MAN AND THE UNIVERSE
STRANGERS IN THE COSMOS
When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity that lies before and after it, when I consider the little space I fill and I see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I rest frightened, and astonished, for there is no reason why I should be here rather than there.
Blaise Pascal, Pensées
The dimensions and the nature of the Universe overcome our understanding.
Man and the Universe - Strangers in the Cosmos
Comments, EssayThe earth is an insignificant blue dot in the Milky Way, and our sun just one among millions of other suns of a small galaxy, which is just one among hundreds of millions of galaxies, where constant explosions of materials and gases are always happening, thus permitting the formation of new suns and planets.
Scientific View of the Universe
Life is solar: all its ingredients were forged in a sun, and then gathered up into a planet after being spat out by an explosive solar agony.
We are on the third planet of a sun knocked down from its central throne, turned into a lost star of a peripheral galaxy, between millions of galaxies of a Universe in expansion.
Physics has discovered a Universe of rage, violence and war, with explosions and implosions of stars and planets, collisions of galaxies, and stars that live off and devour each other as cannibals.
Without ceasing stars switch off and explode and planets freeze; without ceasing fragments and dust of dead suns and planets gather, whirling round over themselves to give birth to new galaxies and new suns.
E. Morin, French philosopher and sociologist, Method V
My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose… I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, by any philosophy.
J. B. S. Haldane
Scientific View of Our Place in the Universe
Life is formed from materials born in the midst of stars and ejected to space.
When we drink a drop of water, we drink the Universe, because a molecule of water, the H2O, gathers in itself the hydrogen – a vestige of the initial explosion, the Big Bang -, and the oxygen, produced in the furnace of the stars and exhaled by them.
Michel Cassé, French astro-physicist, Desafio do Século XXI
When observing the stars, you should see them in another perspective. Take into account what they really are: the mothers of the atoms from which we are constituted, the atoms that constitute the mortal and thinking species that admire the sun as a god, a father or a nuclear power station.
The particles that were composed at the beginning of the Universe, the atoms that were forged in the stars, the molecules that were constituted on Earth or in another place… all that is also inside us.
Michel Cassé, French astro-physicist, Desafio do Século XXI
Blaise Pascal: Why Are We Here? Why Were We Born?
The scientific view of the universe and the awareness of its incomprehensible dimensions created astonishment and grief in philosophers such as Pascal (in the seventeenth century).
What’s the meaning of life in a cosmos like the one described by science? Man is a nothing in such a grotesquely gigantic universe. Man isn’t in the centre of Creation as religions described; traditional views of man and God lose sense.
The Universe conceived in the past – populated with souls, lights, life – was a universe where life had meaning, where the Earth was at the core of God’s purposes. The Universe as revealed by science is dramatically different.
The eternal silence of infinite spaces frightens me.
Why now rather than then? Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time have been ascribed to me?
We travel in a vast sphere, always drifting in the uncertain, pulled from one side to another. Whenever we find a fixed point to attach and to fasten ourselves, it shifts and leaves us; and if we follow it, it eludes our grasp, slips past us, and vanishes for ever. Nothing stays for us. This is our natural condition, most contrary to our inclination; we burn with desires to find solid ground and an ultimate and solid foundation for building a tower reaching to the Infinite. But always these bases crack, and the earth obstinately opens up into abysses.
We are infinitely removed from comprehending the extremes, since the end of things and their beginning are hopelessly hidden from us in an encapsulated secret; we are equally incapable of seeing the Nothing from which we were made, and the Infinite in which we are swallowed up.
Blaise Pascal, 1623-1662, physic and mathematician, Thoughts
Modern Thoughts
Our conscience and intelligence have detected a silent universe, profoundly uninhabitable to man, profoundly hostile, where life is impossible, where man is a stranger. What’s the meaning of life in such an absurd Universe, so different from our dreams, where we are a solitary and conscious voice?
Man knows finally that he is alone in the indifferent immensity of the Universe, from which he emerged by accident.
Jacques Monod, 1910-1976, French bio-chemist, Le Hasard et la Necessité
This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous - indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.
Richard Dawkins, English biologist, River out of Eden
The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.
Albert Camus, 1913-1960, escritor e filósofo francês, The Myth of Sisyphus
We are sons of the cosmos, but our conscience, our soul, make us strangers in that same cosmos, from which we were produced, and which still remains secretly intimate to us.
Earth life is unique, or at least particularly rare in the cosmos, and our conscience is perhaps solitary in the living world.
Man is a marginal creation in the animal world, the development of which has increased his marginality. We are alone on the Earth, among the known living beings.
Our thought, our conscience, gives us knowledge of the physical world, but simultaneously drives it away from us.
E. Morin, French philosopher and sociologist, Method V
Man and the Universe Strangers in the Cosmos
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