When the Voyager spacecraft was on the verge of leaving our solar system, it turned its cameras back around and took a single photograph. Almost every known object in existence was in the frame. Every life ever lived has been on the face of a lonely pixel, only a little brighter than the surrounding darkness; “A pale blue dot…suspended in a sunbeam”. Carl Sagan's narration of this is both stirring and devastating.
When we look up at the void above us, it is with both awe and with dread. The cosmos is unimaginably vast and its secrets unimaginably great; the number of possible worlds is endless. And yet, the great emptiness is profoundly daunting.
For some, the sheer size and complexity is a beautiful testament to the immense complexity of nature, or to the deeds of a god. Its as-yet unknown secrets and its potential to hold another home, other lives and existences are as exciting now as they were to children watching enraptured as Armstrong set foot on the Moon.
For others, the realisation that we are but one of 7 billion fleshy organisms living out our lives on a rock revolving around a gaseous flame in a never-ending darkness instils a sense of meaninglessness. It’s the formidable emptiness of space that is responsible for our ambivalence.
At the risk of sounding like a teenager after reading Nietzsche, our lives are something of a battle between inevitable meaningless and a desire to give it meaning and order. This conflict is at the heart of science; the attempt to find laws that govern the seemingly random.
The idea that there is a greater being behind the apparent meaninglessness is, in a way, an attempt to
do just that. It holds the promise of an unobserved order to the universe and has the added benefit of making us feel less alone. The search for extra-terrestrial life is, it would seem, an update of the desire to feel as though we are not the only ones here. It is a testament to the human will to conquer the unknown and order the void that we pour billions of dollars into the quest to travel to and colonise space. So profound is our fear of insignificance that it becomes an existential threat.
Between the beauty of space and the fear of solitude and emptiness, space is bound to stir up a range of emotions. The human mind, evolved to better enable us to hunt and reproduce, never really needed to comprehend anything beyond the horizon. It is no wonder then that we are so ill equipped, and so deeply conflicted by, the sheer enormity of the physical world around us.