Morning Thanks -- Infinitudes

 

You thought the universe was already huge? A few year back already, a Dutchman at Yale named Van Dokkum, Dr. Pieter van Dokkum, aided by powerful optics at W. H. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, located a gadzillion more stars out there somewhere so far away that miles are totally irrelevant. Literally billions of additional stars raise the greater possibility of life somewhere out there, of course, this menacing yet eerily seductive idea that--eerie fantasy movie music!--we are not alone.

Van Dokkum's discovery has its detractors, one of whom claims that the discovery of another gadzillion stars a gadzillion light years away is, well, ho hum, since we don't stand a chance of ever getting close anyway, crippled as we are by cement boots of time and space.

But the sheer numbers and the vast expanse of what's really above us, what's really out there, is, to me at least, dizzying. The reach of the human imagination comes nowhere close. I can't think my way out there, no matter that I live on a landscape where almost every day the sky goes on forever. If there's a heaven, is it on some unnamed planet somewhere--out there in van Dokkum's new territories? What is heaven anyway? Is it a place? Where's my father right now, really--I mean, literally? I know where his mortal coil lies, but where's his spirit? Or is heaven nothing but spirit? Is heaven simply another dimension, some place even more unimaginable than a million new galaxies? Or are there really streets of gold?

What van Dokkum claims is that we have been woefully short-sighted in our estimates of the length and breadth of the heavens because some new optics have, by their reach, tripled the number of stars--and planets too--in our universe. I don't know if you can get this on your computer, but that means we may well have "roughly 100 sextillion stars, with an approximate margin of error of about 10 times fewer or 10 times more." Go ahead and tap that out on your calculator.

It's dizzying. Not long ago, up north, we stood out amid the trees in an opening spacious enough to give us a view of a gadzillion stars. Took your breath away, even though from our deck on a good, cold night we can rack up a couple million too. That silly verse from Psalm 8 sneaks into the soul with ever more meaning, those spacious heavens being trifle-like, "the work of your fingers," all of that universe to God almighty little more than, say, a set of car keys or a fingernail clipper.

It wasn't Hamlet who said it first or even made it famous. The line was older than Shakespeare, and the Bard knew it was--and that's why he gave a bit of Psalm 8 to the feverish Danish prince: "What is man that thou art mindful of him?"

Seems to me that van Dokkum's new eyes and the even broader universe he claimed to find makes us, at once, both less significant--Earth being but a teardrop in an ocean--and much, much more: for some blame reason, out of all that space, he loves both us and this world.

Don't know Prof. van Dokkum, but I can't help thinking of marvels ever-so-close at hand. Think of the moments of marvelous infinitude that happen outside your window every day.

There's no end to astonishment in the world, so much opportunity to dance with the stars.

This morning's thanks is for that last quiet utterance (I think of it as humbled, quiet) of Psalm 8: "how majestic is your name."