By Ethan Maurice | September 15, 2022
This article offers a means to a more expansive perspective of reality by pointing to the size of the universe — a cosmic view of the vast reality in which our lives are taking place.
I find this perspective of immeasurable value and encourage you: take your time, watch the videos, dig the links.
Back in 2019, while walking the Annapurna Circuit through the Himalayas of Nepal, I spent a lot of time looking up. While all that looking up was prompted by those incredible mountains, my awareness kept catching on the daytime moon.
Seeing the moon in the daytime has long inspired this “cosmic perspective” in me: we live on a ball floating in the vastness of space. And in the Himalayas — one of the most epic places on our space ball — that ball circling ours hung next to those monolithic mountains in a combination truly awesome.
I got quite caught up in pulling out my camera anytime the moon and those towering, snowblown mountainous masses of Earth met:
During the latter half of the trek, I read a little book entitled Astrophysics for People in a Hurry. Among ample time for ingestion and digestion on such a long, remote walk, I began to grasp how small — how incomprehensibly tiny — our planet is in relation to the size of the universe we have thus far observed.
We currently estimate the number of stars in our galaxy between 100 - 400 billion and the number of galaxies in the universe between 100 - 200 billion (most astronomers believe the number of galaxies is much larger, but our estimates are limited by how far tools and techniques allow us to perceive).
Consider this: the sun is one star in a galaxy of hundreds of billions of stars and there are hundreds of billions of other galaxies with hundreds of billions of stars in each of them.
Read that over a couple of times. Try and let it sink in.
Put another way: the Earth compared to the size of the observable universe is incomprehensibly smaller in scale than of a spec of dust compared to the Earth.
Those massive Himalayan mountains stretched my sense of scale to the point of tearing. Yet, they were so tiny compared to size of the universe that — opposite my experience — I couldn’t even begin to grasp the scope of their tininess with my human mind. However, when we try to stretch our grasp across the cosmos, something very interesting happens: for a moment, we are able to experience, to feel, that our entire planet is but a tiny spec floating in the infinite void of space.
In the grand scheme of humanity, this is a brand new feeling brought on by brand new understanding. Go back five hundred years and everyone believed our planet was like the hub of a wheel around which “the heavens” revolved. While it could be said that we have known the Earth is not the hub of the heavens since Copernicus published his observations on his deathbed in 1543, it could be argued that humanity didn’t really experience this until Christmas Eve 1968 (which we’ll get to soon).
As a culture, as a people, we have yet to include the profound truth of our tiny place in an incomprehensibly vast universe in our understanding of who we are. In this article, I want to walk you through some of science’s most shocking glimpses of our place in space and a few of my own epiphanous moments of expansive perspective.
With this article, I hope to expand for you what has been expanded for me.
The Overview Effect
Earthrise, taken December 24, 1968 by Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders.
““The Overview Effect is simply the sudden recognition that we live on a planet, and all the implications that brings to life on Earth.””
Back in 1968, astronauts aboard the Apollo 8 spacecraft floated the first ever manned-lap around the moon. While the purpose was to get closer to putting a “man on the moon,” the unexpected boon of the voyage was taking the first ever images looking back at the entire Earth from space.
Incredulously, these first images were beamed back to Earth and broadcast live on television on Christmas Eve in 1968. The astronauts pointed a live-streaming camera out the window, back at our planet, and half a billion people world-round simultaneously saw Earth suspended in space for the first time in human history. Now that’s television!
The resulting blend of awe, gratitude, and togetherness humans all over experienced — all seeing the earth suspended in space for the first time — was later dubbed “The Overview Effect.” A view so shocking, powerful, and philosophically-implicating, many prophesied this cosmic perspective would change the world. Could anything more obviously imply that we are all in this together than seeing this alive, churning, blue-green ball floating in the endless black void of space?
This nineteen-minute documentary illustrates the moment better than words ever could. We’re on a journey to edge of human understanding, to grasping the ungraspable here. I promise it’s worth the time, dig it:
Pale Blue Dot
“That's here. That's home. That's us.” - Carl Sagan
In 1990, the Voyager 1 space probe, somewhere beyond Neptune — roughly 3.7 billion miles from Earth — pointed a lens back at our planet for one final shot before powering down its cameras for good. The result was the above image, famously dubbed by Carl Sagan “Pale Blue Dot.”
It incredulously took Carl (a member of the Voyager imaging team and captain of creating the famous Golden Record sent along for the ride into interstellar space) seven years of rejected proposals and hobnobbing to convince NASA project managers to attempt the shot.
Taking up just over a tenth of a pixel, the Earth is “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” It remains the furthest out we’ve ever seen our planet from. Combined with the poetic space waxing of Carl Sagan, the image and its far out implications still ripple around the web today:
Coming Back Down to Earth
Since 1968, many have hoped this cosmic perspective — the realization of our overwhelming togetherness on a tiny, blue-green ball hanging in the endless void of space — would better our relations with each other and “spaceship Earth.”
However, look about today, and it is clear the understanding of our place in space has neither brought harmony to humanity nor altered our destructive relations with our planet. Humans from different parts of our “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam” are still seen as other. Different species (other branches on the ever-reaching tree of life) still have none of the specialness we imagine in ourselves. Climate change, deforestation, overfishing, unprecedented species loss, and a laundry list of other manmade issues continue to unravel the rich weave of life billions of years in the making on our tiny planet.
Over five decades have passed since humans the world round witnessed our place in space. The “Pale Blue Dot” image, rendering ideas of separateness and war and infinite resources quite ridiculous, is over thirty years old.
What gives?
I believe this is a uniquely human, cultural issue. We have discovered a new, indescribably big thing about the reality in which we exist. However, this discovery has yet to be integrated into our everyday experience, into our culture, into our foundational beliefs.
We humans have this remarkable ability to weave culture — a collective dream we share and inhabit together — atop reality to such a degree that we can’t even distinguish it from the primary, basic reality upon which it is built.
This improved understanding of our basic reality, of the infinitesimally small stage on which we play in the universe, has yet to be integrated into our collective dream. The cultural view has yet to expand. The cultural lens through which the bulk of us spend our days looking, has yet to be polished with this greater clarity.
We still go to work, eat at restaurants, and walk down the street without awareness that all our experiences are playing out “on a spec of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” It takes the work of creatives (artists, authors, musicians, filmmakers etc.) to reach people in positions of power (politicians, news anchors, influencers, religious and organizational leaders etc.) to expand our cultural view.
We can all stand enrapt and grasp the truth of our whereabouts on a cosmic scale for a moment, but we inevitably return to the culturally conditioned lens. Grasping at the size of the universe once is not enough to impress cultural change upon the billions of us for good.
Coming back from the lightness of wandering among the Himalayas, seeing the moon among those mountains day after day, and reading Astrophysics for People in a Hurry — I retuned with wider awareness and greater awe for each day of existence than ever before. However, as time went by without anything to remind me of our celestial situation, my expanded awareness shrank back down to it’s old, culturally conditioned, egocentric size.
Seeing Saturn and a Means to Remember the Size of the Universe
It wasn’t until a year and a half after my return from Nepal that our place in space entered my awareness again. In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, I was a third of the way through flight school, with no job prospects in aviation in the near future, stuck in Phoenix, Arizona. After five remarkable years of wandering about the globe, I made an economic leap and got hung up. In debt from flight school and living with my parents, I wondered how I was going to wriggle out of this one?
Phoenix is an enormous sea of suburbs. With the glow of endless city lights, but a few dozen stars are visible in the sky at night. So I was surprised when a friend invited my brother and I over to look through his new telescope. As he set the scope up in his backyard that night, I looked up at the obscured night sky and silently wondered, “how the heck are we going to see anything through a telescope from here?”
I have spent some incredulous nights away from city lights, including one otherworldly night 7,000ft above the desert floor near the Mexico boarder on the summit of a mountain above an observatory and was well aware of just how much our nightly window to the universe is obscured by city lights.
As I ruminated on the implications of this nightly loss of looking out at the cosmos, my pessimism was interrupted by our buddy going, “Awww yeah, check this out!”
I looked into the eyepiece of the telescope and saw the rings floating around Saturn!!! Holy wow. Saturn and its rings were floating in space before my very eyes thanks to some mirrors and bent glass in the backyard of a friend’s house in the midst of the light pollution of a major city.
In the wake of that firsthand encounter with Saturn, I cast my awareness to space again and again the following days. Rather than let the perspective fade away (in the same way I have long reminded myself to remember death after a powerful firsthand experience of coming close to it) I decided to make a little ritual of cosmic contemplation.
Same as those crazy universe zoom out videos, I decided to ritually — every morning — cast my awareness across the cosmos:
First thing when I woke up, I’d drop into a prayer-like position next to my bed and float my imagination out of the back of my head. I’d imagine looking back down from the ceiling of the room, above the house, neighborhood, city, state, continent, in full view of the Earth, out past the moon, beyond our solar system, past another solar system, on out of the Milky Way until it was but a tiny cloud spinning with endless stars, past other galaxies til there were endlessly more galaxies whirling about, further out still until all those galaxies became but blips of light, casting my imagination across the universe thus far observed, and then reverse it all the way back through each step into the back of my noggin.
Imagination travels much faster than the speed of light. To the edge of the universe and back took about two minutes. When I finished I’d go “wow…” and get on with my day with a bit more wonder and lightness, marveling at the miracle upon which even the most monotonous days reside.
There was a sense gratitude, of unity, and of the absurdly awesome fact that we are somehow here on this “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” There was also a minimization of worry and ease toward the obstacles of the day. From a perspective infinitely larger than my own, all challenges and troubles I faced were utterly inconsequential in the grand scheme of the universe I cruised that morning.
Buddhist scholar D.T. Suzuki once wrote that “enlightenment is like everyday consciousness but two inches above the ground.” My little experiment in contemplating the cosmos resulted in something like that. Perhaps I only got half of an inch, but floating a half an inch is a lot.
While I’ve lost the practice at the busiest of times, I have found tremendous value in it and would guess I’ve flown my imagination across the universe a hundred times or so since.
The Concept of Cosmic Religion
The latest happening in my growing relation to the cosmos happened last fall.
Building a real estate photography business with a friend, I had a gig shooting the apartment of a man recently deceased. He lived alone with little, but kept a fantastic bookshelf. His belongings were half packed to be donated or tossed out and I felt he’d be happy if I snagged a book from his soon-to-be-tossed collection that might shape me — some extra echo of his life beyond death.
The Philosophy of Albert Einstein, with a space image strewn across its front cover beckoned. I stuck it in my camera bag and brought it home. Along with transcendent photographs of spiraling galaxies, blooming nebulas, and other incredulous space imagery, one page entitled “Cosmic Religion” with three Einstein quotes particularly shook me:
““My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.””
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed. The insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms — this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.”
“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
All those experiences the past few years: reading Astrophysics for People in a Hurry as the moon floated by the Himalayas, learning of the moment half a billion humans stood enrapt on Christmas Eve simultaneously witnessing their place in space for the first time, the goosebumps I got listening to Carl Sagan wax about our “Pale Blue Dot,” seeing Saturn through a telescope in a friend’s backyard in the middle of a major city, riding my imagination to the edge of the known universe and back each morning — all that — probably primed me for the moment I encountered Einstein’s idea of “Cosmic Religion.”
It touched something in me.
For a moment, time seemed to have stopped.
And I went, “Woah…”
I’m not sure what to make of it all yet. But there is something transcendent, something deeply religious, in marveling at the scope of our universe.
And this is understanding new and true. When all the world’s major religions were founded, nobody had a clue just how far out this all goes. Without the ability to extend our senses — without telescopes and satellites and probes sent billions of miles into space — there was simply no way to perceive the truth that we are closer to the Horton Hears a Who situation than watched over by some human-like, father-figure version of God.
In the wake of the Enlightenment, the beginning of scientifically extended observation, Nietzsche famously declared, “God is dead.” Grasping our place in space threw a monkey wrench into our human-centric beliefs and the concept a human-like God that watches over us and keeps score. And since Nietzsche’s declaration, that monkey wrench has only continued to expand, on and on, in lockstep with our ability to look further out into space.
While a strong blow to a God crafted of human ego, does the size of the universe not also offer to expand our concept of God? Of our connection to something larger? Of holy awe, in recognizing that yes, we are tiny organisms in an incomprehensibly large, complex universe, but that we are born of the matter and force that animates this whole thing? Is it not a miracle worth celebration that we are alive on this tiny, fragile, spinning, storming, blue-green ball of life suspended in the infinite void of space?
The revelations afforded by science may have killed our previous, human-centric conception of God. But do they not offer another more mystic, vast, and ineffable concept of God as well?
Is it not a religious experience to look up at the night sky and realize that the atoms that compose you and all things on Earth were cooked into existence in the blazing nuclear hearts of stars? That everything that composes us and all things in our experience have been around for eons upon eons longer than we can hope to imagine — fashioned and refashioned, over and over, again and again, across endless eternities?
Can we not jive in spiritual fashion with scientific fact?
I sense that in regularly contemplating the cosmos, and perhaps an eventual sort of a cosmic religion — no disbelief in observation required — might offer to reconnect the discoveries that Nietzsche claimed “killed God” with the gifts he famously fretted we would no longer receive from “Him.”
In order for humanity to live in accord with the understanding of our place in space, we need more than a once-off experience, though. No matter how awesome, there is no such thing as a single, everlasting impression. To integrate this new understanding into culture requires ritual regularity, symbols and stories powerfully charged with meaning for us to repeatedly encounter to experience, feel, and live in recognition of our place in space.
Contemplating the cosmos is a bridge between science and religion. I wonder, could Einstein’s concept of cosmic religion — a rational view that transcends rationality — again allow us to believe in something larger than ourselves? Might grasping the size of the universe be the 21st century update to spirituality and religion we we need to transcend our ongoing collapse into narrowmindedness and ego?
If we wish to bring about a more harmonious relationship between humanity and the whole of life, if we wish to be less isolated and more connected, if we wish to spend our days more enrapt in wonder and less spinning ceaseless yarns about ourselves in our heads, then perhaps it’s time we work to find and create more ways to remind ourselves of the wildest of all truths:
All of this is happening on “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
