Perspective

When I look at Thy Heavens, the work of Thy hands, the moon and the stars which Thou hast established, what is Man that Thou art mindful of him?” (Psalm 8: 3-4)

     I occasionally hear a fellow stargazer exclaim (often seemingly out of nowhere), “I feel so insignificant” as he or she observes some far distant galaxy, or even just contemplates the vast scale of the visible universe in comparison to our Earth. This is a natural reaction, considering that the universe is inconceivably large. The breaking point is intriguingly different for different people. For some, it takes little more than one of those side-by-side comparisons of the relative diameters of the Earth and Jupiter to make them feel hopelessly small. For others, it takes leaving behind the somewhat comfortable scale of the solar system before they start gasping for air. The massed suns of the great Milky Way spiral arms can leave a person with a “Where’s Waldo?” sensation as they regard our poor little home star, hopelessly lost in some out-of-the-way stellar backwater. As for me, I can start to lose my balance when contemplating the universe-spanning galactic superclusters, each containing as many individual galaxies as the galaxies themselves contain stars. It’s perhaps understandable to feel a bit dizzy in the presence of numbers and distances that defy all attempts to even find adequate words to describe. “Awe-inspiring”, “humbling”, “overwhelming” – they just don’t seem to carry enough weight.

     Take a good look at the above image. This picture was taken by Voyager I on February 14, 1990, on its way out of the Solar System. The Earth is the small white dot near the center of the bright red band of light. The color bands are the result of sunlight reflecting off of various parts of the spacecraft onto the camera lens. These were unavoidable, since from the spacecraft’s vantage point of being essentially outside the solar system, the camera needed to be pointed nearly straight at the sun in order to capture the Earth within its field of view.

     Again, looking at such an image it’s perfectly understandable that one might start to feel small and insignificant in the face of such immensity. Perhaps, you might say to yourself, those people are right who say that human beings make entirely too much of themselves and exaggerate our importance. Worse, perhaps the skeptics are right who ridicule people of faith for thinking that any god worth his salt could possibly find such a ridiculous speck of dust as worth his time and attention, let alone the pathetic life forms that infest its surface…

     It’s very important not to dismiss these feelings, either in someone else or in yourself. But there is an answer to them – a means of putting such thoughts in perspective. And that’s precisely what we’re going to talk about here – perspective.

     In my opinion, one of the most beautiful passages in all Shakespeare is found in Act Five of The Merchant of Venice. Lorenzo and Jessica are outdoors on a moonlit night, sitting in a garden. Lorenzo points to the sky and tells Jessica,

Look how the floor of heaven

Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold. 
There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings.

Pure magic – especially when set to music, as it was by Ralph Vaughan Williams in his Serenade to Music. I find the passage midway down page 448 of the 1274-page Oxford Shakespeare, sitting in front of me on the table as I write this. Close the book, and it’s difficult to picture just where it is in that heavy tome. Pick it up without a bookmark in place and flip through the pages – you probably would not readily find it. Does this mean that this four-line passage we just read is somehow less significant when regarded as part of Shakespeare's complete works? Of course not! Yet that is precisely the trap we fall into when we imagine our little planet to be inconsequential, solely on the grounds of scale.

     Let’s take our little thought experiment a step further. We place the Oxford Shakespeare volume on a library shelf, even on one within a large public library; let’s go all out and say the New York Public Library. Now where is the book? Can you even make it out amid the thousands upon thousands of similarly sized volumes crowding about it, not to mention the row upon row of other bookshelves, and the whole floors of them above us and below? Where is our little snippet of dialog now? But find it and read it again, and amazing thing – it has lost not one tiniest bit of beauty and wonder solely by being placed among so many millions of similar passages.

     We can repeat this process as many times as we wish. Where is the library within the great city of New York? Where is New York, for that matter, on a map of North America? But you get the point – size alone does not equate to significance, and multiplicity does not lessen the value of each individual.  Just as four magical lines of poetry lose none of their worth by being four out of ten million such lines, one human being is no less precious because there are seven billion of us at the moment. And our most precious planet Earth would still be unique, even if we discovered untold millions more like it around other suns.

     When Piazzi and Bessel measured the distance to 61 Cygni in the 19th Century, they were by no means introducing an entirely new scale of size into Man’s understanding of creation, but rather observationally confirming suspicions long held. As long ago as the 2nd Century A.D., the great Ptolemy realized that in comparison with the then-incalculable distances between the stars, the whole of the Earth should be regarded as no larger than a mathematical point. (“The Earth has sensibly the ratio of a point to its distance from the sphere of the fixed stars.” Almagest, Book 1, Section 6) Nowadays, thanks to instruments such as the Hubble Space Telescope, we can make out dim galaxies that lie more than 13 billion light years away. Impressive indeed.

     Yet the distance between myself and my neighbor is of no less importance.