There recently have been a few posts that take the Republicans to task by comparing their policies to the teachings of Jesus. I’d like to present an alternative approach that gets us to the same place.
I remember the first moon landing: Apollo 11. I went outside and looked up at the moon while Eagle was there. Moon shots now have gone the way of all big ideas in our government. That – and time – have obscured the magnitude of that achievement. That night, though, I was in awe. We were up there. Man had reached the moon.
I feel that way still when I look at the moon, but there is more in the night sky to inspire awe, more than I knew of back then. To explain, I need numbers that are beyond comprehension, so, I’ll round vigorously.
The Universe is 14 billion years old – assuming it had a beginning. The Earth is 4.5 billion years old. Life on Earth has been around for about 3.8 billion years and Homo sapiens for a few hundred-thousand years.
The observable Universe is 5 x 1023 miles across (that’s a 5 followed by 23 zeros), and it’s expanding at an accelerating rate. Why is this the observable Universe? Given the age of the Universe, light from objects farther away has not had time to get here: that’s light moving at the speed of light for 14 billion years. Now, studies of data from an effort called BOSS (the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey) suggest that the Universe may be infinite in space and in time. The moon, the farthest point to feel our footfalls, is 240,000 miles away. The diameter of the Earth is 8,000 miles.
The observable Universe is thought to include 100 to 200 billion galaxies and roughly 7 x 1022 stars. The newest Hubble data suggest that there may be 10 times as many galaxies. And this is just the stuff we can see. The stuff we can’t see, the stuff we must infer from its gravitational effect (assuming Einstein was right), accounts for 95% of the Universe.
This is the stunning scale of what’s out there. And what’s out there also is stunningly beautiful and intriguing. But none of it cares about us. For all we can tell, we are a recent, localized accident, a by-product of the sheer size and age of the Universe and the laws of probability.
If, as all the evidence says, we are on our own, our only time is the here and now. No eternal reward awaits us and neither does eternal, inescapable agony (but what a vile, depraved, nightmare of a fantasy that is). Our only meaning, our only value, is to each other. Our only sins are against each other. We are only what we make of ourselves. But we have the freedom to make what we will.
We’ve been around for 200,000 years. It took us a while, but we pulled ourselves up quite a ways from the savanna and, along the way, we’ve measured the size and age of the Universe, looked inside the atom, and, yes, walked on the moon.
We also have progressed in governance. That took a while, too, but democracy, from the Greeks to the Enlightenment to the Founding Fathers, has put down roots. Civil liberties also are ascendant over the greater arch of history if not in the current retrograde moment.
But that current moment shows us that every moment in history is a decision point. At any moment, we can choose to keep moving forward, or we can slide back. Nothing out there will step in to save us. It is strictly our call: up to our judgement, and dependent on our vigilance.
At any moment in history, democracy and civil rights can go the way of moon shots and big ideas. That man has walked on the moon is less inspiring if you are repressed, enslaved, or just hungry. The extent of the Universe is less impressive if you are living in a camp or in hopelessness and squalor in the richest country that ever has been.
The next time you hear Trump pontificating about his own grandeur or lying about his concern for the forgotten man, the next time you hear Republican scams about how rugged individualism will save us from the horrors of government, just remind yourself: our only sins are against each other.