as the Orion Spur.

The galaxy as a whole is over 100 thousand light years across, and it contains at least 200 billion stars--more than you could count in several lifetimes. We've only seen a tiny section of it, and then only in our imaginations. A real trip like this is still completely beyond our grasp, and will be for the foreseeable future. And the Milky Way is just one galaxy; part of a small group of galaxies on the edge of a giant cluster that contains thousands of others, in a universe that contains untold numbers of such clusters. We could keep on traveling outward, to see where our galaxy fits in with others, but we've surely gone far enough for now. 

Now, here's the question. If you walk out one night and look up at Orion, does the tour we just took make  looking up at a night sky somehow less amazing? I don't see how it could. For me, it just makes a great thing that much greater, showing us wonders we never could have imagined if learn'd astronomers hadn't made all those charts and figures.

Apologia

"These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present."

                                                               - Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify!"

                                          - Henry David Thoreau, Walden 

When I was in college, I came across Plato's book The Apology. Like most of Plato's works, this one has Socrates as its main character. I had been reading Plato, and I knew Socrates had been tried for corrupting the youth of Athens, and for not believing in the gods of the city. He was, of course, found guilty, and ordered to commit suicide by drinking hemlock. I knew enough about Socrates to find it odd that he would have apologized for his actions, even in the face of death. And sure enough, he didn't, at least not in the usual sense of the term. I turns out the older meaning of “apology” is “a defense, excuse, or justification in speech or writing, as for a cause or doctrine”. The word didn't imply any expression of regret until the 1700's. Socrates wasn't apologizing, in today's sense of the word. He was defending himself; explaining the reasons for his actions. To express this idea today, you have to borrow the original Greek word: apologia.

I'm no Socrates—not in intellect or in bravery—but as I sit here on a rainy day at the age of forty, I feel like it's a good time to compose my own apologia. Or perhaps it should be an apology. I'm not sure yet, and that's part of the reason I'm sitting down to think it over. It's not that I've been corrupting any of the youth. I don't have a lot of contact with the youth, really, and that's one thing I'll be talking about. And, while I'm agnostic about the existence of God, I suppose it is true that I don't pay normal levels of respect to many of the other gods worshiped by wide swaths of our society; gods with names like Conformity, Consumption, and Image. I'm not immune to their influence, but I do try to resist it. What I really feel like I need to explain is my lifestyle. I'm writing this in rented shotgun apartment, half of a duplex in a half-seedy part of town (I don't mean I'm poor. I could buy a basic house if I wanted to). I live here with my bulldog, Louie. I don't have a TV. I've never been married, and I have no kids. Sometimes I talk to people and realize, with a jolt of surprise, that they see these things and feel sorry for me, assuming I must be unhappy with such a solitary, spare life. But I'm not unhappy, and I don't even find it very lonely (though I do miss friends and family around the country). I may be weird, but I ain't sad and lonely.

But as I said, I'm forty. It's a fulcrum age, an age to take stock. I've walked up the young side of the see-saw; now I want to balance for a while and look around before putting any more weight on the other side. I feel a little self-indulgent writing an essay entirely about myself, but I think it's worthwhile for two reasons. First, I want to explain to people who know me why I have lived the way I have (of course, that assumes I really know why, which may be a big assumption). Second, since writing forces you to make your thoughts clearer, I want to work out for myself what it is about me that's caused me to live the way I have, and think about whether or not I should continue this lifestyle. Is my lifestyle solitary and reflective, or detached and self-indulgent? Is it justified? Is it wise to spend the second half of one's life this way? These are important questions, and worth a little self-reflection.

So why do I live this way? Here's the short answer, for people who don't want to slog through the personal history below: I live this way because it lets me do what I want to do, which is try to learn as much as I can about this world while I'm in it. What I have wanted most, for the last 15 years or so, is time. Time to read and learn and think. Most people don't have much time to do these things. They have home improvement projects to work on, mortgages to pay, kids to take to cheerleading and soccer practice. If you have a job, a spouse, a couple of kids, a big house with a big mortgage, and a car or two to pay off, you probably don't have a lot of time or energy to think about life's big questions. If you do, then hats off to you, because I couldn't find the time. Of course, most people should have the kids and the spouse (if not the giant house and overstuffed schedule), because that's what keeps the human race going. And that's what most people want. Just not me, or not so far. What drives me is curiosity, and the overwhelming sense that life is short. I see workaholics, and I always figure they must be very confident in the afterlife. An atheist workaholic is a complete mystery to me, unless they are saving lives in their job. Here's why: I very much doubt that there's a heaven, and even if there is, I think it's crazy to shortchange this life in expectation of an afterlife which has never been proven to exist. What if this is all we get? Shouldn't we set aside some time to figure out what it's all about, or at least try?

Think about how fleeting we really are. Imagine, as Carl Sagan asked us to, collapsing the age of the universe into one year, with the Big Bang ringing in the new year on Janurary 1^st. The Earth wouldn't form until September 14^th. Dinosaurs would rise and fall between December 24^th and 28^th. Humans wouldn't appear until around 10:35 pm on December 31, and all of written history would take up the last few seconds before midnight. An entire human life would last less than a quarter of a second, less than the proverbial blink of an eye. Imperceptible. Our days are short, and time is precious. I want to keep a chunk of it, and set it aside for trying to understand this crazy old world; for trying to appreciate its wonders, and perhaps to show other people how wondrous they really are. As I said, not everyone should go through life single and childless so they can think more about the mysteries of creation. But that doesn't mean nobody should. I've stepped off of the normal path of American life, to check out some of the things I've seen out there and report back on them. The reporting back is essential. If I didn't try to convey the results of what I'm finding to others, my explorations would be pure self-indulgence. That's why I write this blog, and why I've made educational posters and websites. Anyway, if you want to know why my lifestyle is so weird, that's the short answer. The longer answer—or my best theory about it—appears below, but I don't expect many people besides me to find it interesting.

______________________________________________

Good grief, this is self-indulgent. Oh, well, know thyself, and all that. Besides, it's raining outside. Actually, it would probably be useful for everybody to do this every decade or so, to track how much they've changed. And that might be a rationalization....

OK, anyway, I figure if I want to understand myself intellectually, I need to look two things: my basic personality traits, and the ideas and events that have changed the way I think. As for traits, I've always been unusually solitary, curious, easily-distracted, sensitive, low-energy, and, as a child, depressive. However, I was always very independent-minded. I never followed the crowd as much as most, and I never liked being told what to do. So I'll take a look at those things one by one:

Solitary: I was always an introverted kid; quiet, shy and socially anxious. When other kids roughhoused and shouted, I usually backed-off. That wasn't how I wanted to play. I spent a lot of time by myself, and I didn't mind, except that the other kids sometimes made fun of me for it. Today I'm still unusually solitary and still don't talk a lot, but I'm not really shy. I'm usually friendly and confident, but too much interaction with other people still wears me out.

Curious: I'm as curious as anyone I know. I'm constantly gobsmacked by the wonder of it all, especially of nature. I always have been, except for the hormone-addled teen years, when I was mostly curious about girls. I was one of those kids who checks out all the nonfiction books in the school library, spends time walking in the woods, and asks for chemistry sets for Christmas. I'm capable of becoming interested, for a little while, in just about anything. That's why I became a reference librarian.

Easily distracted: This is probably the flip side of curiosity. I don't have trouble paying attention. I just have trouble paying attention to things I'm not interested in. I'm not absent-minded; I'm elsewhere-minded. I always thought I was like someone with ADHD, except without the hyperactive. Then, a few weeks ago, I read that there were two kinds of ADHD: the hyperactive type and the inattentive type. Hmmm.

Low-energy: I've never been one of those high-energy types. In fact, those are some of the only people I really envy. When I come home from work, I usually just want to lay on the couch and read. Or nap. I would give everything I own to be one of those people who enjoy staying active all day long. Everything except for my bulldog. I'm keeping him.

Depressive: As for depressive, I was one of those kids that worried all the time. I remember asking my mom when I was very little if I would ever have to go to war. I think I was kind of a downer to be around sometimes. Looking back, I see that depression came and went all through my youth, and I can mark the times when it hit—fifth grade, sixth grade, tenth grade, 3^rd year in college. Finally I got medication for it. I still take it, and if I get off it, I start getting depressed again. It dulls my emotions a little, but slightly unemotional is better than being in deep despair; negative and fretful all the time. If you've never been depressed, believe me, it is very real, and really awful. Maybe I shouldn't mention the medication, but I don't think people who benefit from it should be ashamed of taking it. Should anemic people be ashamed of taking iron supplements?

Independent: While I had the greatest parents I can imagine, there was one thing I always hated about the basic childhood condition. You're always being told what to do. It's unavoidable, of course. I'm a firm believer that kids would grow up to be savages if they weren't made to be polite and respectful. But I didn't like it. I wanted to do what I wanted to do. I was independent-minded in other ways, too. I didn't think the way my friends did about everything, and I didn't follow every trend (though I did follow some, especially as a teenager). I always had a basic sense that a lot of the things people did, and cared about, just didn't make sense. As a kid, I always marveled at the fact that, as full of wonders as this world is, we spend all day in school as kids, and even more of the day at work as grownups, in order to keep running on an escalating treadmill of material things that mostly have little to do with those wonders. I always dreaded the thought that when you grow up you have to spend most of your waking life working. I'm still kind of amazed we haven't figured out a better way to live. Anyway, the independent thing has just gotten stronger with age. I may have achieved full-on cussedness now.

All these tendencies are things I remember about myself from earliest childhood. Now for ideas and events that influenced how I think. These, of course, were pretty vague when I was a kid.

Nature: The big idea I always had—the main thing that struck me intellectually and emotionally—was the beauty and balance and wonder of nature. Nature was always the ultimate standard of beauty and harmony for me when I was a kid. Growing up, nature always seemed more “real” to me. A lot of what people did just seemed sort of made up and arbitrary. It still does, to some extent. Of course, now I've modified my views on nature. I now realize that nature is only harmonious in certain ways.  It is completely amoral, and often horrifying; and we are right to try to rise above it in some ways. Still, we are a part of nature--a tiny aberration in a vast universe we barely understand, and we shouldn't forget it.

Evolution: Since probably 6^th or 7^th grade, the idea of evolution made sense to me. So did the idea that the Bible couldn't possibly all be literally true. Noah couldn't have gotten all the animals on Earth in an ark. God didn't create the world by crude magic in 6 days. Once I heard that idea that all living things were related, and that they had evolved over countless ages through variation and selection of the traits that happen to work, it made perfect sense. Now I think that biological evolution is just one example of a basic pattern of creativity that nature uses everywhere: immune systems, learning, brainstorming, the evolution of cultures, memes on the internet; all those things can work very much like biological evolution.

Aversion to church: I went to Baptist churches as a small child. The one my grandparents took me too had a real hellfire and brimstone preacher. Later, my parents switched to a Methodist church, which was much more moderate. But I still didn't like going. I was skeptical about most of the dogmas, and I didn't like the sense of guilt that seemed to pervade everything. The idea that we're all horrible and deserve nothing more than to go to hell, and only by the grace of God would we be saved—if that isn't true, then it's one of the worst ideas anyone ever had. I didn't like the sterileness of church, the goody-goodyness, the canting phrases that people adopted while they were there. You couldn't play real rock'n roll in church; it had to be a declawed, watered-down version. Maybe part of my aversion to church was my solitary nature kicking in. The group-oriented touchy-feeliness of it, the baring of feelings with people I wasn't otherwise close to; it made me feel ill, like someone was touching me that I didn't want touching me.

All those views--about nature, evolution, and religion--are all attitudes that I had from early on; middle school at the latest. Around 7^th grade, I can actually start tracking how my views changed, more or less year by year. Around that time—around the time kids start getting into sports and cheerleading—I started wanting to be popular. I started spending less time thinking about nature and ideas, and more time about how to be liked (I was well-enough liked, and not a complete poindexter; I just wasn't one of the popular, ringleader-type kids). While I had been attracted to pretty girls as long as I could remember, now I was getting confident enough to try to figure out how to get them to like me. Then I got into gymnastics, and started to get muscles. When I got to high school I realized I wasn't--as I had always assumed--ugly. In fact, I was pretty cute, and the older girls liked to smile and talk to me; to try to made me blush. I started going to parties, and learned that if you talk to a girl for a while and she smiles at you, she would probably be quite willing to spend the next little while kissing you. I ran track in the spring, so I knew all the athlete guys, and they respected me since, because of gymnastics, I could bench press more than they could. I never turned into one of the really popular kids, but I forgot about being the brainy kid. I stopped reading books in high school. I started equating intellectualism with the music I listened to, as many kids do. I lived in a town of 2,000 people in the Arkansas Ozarks, and so my friends and I all considered ourselves superior because we listened to classic rock, not top forty pop or country. Yep, I was a real intellectual.

I went to college a year early in a bigger small town in Arkansas, joined a fraternity, and had the time of my life. If you had pinned me down about politics, would have probably said I was a Republican. Not the religious kind, though I would have still called myself a Christian. My friends mostly wanted to make a lot of money, and so did I. I had a vague notion that the survival of the fittest idea applied in society as well as nature, so I guess I was a sort of half-assed social Darwinist who thought most poor people had nobody to blame but themselves (hey, lots of people never grow out of this). I got preppy--what can I say, I was seventeen--I've grown up since, and so have the people I was hanging out with. Well, most of them have. But I started to have a bit of an intellectual awakening my freshman year. I took an anthropology class, and while the teacher was mortally boring, we were reading about other cultures around the world that were shockingly different from ours. I started to think, or think again, that maybe our culture was just as arbitrary. Who says ours is the right way? My conservatism, never very well-founded, was starting to totter.

Because I had gone to college early, I didn't discover I was eligible for some good scholarships until my second semester in college. The most generous was at the University of New Orleans, where a Texas oil millionaire named Patrick Taylor had endowed a scholarship for kids like me, who happened to do well on standardized tests. In New Orleans I met a very different group of friends, from all around the country. They were mostly shockingly smart, and many of them were from big cities, so they were much more urbane than me. This was one of the last years that “alternative” kids were still actually alternative, and I started to question my preppiness. I learned that maybe classic rock wasn't the only kind of music that could be good. I took a sociology class, and started to think that maybe you couldn't reasonably expect people born in squalor—the kind of squalor I was seeing in New Orleans—to lift themselves up by their bootstraps with no help. Maybe it wasn't immoral to level the playing field a little.

I also took a philosophy class, and learned how mind-bending and fascinating philosophy could be. I read Descartes, and learned the following big idea: maybe we should question absolutely everything, and whatever remains as undeniably true is what is really true. Descartes went in a different direction with this than me, but the basic idea stuck, and has been with me ever since. I changed my major from pre-med to philosophy (I wasn't studious enough for pre-med, and I knew it). Besides, all the philosophy professors were quirky New Orleans characters who made philosophy seem exciting.

I also rediscovered my love of nature. New Orleans' flatness made me realize how much I liked the mountains in Arkansas, and I was dying to go for a hike. I would drive across the tall bridges over the Mississippi River, just to get a brief view off into the distance. Once, my sister visited, and she was talking about books with some of my friends. I realized I had almost stopped reading books outside of school, so I started again, and soon became rabid about it. In Arkansas, all my friends took the truth of Christianity for granted, though they weren't all biblical literalists. In New Orleans, I started meeting really smart, nice people who said matter-of-factly that they weren't religious. All the ideas from church that seemed uncomfortably at odds with science--the divinity of Christ, original sin, heaven and hell—I thought for the first time that it was OK to admit that they might not be true. I hit upon the old argument that if God exists, and he (or she) is just, then he wouldn't send me to burn for all eternity for using my mind to decide for myself what's true. I still believe this. When I realized there might not be a heaven, it hit me—hard--that this might be all we get. This was another big, big, idea that's been with me ever since.

I had great friends in New Orleans, but I hated it there, because UNO was a commuter school, and very little was happening on campus. I hated New Orleans itself at the time for its flatness and squalor (I've learned to appreciate it since then, because I've actually taken the time to learn about it). I vowed to leave Louisiana and never come back. Never say never.

So, I transferred to Hendrix College, a little, private, liberal school back in Arkansas with the reputation around Arkansas for having a lot of gays, punks, and hippies (the last two are accurate, but I think I met as many gay people at the other schools as at Hendrix. But I tend to make friends with gay people—gay guys, for example, don't bore me to death talking about sports 75% of the time). Most of the kids there were upper-middle class, and pretty smart and literate. But a lot of them seemed spoiled and sheltered compared to the state schools I had attended, which were both full of first-generation college students, many of whom grew up poor. I was trying to transfer into a small school as a third-year student and break into already tight social groups. I got depressed. I started watching a lot of dark movies, and reading all the standard authors most liberal, bookish college kids read—Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Robbins, Ken Kesey, Jack Kerouac. Most of the philosophy professors at Hendrix were stern and boring, nothing like the characters in New Orleans.  I realized that introductory philosophy classes give you the most exciting stuff to read, and that a lot of philosophy is either dry or impenetrable. Worse, it rarely comes to conclusions that most of its practitioners agree on. Science, I realized, was more successful at such conclusions, because it actually tested ideas, and threw out the ones that didn't work. Besides, I realized, it's a tough to find a job as a philosopher.

So, I switched my major to psychology, which is slightly more scientific and had somewhat better prospects for a career. In social psychology I first started learned about how prone people are to biases and group-think. I learned that our minds aren't really geared for finding what is true, or for understanding themselves, so much as navigating through a complex world using any trick that works. This includes trying to convince ourselves that we are good, right, smart, and basically one of the good guys, even if we are none of these things. I read about depression, trying to figure out why I was prone to it, and made myself even more depressed.

For some reason, I took a class called China Through the Ming Dynasty. That's when I read the Tao Te Ching, and it blew my mind. I got interested in eastern-style mysticism, especially three ideas: 1. That we should pay attention to how nature can work by simply flowing without thinking, and that we need to learn to be able to do this ourselves, because overthinking can get in our way. 2. Words and images are often simply inadequate for capturing the grandeur of reality, which can be appreciated better by opening our minds and not trying to put things into words. 3. We should simplify our lives and appreciate the wonders that come for free. I kept getting more interested in nature, and started hiking again. I became more of a knee-jerk liberal, but I pushed back on some of its excesses, especially the over-the-top political correctness that was becoming popular around that time.

I figured I would get a Ph.D in psychology and be a college professor, but I wasn't sure what area of psychology I wanted to go into. So, after Hendrix, I enrolled in a master's program in psychology at Hollins College, in Roanoke, Virginia. There I started thinking more about cognitive psychology; about how thinking and perception work. I also expanded from Taoism into Zen Buddhism, and started thinking about how that related to the mind. I got interested in enlightenment. I was captivated by the thought that people could attain a higher, or at least different and informative, state of consciousness by meditating and simplifying their lives. I was smitten by the idea that the concept of the self—the feeling that we are a separate entity that is more or less bounded by our skin—is an illusion. We are bigger than that, though it's hard to and keep that fact in mind for very long. There's no clear line where our self ends and the world begins, and the more you meditate and think about it, the more you feel like the world is part of you, and vice versa. Scientists don't talk about this stuff much, but it's not unscientific. There's nothing supernatural or magical going on; it's just a different way of experiencing existence. Unfortunately (I think), I gradually lost this interest, but I still think it's important, and I think I may someday come back around to it.

That part of Virginia is beautiful, and right on the Appalachian Trail. I started hiking a lot, and became even more nature-oriented. I read Annie Dillard's amazing book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which she wrote while living nearby. The book is a long, semi-mystical meditation on nature, in all its glory and horror. Much of it is pure, heart-stopping genius. I would wonder around Tinker Creek, trying to see things the way she had seen them. At the same time, though I can't blame Annie Dillard for this, I become more of the nature-worshipping, romantic-type of environmentalist. I saw “natural” as good, and “artificial” as bad (I'd always had that tendency). I turned into a bit of a luddite, and I became convinced that the population explosion would bring on an environmental apocalypse in just a few decades (I would modify this thinking later).

After Hollins, I started to rediscover my love of animals. I saw a National Geographic article about play behavior in animals, and thought: that's what I want to study. I wanted to combine insights from cognitive psychology with animal behavior, to figure out why animals play. I found a cognitive psychologist who was interested in animal play behavior, and I applied to be her graduate student: The only catch was, she was in Newfoundland. So I moved to one of the more remote places in (or near, really) North America. You should go there sometime, it's fascinating. I got even more into simple-living and intensely ecologically-conscious lifestyles. I even got interested in communes; into back-to-the-land kind of stuff. I was still a semi-luddite, who believed nature was beautiful and harmonious, and human creations were ugly and artificial. But then one night I was talking to a fellow grad student who had been a philosophy/biology double major. She was explaining to me why she was a vegetarian, and I gave the standard response that “Eating meat is natural. Other animals do it, why shouldn't we?”. She immediately asked me if, since lions and many other mammals kill babies that they didn't father, we should do that to? It is just as natural, after all. I was busted. I later learned that this is called the appeal-to-nature fallacy. Just because something is common in nature, that doesn't necessarily make it right. This is a very big idea, and more people need to hear about it.

Most of my friends in Newfoundland were outdoorsy biologist types, so I kept doing a lot of hiking. In classes, I learned more about evolution and behavior. I realized that a lot of what animals do can be explained by the fact that genes act as though they are trying to get themselves propagated into future generations. Evolution doesn't cause animals to behave “for the good of the species”. Far from it. It causes animals to act as though they are trying to send as many of their genes into the future as they can. Whether it helps the group as a whole is irrelevant, from evolution's “point of view”, which is why a lot of animals are not very nice to members of their own species. The logic is this: genes that cause animals to behave in ways that help them survive long enough to reproduce as effectively as possible—these are the genes that are successful, and grow more common over time. Animals sacrifice themselves for their offspring because their offspring carry their genes. However, animals may also sacrifice themselves for their relatives, roughly to the extent that their relatives are likely to carry the same genes they do. Of course, neither the genes nor the animals know why they do what they do. Genes can't feel or think anything, and animals do things because (because in the immediate sense, not the evolutionary sense) they have a strong urge to. They don't think, “It's time for me to find a mate, so I can reproduce and spread my genes”. They probably think something like, “Want sex! Want to build nest! Look, babies! Want to take care of them!”

It's a subtle, often-misunderstood, and incredibly powerful idea. And it probably explains a lot (not all) of human behavior. Why do we pair up with other people, settle down, and have kids? Because that's what our biology tells us to do; that's the behavior that best propagated our genes in the past. Why do we (usually) devote more or our time to helping family members than unrelated people? Because they share genes with us. This doesn't mean these behaviors are meaningless, or that we should stop. It's human nature to do these things, it makes most people happy to do them, and we would go extinct if we didn't. However, it is good to realize why we do them, and consider whether there are times we should tell our genes they're not the boss of us. We can't ignore them, but we can push back against them. After all, just because something is natural doesn't mean it's right.

Anyway, in Newfoundland I was trying to combine cognitive psychology with evolutionary biology and animal behavior. This turned out to be a problem, because some of my professors could only think within the bounds of their discipline. Put crudely, some of the psychologists thought the biology was bullshit, and some of the biologists thought the psychology was. Going to seminars, I realized that college professors fight like cats in a bag, and often with roughly as much reason. I got disgusted with the intellectual provincialism of my professors, and I got interested in the idea of finding unifying themes in human knowledge. I wandered around the library, looking for books about unifying different branches of knowledge, but I was shocked to find that there were hardly any. I started thinking, “What is universal? What is common to everything?” Well, we are all primates, we all live according to the same laws of nature, we are all made of similar cells, which are made of similar molecules and atoms. I realized, in short, that science and nature were a source of unity. So I started reading a lot about science, not just biology, but chemistry, physics, astronomy, and so on.

I finally realized that a common theme in all the sciences is that everything has evolved over time. The universe began very simply, with a handful of types of particles and forces popping into existence in the Big Bang. Then things got more complex. Particles combined into atoms (just hydrogen and helium at first). Matter fell together into stars and galaxies.  Stars forged hydrogen into all the heavier elements, and then blasted them out in colossal explosions: supernovas (most of the atoms in our bodies were once part of an ancient, exploding star). I started to believe that if you think of things in terms of the history of the universe, then that provides a universal narrative for explaining the fundamentals of nature that are explained by the various sciences. It ties all the sciences together in one big, grand story.

Nature has branched out over time, from an initial, single trunk to more and more luxuriant, diverse branches. It's a big family tree, and everything in it is related. The farther back you go, the wider the circle of relation gets. I look a little like my cousins because we share ancestors, and recent ones. I look less like a chimpanzee, because the chimp and I share ancestors that lived several million years ago. But the chimp is a close relative compared to a tree--my common ancestor with trees lived thousands of millions of years ago. However, the tree and I have a distinct family resemblance. We both have cells, mitochondria, DNA, many of the same metabolic processes, and we are both made of similar organic molecules and atoms. I'm even related to rocks, stars, and galaxies, because I'm made of the same fundamental particles that they are; born in the same cosmic genesis.

The further you look back, the more common ground you find. If the history of the universe can be seen as a big, branching family tree; then much of human knowledge can be seen as a tree as well. Physics is at the trunk, chemistry is a little higher and more branched, and biology more branched and complex still. Even history can be seen as a branching tree of cultures, languages, and ideas, although those branches merge as well as split. By the time you get to the arts and humanities, the tree metaphor breaks down, at least to the extent that they are more about experiencing and interpreting the world than explaining it. Facts and histories may not be the point, and even if things like artistic trends branch and diversify like species (and they do) the branches in the humanities are so complex that diversity is much more apparent than unity.

Anyway, this story is getting way too long. I got obsessed with the idea of writing a book, conceptually unifying big chunks of science, history, and other branches of factual knowledge, by telling the story of how the universe has evolved--branching and building over time, combining an initial unity with increasing diversity. Tall order, right? Well, I was 24, I thought it would just take a year or so. Besides, by that time I had realized I wasn't single-minded enough to be a professor. Many profs are focused almost to the point of obsessiveness on one highly-specialized topic. I would always be interested in a wide range of things. I left school to write the book.

I worked on that book for the next ten years. I lived many places, and worked various crappy jobs. I did it because I had told people I was going to write this book, so damnit, I was going to write it. Also, I really believed in it. I thought it was really important for people understand how different branches of knowledge fit together, how we and all other things have a common heritage, and how short our lives are compared to the abysses of time the book covered. I still believe all these things. I also thought that people have to find common ground, or we would go extinct and take a bunch of other species with us. I believed the next century would be the crucial one in human history, because it is the inflection point in a massive explosion of human population and impact, unprecedented in history. I was trying to show in the book how shockingly small a century is, and how human populations growth is like an explosion. I believed that if it the book influenced just a few dozen people to work toward avoiding the catastrophes of the next hundred years, then it would be worth sacrificing things like marriage and children (especially since I had never been all that drawn to those things). I believed more and more that, if I had just one life, I had to figure out what was going on as much as I could, while I could. I wanted to understand this crazy, beautiful, often horrible world while I had the time, and the book was my way of doing it. I got more solitary. I avoided getting involved with women, because I couldn't devote a fair amount of time to a relationship and still finish the book. I got very jealous of my time, always looking for time to read and write. I eventually lost my fascination with the mysticism of Taoism and Zen, and became more enamored with knowledge, with finding facts and connecting them into a meaningful whole.

As I wrote the book, though, I became less convinced of the absolute dichotomy between nature and society. When I started it, I believed that a lot things about human society—as opposed to the natural world—were unstable, out of balance, and arbitrary. And many of them are. However, slowly, I started realizing that nature and society weren't always that different. Lots of traditions in society do make some degree of sense, even if they are “made up”. Laws, for example, are an evolving system, like many evolving systems in nature, and they represent an accumulated set of (mostly) reasonable solutions to human problems. I started taking the idea more seriously that nature wasn't always better. Nature is blind and amoral, but people don't have to be. I began to understand how complicated environmental problems were, and how simple-minded ideas like “all growth and technology are bad!” are silly. Growth and technology can cause environmental havoc, but they can also solve it. If you're skeptical (and you should be) here's an example. In the seventies, many environmental scientists thought the human population would explode exponentially, bringing on Mad Max world. Populations certainly can explode exponentially, and it really is scary. However, as economies develop in less-developed countries, people lose their incentives to have a bunch of children, and population growth rates go down. This is called the demographic transition. So the explosion is not totally uncontrolled, and economic growth can actually prevent population-related damage to the environment. “Sustainable growth” is not necessarily an oxymoron. Of course, as people get richer, they may have fewer babies, but they consume more per person, and then you have another issue. I don't mean to say I stopped worrying about the environment. We've got problems, and big ones. I just realized that nature isn't always good, the things we create aren't always bad, that environmental issues are enormously, mind-bogglingly complex. Not only that they seem even more complex because of all the interest groups trying to spin things one way or another. Anyway, I realized I wasn't going to be able to offer the kind of simple, straightforward view of current trends that I hoped to end my book with.

I also started realizing the book was too big to finish. Scientists were discovering things faster than I could read about them. I also began to see that science and factual knowledge wasn't going to cut it for most people. They were never going to find these things totally satisfying. The spectacle of a grand, evolving universe that ties things together into a great story may be deeply appealing to me, but it doesn't have the human interest most people want. Besides, I started to see that you can only get so far with bare facts. You also have to start thinking about meaning and morality, and science doesn't really tell us much about that. It gives us the facts we need to know, and tells us about the consequences of our decisions, but it can't tell us which decisions are the morally right ones. It can't tell us, at least not entirely, how to lead a meaningful life.

 In short, I stopped believing in my project as fervently as I had, and I realized the book was far too big to be publishable. When I turned 35, I decided to stop and get on with my life.  I put the book online, at www.knowledgetreeproject.org. I took some of the illustrations from the book and made an educational poster, and sold over a thousand copies of it. When I ran out, converted the poster into a website, at www.universetimelines.com.

However, I had learned an enormous amount of stuff. I figured that I should find a way to put that, and my rambling, scatterbrained intellectual curiosity, to use. So, I went back to library school, to be a reference librarian. In library school, I got more social again, and re-learned how much fun it is to hang out with other people. I also confirmed my suspicion that most people don't give a damn about any of the things I had spent the last ten years thinking about. The story of the universe was never going to strike a deep chord with most people. Most people need to think about how they relate to other people. I started thinking maybe the material universe doesn't matter as much as I thought it did (I mean, it's pretty important), and wondering what really did matter. I'm still wondering, and I probably always will.

After library school, I moved to a small city in south Louisiana to work as a reference librarian. There aren't as many social opportunities here. So I started reading more. I started writing again, but on a small scale, with this blog. I started reading about ethics, wondering about the foundations of ethics. Here was a new puzzle for me. Why be ethical? I mean, I think it's important, but what are the foundations it rests upon? It's a fascinating question with no easy answers, even for religious people. Of course, now my rambling brain has rambled a little further. As I've seen people online start to bicker more and more, I gotten more interested in civility, and its relationship with critical thinking and logic. A lot of the blustering online isn't just rude, insulting, and counter-productive—it's also illogical. If you avoid logical fallacies, like attacking a person instead of their argument, it's a lot harder to be nasty. Rude and illogical go hand in hand, at least in comment threads. Anyway, that's where I am now. Who knows what I'll be reading and writing about in 5 years?

If all that doesn't justify why I've lived the way I have, I hope it at least explains what I was thinking as I was doing it. Of course, way back at the beginning of the massive post, I was setting out not only to explain how I've lived in the past, but to think about whether I should continue living that way in the future; whittling down life's complications so I have time to read and think. But to be honest, it's almost stopped raining, and I'm tired of writing. If I'm going to think hard about that, I'm going to have to do it another day. Now my brain is mushy. The big question, of course, is whether it's nothing but self-indulgence to spend so much time reading, thinking, and writing (I'm assuming a little self-indulgence for the sake of pleasure is justified). And the answer to that lies in what I do with my conclusions. I tend to think that if a few dozen people read the stuff I write, and are influenced in positive ways, then I'm justified in spending some time doing it.

Of course, the other question is, how important is it for me to spend my time doing other things? If I were married and had children, it would be totally inappropriate to spend so much time reading and writing, and so little being a husband and father. But I've already indicated that I don't think everyone should feel obligated to get married and have kids, much less to get on the whole treadmill of keeping up with the Jones's in an escalating cycle of consumption. I know for sure that my time reading and writing is better spent than if I were working extra hours to make payments on a Lincoln Navigator or McMansion. Perhaps it would be better spent doing volunteer work, or adopting children. But those things aren't what my basic nature makes me want to do, and when you reach forty, you start to have a good idea of what's constant about yourself. What I want to do, again, is figure out and appreciate this world as much as I can, in the short time I'm here, and try to help other people do the same. I'm not trying to write a massively over-ambitious book any more, so I don't need to be so jealous of my time any more. No one's going to die if I never get around to reading some book. But I don't ever want to lose all my time for learning and pondering. If we can't stop to think and get our bearings, then life passes as a big, confusing mystery; a frantic dash for money and prestige. Socrates famously said that “The unexamined life is not worth living”. I wouldn't go that far, but I know the examined life is the more satisfying one, at least for me.

Timeline Site Gets a Facelift

 

I haven't been posting here much lately, because I've been working on updating one of my websites.  In an earlier post, I talked about how I had put my educational poster, Universal Heritage:  Timelines of the Universe, Life, and Humankind, online.  At first, I just made PDF's of all the timelines, and linked to those.  But all 16 of those were originally designed to fit on one poster, so they were a little, well, cramped looking.  I've expanded and updated them and turned them into actual webpages, and made the homepage a little more aesthetically pleasing and simple.  Since it isn't a poster anymore, I also moved from www.worldviewposters.com to a different domain: 

www.universetimelines.com

The whole thing is now full of hyperlinks to Wikipedia articles, so if you want to quickly find out more about something you see on one of the timelines, just click on it.  If you're wondering why I chose Wikipedia, I have a rather long-winded explanation here. 

Hope you enjoy looking at the new site, and if you have any questions or comments, please let me know at ross b mays at g mail dot com.

The Big Picture: History of the Universe Poster Goes Online

Lately I've been showcasing some old creations on this blog.  In the past, I took on much larger projects than I have time to do now.  Or maybe I'm just too lazy to create something new.  In any case, this is a poster I made a few years ago.  Yes, it's a timeline of the whole universe--like I said, I took on larger projects back then.  Anyway, I had about a thousand of these printed up. I've sold almost all of them, and I made a satisfying return on my investment.  I used to ship these all over the world (especially to Australia.  The Aussies loved them for some reason).  These days, though, I sell so few that it isn't really worth my time to ship them.  Buying mailing tubes, standing in line at the post office, getting emails from people in Romania whose poster was lost between here and there--it's a bit of a pain.  So, I'm setting it free...at least in electronic form.  It's available at www.worldviewposters.com.

If you happen to be interested in perusing a visual overview of the history of the universe (and who isn't, right?) you can click on the picture to open up PDF versions of the individual timelines.  I recommend zooming in to at least 125%.  You may want to start at the third timeline, which shows the full age of the universe, and then going backward and forward from there.  The first timeline deals with the big bang, and it's much more intimidating than the other ones.

Hope you enjoy it, and thanks to all the people who bought a copy!