Fragments of time
I have come across a stories on Instagram saying how we, humans, celebrate a football made of stone, called planet Earth, finish spinning around an everlasting thermonuclear reaction, which is the Sun, every year, resembling our insignificance towards the gigantic proportions of the universe and the infinite duration of time.
Pop science makes us think that way. All TV universe-related shows of science— The Big Bang Theory; Cosmos: a Spacetime Odyssey; Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking and such — emphasize the greatness of universe comparing orders of magnitude between planets, supernovas, nebulosas and man; and the briefness of our life comparing our life expectancy with the age of the cosmos.
In a materialist, limited sense of reality, this knowledge of the galaxies and stars ought conduct to nihilism, as if our existence in this world were just an illusion towards the implacability and grandiosity of the creation. The thing is a great part of the producers and scientific consultants to these shows — like astrophysicists, chemists and mathematicians — are all nihilist themselves.
To associate religion with science in a scientific TV show might seem a mistake, since the spectator is looking for theoretical entertainment, not religious explanations of how the cosmos works, but this is not the issue — for science and religion have been walking together since the creation of the scientific method. The issue is that there more to existence than just gravity.
Why stars collapse and people die
Most cosmos fatalists — as I like calling the hopeless scholars who are pleasured by reducing everything to its mass and size — would ratify their deterministic, sterile vision of man facing the universe with long, hard-understanding integral and differential calculus equations, as if math alone could justify their philosophical conclusion on humans and space. On the other hand, either creationists or human-oriented philosophers could say man is the measure of things, and affirmate a meter and a light-year would just be the same, depending on the point of view.
What I would like to bring to the discussion is life. Apart from planets and us humans as a whole being, I want to take a microspical, intimate look at what makes us alive and living.
You may remember from your biology classes in high school the ribosome, present in our cells. It produces the proteins that compose us, from muscle titin to antioxidant glutathione, respectively, biggest and smallest proteins in our body.
The ribosome is a complex organelle, maybe the most complex one, present within the eukaryotic cell — not considering the nucleus, which can be taken as a set of cell parts. Its parts are so many and they play roles so that it is impossible to detail everything in here without making this article into a scientific one.
To give a glance of the complexity of this nanometer sized structure, it turns a polymer — DNA, in the form of messenger RNA — into another, completely different —polypeptides, formers of proteins — , by chaining one substance to another through a third one — transfer RNA— , everything controlled by a fourth one — microRNA— inside a structure made of a fifth one — ribosome RNA — , which composes the ribosome itself. This is a gross resume of the protein biosynthesis — which involves the role of genes, cell cycle, microenvironment, pH and even intercellular signalling, barely understood until now — , and which has not been reproduced independently of an organism by science yet.
There is no way the dilation of time at lightspeed or singularity be more complex than the biological apparate of protein synthesization from a ribosome, even if physics is less intelligible than biology. Cellular respiration, for instance, is as complex and unique as the nuclear fusion occurred in the stellar nucleosynthesis, since Nature is the same and the same final patterns are followed, from biomolecules to groups of galaxies.
And this is just one part of the cell functioning — proteomics. There are processes and more processes when it comes to make a thing live, and if they are not in perfect sintony, the being either dies for its organism is incompatible with life — which are the congenital malformations or metabolism innate errors — or if it gets deficitary in some point — which is cancer, senescence, diabetes, myocardial infarction and other acquired diseases.
Similarly, when a star becomes senescent or consumes its resources too fast — just like when we smoke, drink or eat too much junk food — and runs out of energy that was sufficient to fuse hydrogen into helium and helium into heavier elements, it dies and become a supernova. All in nature depends of equilibrium, and it is either finite or ever transforming, depending on how you look.
The discovery of science
Things are neither small or big. Despite scientific relativism, for a bacteria Jupiter might seem really, really big; for Jupiter, which is infinitely bigger than the bacteria, Orion might seem really big, as infinitely bigger as Jupiter might seem to the bacteria, who sees both Jupiter and Orion as infinitely bigger than itself, despite the huge difference in size between a planet and a constellation.
In a daily basis, we tend to scale everything, from finances to boob size. Some things are better when small, such as batteries; others, when big, such as the house you live with your kids. Mutatis mutandis, resources have a marginal value, which can’t be determined utterly, but subjectively, regarding its rarity or usefulness.
In order to comprehend nature, humanity has, for the last 5,500 years, attributed rational causes to natural events, either internal or external to us. Although the truth — or knowledge itself — is ultimately right, since 2+2=4 and not 5, our perception of the world dictates the also the way we interpret it, which is how science is made.
This problem was brought by Aristotle around 3,500 years ago and it’s still a matter of concern inside the scientific community. Not to seem too much epistemological, I will not explore philosophy of knowledge in this article, but we can, in a very intuitive way, see how our telescope to the world, which are our eyes, at the same time, trick and help us understand the realm we live.
When something — object — is seen by us — image — we form, from our visual cortex, the image we see in front of us. Taking a tree for instance, your brain first orientates and directions the object through space (look, I see something there!), then recognizes its form (it’s a tree!), then associates with your previous knowledge of the thing (oh, it’s an appletree!). The mechanism is not that simple as it concerns lots of neural pathways and connections through different cortexes, but this is what you need to know about it for now.
We have a complex, though failable, equipment inside our heads to recognize the things that surrounds us. Across animals for instance, different types of eyes serve for different purposes — the distant-seeing eyes of a hawk or the multiple image-forming eyes of a fly. This taken, the world a fly sees is not the same you see, and this is for the best in order to survive in the animal kingdom, each individual playing its function.
This failable equipment conducts to failable interpretations of the universe as a whole, even through mathematics, which is physics in an essential matter. I am not saying knowledge is dischargeable so far, but that there is a measurement error all and every time we take a look at the cosmos.
Because of that, emitting ultimate and fatal opinions about man and the universe, such as “we are star powder” or “the human being is nothing comparing to the cosmos” is not only wrong because of the myriad of processes that keep us alive at 36,8ºC as shown above, but also because whole nature will never be understood by our untrustable knowledge.
It is also said that our tiny perception of time would be nothing towards the billions of years the universe is aged, as if weeks and months wouldn’t stand a chance against eternity. The truth is a second and eternity are the same — try dividing time in ever smaller and smaller fractions of a second, until you reach the definition of a moment. Eternity is there.
Beyond comprehension
If you are reading this and there’s light outside, stop reading now and go see leaves being vanished in the wind and the sky with its heavens. If it’s night, stop reading now as well and go see the infinity of the universe through its darkness and stars.
Every experience is an experiment, which different observers may come out with different conclusions. Just as simple as the grass in your backyard, is the earth spinning around itself and running laps around the sun — to lose some weight, maybe.
I’ll just keep playing back
These fragments of time
Everywhere I go
These moments will shine— Daft Punk
Since humans will never be able to understand the existence without being mistaken by its own senses, full knowledge will never be obtained. This can be upsetting, but also tranquilising, so we can deal with really matters — our families, our loved ones, our purpose in life and ourselves, apart from enzymes or hydrogen atoms, at least for some moments, the same ones eternity is made of. There is eternity in every moment, and eternity might be just an atimus for God, who is observing us from above and without error at all time.
Let us be joyful in this december 31st, for we exist as the largest evolutionary investment of the universe, and are alive for yet another year.
